826 Valencia is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting students ages six to eighteen with their creative and expository writing skills and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. Their services are structured around the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success.
It’s not easy to stop the construction of natural gas pipelines, but several years ago the ecological artist and activist Aviva Rahmani came up with an ingenious idea: what if you could protect threatened landscapes by turning them into art?
As the Yippies prepared for protests at 1968 Democratic National Convention, Yippie Paul Krassner rattled Chicago leaders by suggesting that the Yippies were planning to put LSD in the city water supply. As Abbie Hoffman said at the Chicago Seven trial: "I read in the paper the day before that they had 2,000 troops surrounding the reservoirs in order to protect against the Yippie plot to dump LSD in the drinking water.
When award-winning architect David Rockwell started spending time in playgrounds with his young children, he was disturbed by the lack of imagination and variation in the way kids interact with standardized playground equipment. He spent five years developing the Imagination Playground, seeking private-public partnerships to see it realized.
The Heidelberg Project is an outdoor art project in Detroit, Michigan. It was created in 1986 by artist Tyree Guyton and his grandfather Sam Mackey ("Grandpa Sam") as an outdoor art environment in the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood on the city's east side, just north of the city's historically African-American Black Bottom area.
Reversing decades of discrimination set into place when New Deal labor laws intentionally excluded domestic workers, New York State in 2010 passed the very first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. Hawaii and California followed soon after with other states soon to follow.
Josh Keyes is a contemporary artist who takes a "satirical look at the impact urban sprawl has on the environment and surmises, with the aid of scientific slices and core samples, what could happen if we continue to infiltrate and encroach on our rural surroundings."
Sara Hendren is an Enabler. Hendren's writing, research, and "knowledge-building" propels conversations of ability and disability in such a way that activates a creative dialogue as well as provides a scholarly basis for cultural critique.
Bernie Sanders supporters know how to bring the party! And they did it big time for the Democratic Debate in New York this week, with help from The Illuminator & the NYC Light Brigade. They installed an interactive video game featuring Bernie jumping over obstacles and WINNING!
GAME ON! Its gonna be a good Spring!" Connie Bacon.
Activists and the politically aware will march with the message that Donald Trump and his beliefs are "UNWANTED".
Elisa and Lily chose to create StyleLikeU as an alternative to this disempowering status quo. In 2009, the duo picked up a home video camera and launched their "Closet" series, documenting diverse individuals who were challenging fashion industry norms in their style.
On the opening day of the Spring/Summer 2011's season of Mercedes Benz's New York Fashion Week, former fashion editor, speaker, and fashion activist Michaela Angela Davis led a protest of approximately 20 black women, dressed in black suits, carrying signs with the names of every fashion editor in the 40 year history of African American fashion and lifestyle magazine, Essence Magazine.
In 2013, and again in 2014, PCI Media Impact partnered with Professor David Gere and the UCLA Art & Global Health Center, to design and facilitate a 5-week communications workshop, entitled Soap Operas for Social Change. Throughout this intensive course, students designed and produced an Entertainment Education (E-E) serial drama in response to the growing concerns about sexual assault on campus.
The link between early trauma and ill health later was untilled soil in the world of medicine. But the possibility of a connection captured the interest of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. And it was the beginning of a 25-year odyssey for Vincent Felitti when he teamed up with researchers to study the health of 17,000 members of a preventive care program at Kaiser Permanente, a private insurer.
Last week, Tunisia's tallest minaret went under the brush of the country's hottest muralist. On the Jara Mosque in his hometown of Gabes, 31-year-old eL Seed painted a verse from the Quran preaching tolerance, a message meant for Salafist Islamists who protested "provocative" pieces at an art exhibition earlier this summer.
The minaret of the Jara Mosque in Gabes towers over its surroundings. Formed of golden brick, it jolts up from the flat, sand-colored cityscape around it, all the better to broadcast the call to prayer across the coastal city.
The Colombian hip hop had an outstanding representation with the C15 group in the Fabrica of Rimas International Festival, a gathering of urban cultures, sponsored by Morocco, Colombia and Spain.
"The Last American Indian on Earth", a performance art piece by Gregg Deal,a member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe originally based in northwestern Nevada.The project documents what happens when an unsuspecting public is confronted with the flesh-and-blood version of a stereotype, one that for most is the only authentic expression of what it means to be an Indigenous person of the American continent.
The kidnapping and enslavement of African people was the life-blood of transnational corporations like the "Royal African Company." In law, these human resource corporations were called "artificial people." Their human cargo was called "cargo."
In Tunisia, a country gripped by economic uncertainty and still in the midst of rebuilding its identity after the Arab Spring, hip-hop culture is viewed as part of an ongoing dissident movement. Just a few events, such as the recent Mafia Wallitili Festival in the heart of downtown Tunis, offer the local hip-hop community an opportunity to share their values with the broader population.
By Nora Fakim, BBC News
Several hundred women's rights activists have demonstrated outside Morocco's parliament to demand the repeal of a law on sexual violence.
Morocco's penal code allows a rapist to marry his victim if she is a minor as a way of avoiding prosecution.
A 16-year-old girl, Amina Filali, killed herself a week ago after being severely beaten during a forced marriage to her rapist.