[MUSIC] (Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated.

A new exhibition at the Tucson Museum of Art explores 2,000 years of Andean tradition.

(Kristopher) Contemporary artists are showing us that cloth can be a viable medium for making social critique.

We have artists who are using textiles to think about stories of how resources get used, how cloth tells us about the movement of people.

(Tom) University of Arizona students take campus safety into their own hands.

(Haley) Safety should be free and it should be for everybody, but until we all commit to that and are all willing to help support that and watch out for each other, it's not going to improve.

(Tom) A temporary measure during the pandemic looks to find lasting support.

(Brandi) Most people don't understand what it would be like to have a stranger come into your home, do very personal tasks for your children, and to live in your same space with you for you know anywhere from 20 to 80 hours a week.

(Tom) And fill your yard with native plants that help our environment.

(Hannah) It has a fantastic fragrance.

Hum I don't think it really smells like lavender, but it's really a nice soapy kind of smell and it is in the mint family.

(Tom) Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

Cumbi is a fine, luxurious fabric of the Inca Empire reserved exclusively for the rulers and the elites.

Well now in exhibition Cumbi, Textiles, Society, and Memory from Andean South America at the Tucson Museum of Art looks back on 2,000 years of this wonderful creation.

In it you'll see textiles from the ancient Andes as well as creations from modern Latin American artists.

[SOFT PIANO MUSIC PLAYING] [KRISTOPHER]: The word cumbi comes from the Quechua language, which was the language spoken in the Inca Empire.

And cumbi was the term for the very finest tapestry-woven textiles produced in the Inca Empire.

It's a term that invites us to think about how textiles are part of societies.

[SOFT PIANO MUSIC PLAYING] The works of art in cumbi represents some of the real artistic highlights of culture from the ancient Andes in the museum's collection.

We have textiles that are woven with techniques that are best expressed in ancient Peru.

It's said that Andean weavers developed techniques that are unknown anywhere else in the world.

There's a textile in the exhibition that was woven on the north coast of Peru around 1,000 years ago.

And it's a textile that shows many images of felines.

They almost look like they're processing with their paws up.

It's a piece that was really expertly woven.

There are five different panels that make up the textile.

Artist or artists who were involved in the making of this work joined them together really beautifully so that a tail that begins on one panel continues over onto the next.

The pieces that you're seeing here are the borders of a textile that no longer exist.

And they're these wonderful borders that show us all kinds of animal and plant life almost sprouting along the edges.

[PIANO MUSIC FADES] Cloth shapes the social world in a number of ways.

There are textiles here that tell us about gender identities, about social status, about ethnic identities, and that would have been markers for their wearers in ancient cultures.

There are also ways in which cloth today can be used to think about changing society and shaping society.

Contemporary artists are showing us that cloth can be a viable medium for making social critique.

We have artists who are using textiles to think about stories of how resources get used.

We have artists who are thinking about how cloth tells us about stories of the movement of peoples and ideas across the world.

We have works that are helping us to think about how cloth can help us to see inequality.

All of these are issues that artists are looking to address with their woven works.

These works by Carolina Aranibar-Fernández are images of places across the globe.

And what the artist does is she takes appliques of a kind sourced by Bolivian Indigenous women weavers and cuts them into these kind of cartographies and then printed over them their images of the kind of topographical visualization of regions affected by mining.

[SOFT ORCHESTRA MUSIC FADES IN] So we have a work in the exhibition by the artist Carolyn Castaño, who is based out of Los Angeles.

And she makes these wonderful images that combine traditional Andean textile images, like the checkerboard at the bottom of this work with images of the Andean landscape.

She's really interested in how landscapes are illustrated and how the kind of vibrant ecological life of the Andes is depicted in artworks.

In this exhibition, we have work by Perla Segovia, who's a Tucson-based artist, a Peruvian-American artist.

And she has used the material of water-soluble threads to tell the story of migrant children and their journey to the US and to kind of create a memory for their stories with her work.

So there is kind of a local tie to an issue that we know is important in the life of the Southwest in her work.

When you're creating an exhibition, one of the things, especially for an exhibition like this one, that can be both the challenges but also the opportunities, right, is that each piece has its own story.

But you're bringing them together in a way where you're trying to create a bigger story from their collectivity.

There are over 70 works of art in Cumbi, some very old, some created just in the past couple of years.

And you're trying to think about what ways can I put these together, have them speak to each other that creates a bigger dialogue, have had a tradition about a medium across their kind of collectivity.

[SOFT ORCHESTRA MUSIC FADES OUT] (Tom) Sadly, school shootings like the fatal attack on Dr. Thomas Meixner here at the Harshbarger Building in 2022 occur all too often on school campuses.

Campus Unarmed is a student advocacy group here at the University of Arizona whose aim is to foster more positive student-teacher relationships in an effort to make campus safer and to combat gun violence.

(soft music) (Haley) Yeah, we always say this happens to everyone else.

It doesn't happen to us, but guess what?

It happened to us and we weren't prepared.

God forbid that there is a next time, but let's make sure that we have everything in order so that if it happens, we're prepared.

(soft music) (Reann) I was on campus the day that Thomas Meixner was killed.

I remember getting an influx of texts and calls, especially from my mom, and making sure I was okay, friends from other colleges, and I was so confused until my Greek life organization was like, please stay safe.

Don't come out.

I saw all of the campus alerts saying, you know, stay put.

And I was very shocked to see what had happened, especially later finding out that it was Thomas Meixner.

(Alicia) I do remember just hearing that there was somebody on campus, that there was shots were fired, and just having that unknown period of what happened, were people hurt?

Like, can we even leave the classroom right now?

Like, what is happening?

There was a lot of uncertainty during that time.

(soft music) (Reann) We're working with an initiative called Invent2Prevent that's sponsored by the US Department of Homeland Security.

And it encourages students at these universities to think of a targeted violence group and work together to diminish that violence.

We thought that school shootings was very relevant, especially on college campuses.

So we wanted that to be our main focus.

We got the ball rolling and this event came to be.

(Alicia) Before this event, when you walk in, the first thing we do is just kind of give you a little bit of background about who Campus Unarmed is.

And then you have about a six minute video where you really get to hear professors' experiences of campus violence, of gun violence specifically, and understand like their concerns I used to feel more safe than I did until about a year ago.

Mostly I was concerned about other students.

It's really good that we're having, that you're doing this interview now and you're working on this project now because what so often happens is a tragedy will occur, we'll care a lot about something for a little while, and then we'll move on.

We'll forget about it until it happens again.

And so I think it's good that we continue to think about this kind of thing, not just in terms of how do we deal with the crisis when it happens, but then also how do we have fewer crises.

There have been times in recent memory that I have not felt safe to be on campus and have chosen to work remotely due to these recent allegations.

So after the video, we do have some sticky notes on some big posters that are gonna facilitate some of that conversation that we can then share back out with the professors to start understanding and seeing the different sides of the story so that we can really come together and create a safe community.

(Reann) On campus, I feel safe sometimes yes, sometimes no.

I think that the University of Arizona has done a good job to get better at creating safety, but ultimately it's not gonna go away the fear.

But I think that's what's so amazing about Campus Unarmed is that we could be serving as a puzzle piece to a bigger picture where we can put in other safety resources and get those conversations started from the start so that students can feel safe every day.

(Alicia) The importance of fostering a relationship between students and professors is absolutely vital to the security of the campus.

It has been proven due to past incidences that having that safe environment does protect campuses.

It gives people the place to be vulnerable to go to somebody when they are in a mental health crisis or just a crisis in general of having a place where they can get the support they need because without that, they're gonna struggle alone and that's when things tend to spiral mentally for a lot of people is that isolation and we really just wanna create a community where everybody can be supported and get the help they need when they need it.

(gentle music) (Haley) Safety should be free and it should be for everybody but until we all commit to that and are all willing to help support that and watch out for each other, it's not gonna improve.

(Reann) I want students and teachers to come out of this event with a greater sense of awareness.

I find that sometimes after a big event like this occurs on campus, it's talked about a lot and then it trickles off and nobody thinks of it again.

But with Campus Unarmed, we want the students and teachers to feel like they can have a connection with one another.

We want students and teachers to continuously work on that warm environment to create those conversations that may be uncomfortable but ultimately makes people want to feel included and part of this topic because from the beginning we want people to feel safe and not feel like they don't have a relationship and that they need to create a catastrophic event.

(Tom) In 2020, the state of Arizona made it possible for parents of children with disabilities to receive training and funding in order to become their own children's direct care worker.

So what started out as a temporary program has now become a permanent initiative.

And now the parents with the Raising Voices Coalition are highlighting how this is helping to alleviate challenges like keeping healthcare workers on the job or housing instability, even the financial struggles that have long burdened these families.

Ready?

[# CHIPTUNE GAME MUSIC] [# GENTLE AMBIENT TONE] Tyson was born at 40 weeks, no complications at that point.

When he was six months old, he contracted bacterial meningitis that caused a really severe traumatic brain injury.

And as a result of that brain injury, he has lifelong complex epilepsy and cerebral palsy.

Tyson is complete care, so even though he can use a communication device, we've had to work really closely with speech therapists, occupational therapists, and then for his eating, he has a feeding tube, so we administer food and medications.

We're just really involved in those everyday activities, but needing support to the same degree as a six or eight month old baby would.

Christian is nonverbal.

He has global brain damage.

He's full care.

I have to lift him, dress him.

Mouth care is huge because his mouth is always open.

He has a feeding pump, so making sure that he gets enough calories and they stay in him.

Make sure he's comfortable, make sure he's entertained.

Let's put you down, I want you up a little bit more.

There we go.

When he was 11 months old, he crawled out of the doggy door and he fell into the family pool.

He was... unconscious and had no pulse and no breathing when the paramedics got there, but it was enough to cause global brain damage.

And they tried and they tried and they had asked us to come in and say goodbye to him.

And so when we went in, and I put my hand on his leg and said his name, he came back.

They said, "We have a pulse."

But every little test he passed, so we just went with him.

The temporary paid parent caregiver program that's been in place since 2020 has been serving families in Arizona with, who have children with disabilities.

We were always kind of living paycheck to paycheck, trying to catch up.

We both have advanced degrees, but me, being Tyson's primary caregiver, I wasn't able to go and... work in the same capacity that I would otherwise, even if I had more of a typical child experience.

(READING) Did you know that maple trees make little helicopters called samaras?

It's definitely affected every member in the family, directly or indirectly.

Being his caregiver plus, figuring out how that's going to work when you can't just call like a babysitter down the street.

It definitely limits kind of what your career goals are.

In Arizona, there are currently about three and a half thousand members who serve as parent direct care workers for their minor children.

As of August, 2023, only about 8% of those are receiving at least 40 hours a week as paid parent providers.

In 2020, the state of Arizona came out with a program to support families who were isolating, where we could become paid family providers.

If you'll remember everything kind of shut down.

So it was really important for us that we gave parents a flexibility to allow for them to either deliver care to their children in a way that made sense to them, and supplement the workforce that was no longer comfortable entering into another family's home.

Most people don't understand what it would be like to have a stranger come into your home, do very personal tasks for your children, and to live in your same space with you for, you know, anywhere from 20 to 80 hours a week.

[BRANDI with playful suspense] You say, uhhhh: BOO!

[TYSON makes gleeful utterance] Yeah.

Yeah.

Are you feeling better?

[TYSON makes happy utterance] [BRANDI] Yeah?

Families like mine, we've had the experience prior to COVID of having a really difficult time finding people to come in and work with our kiddos.

What we are currently concerned about is that direct care worker shortage is even more severe now post COVID than it was prior to.

We have known, that there are, workforce pressures on the direct care workforce.

there's not enough to meet the assessed need, but it is a tough workforce to recruit for and a tough workforce to retain.

We've probably had probably somewhere between 20 to 30 different providers over the years.

And typically their employment lasts anywhere from a couple of weeks to, on a good case about six to eight months.

It's only logical that we take a step to, to help compensate and, and, um, resolve for, for that gap in the system that exists for parents who want to provide care.

We already have the skills, and often we're the ones training, attendant caregivers that are moving into the house.

So that is cut out of the equation.

It's just business as usual.

Being regular is a big issue with kids that aren't you know, have a limited diet and they're not actively walking around and creating like creating a natural flow of the body.

So it's really important to keep them pretty regular.

Being able to take care of our child, not have a lot of different bodies and a lot of different outside exposure in the home.

Parents providing care to their minor children have to go through the same exact training protocols that any other direct care worker needs to.

Parents are able to go and be employed and trained as care providers so that they can work with their children one-on-one.

We also have the capacity to work with anybody else's children who receives those services.

And it's a huge financial burden that is lifted off of these families that can't have two incomes sometimes because one parent has to stay in.

And what about single parent families?

I was a single mom with Christian and Lola for a few years.

So I'm so passionate about this for the people that need this program as much as I did.

Do you wanna do choices?

Okay.

Do you want to play your... DJ board, or use your communication device?

Prior to COVID, a lot of families experienced, the inability to have outside help come in and support their children.

And so with this program, those families are able to receive payment for what the care that they've been providing for many years unpaid.

So that really validates their employment experience as a valuable contribution to their child and to society.

The federal flexibility approval, waiver approval, is what gives us the authority to reimburse parents for these services on a temporary basis.

We've gotten an indication from the federal government that we can have an extension of that flexibility.

This program as a permanent option is a huge security to the disability community in general.

We started having discussions with our community, so thousands of parents providing services like I am, on how we really want this to continue, but right now we just have our stories.

We just have our experience.

And so through Raising Voices Coalition, we were able to find data that would help advocate for a permanent program.

Having that dialogue with parents and with the community that's going to be impacted by this is, it's paramount to making this program a success.

We're only as good at meeting the need as we are aware of what the need is.

It means that families will be able to think long-term, not just a few months ahead.

And they'll be able to financially plan and plan the care, you know, organization of their household on a more permanent basis.

I'm able to relax definitely a lot more and enjoy... enjoy Christian.

It's a very stressful life having a child that has special needs and the world is not built for him.

But this program is just one more thing that takes a weight off of our shoulders.

When I have support from an outside provider at least 20 to 40 hours a week, it helps me survive the best.

So I'm able to have that balance of being his care provider when it's needed and then also have that outside support.

I don't see this program taking away jobs from anyone.

I think it just adds jobs to the community as well as really puts the career caregivers where they're most needed.

We're really excited to make this a permanent feature of the AHCCCS program for those minor members being served in our long-term care program.

Having this program allows single parent families, rural families, low-income families not to have to rely on state assistance.

It helps us focus on that rather than worrying about making ends meet.

We hope to see this move across the country to really support families and individuals with disabilities across the board.

I feel like it's a win-win all the way around.

[# TENDER MUSIC] (Tom) You know with enough water you can grow almost anything in the desert like the grass or the pine trees back there, even these olive trees.

But you know a number of our native plants have already adapted to this environment.

They use less water and they provide needed habitat for birds and insects and animals.

Here's the latest installment now of our Desert Plants series.

Hi, I'm Hanna Blood and I'm the nursery manager and propagation manager here at Tohono Chul Gardens.

Today we're looking at Desert Lavender.

This is Condea emoryi, formerly Hyptis emoryi.

It is a really amazing shrub of the mint family.

You can see that it has this gray foliage to protect it from the heat.

So it's stellar for planting in hot reflective heat areas.

It has clusters of tiny purple flowers that attract a lot of the smaller pollinators like little bees and butterflies.

It is a host plant for the Gray Streak butterfly, which is a smaller butterfly.

Many small butterflies love the nectar of this plant.

It has a fantastic fragrance.

I don't think it really smells like lavender, but it's really a nice soapy kind of smell.

And it is in the mint family.

So it has been used by people historically.

The seeds are edible.

The fragrance is supposed to be an insect repellent.

And it's found on gravelly slopes in arroyos here in the Sonoran Desert.

It's also found in Sonora, Mexico, Nevada, California, down into Baja, California.

It can get nipped by the frost, but as you see, it's a very vertical shrub that can take a little pruning.

It can grow up to 10 feet tall and be about five feet wide.

I recommend this plant because it's beautiful.

It smells great and it's extremely drought tolerant.

It's a really great addition to any garden.

You want to increase your species diversity of pollinators.

And it's just lovely.

The Sonoran Desert is so rich in diversity and it's an amazing magical place.

Just start with planting a tree for shade.

Start planting anything.

And you immediately increased your yard diversity.

And just think of it as an experiment.

Plants like certain places.

Don't be afraid to try it.

You might be successful.

(Tom) For many more examples of native plants that will thrive in your yard, just head to our new website, azpm.org/desertplants Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we'll see you again next week with another all-new episode.

[MUSIC]