The Art in Action Youth Leadership Program uplifts and transforms the lives of young artists impacted by violence and poverty. Our annual summer camps and year-round programs create hope and opportunity through socially relevant popular education, community-building, and creative expression geared toward developing solutions. Art in Action provides a supportive, positive place for young leaders to cultivate leadership through dance, theater, music, spoken word/poetry, painting, storytelling, and media arts.

Involvement in the Seattle Protest

• Helped to put together the first "Shut it Down" postcard which mobilized thousands across the country to come to Seattle.

• Co-coordinated the pre-training with Ruckus Society leading up with hundreds of people north of Seattle.

• Put together an educational theater road show up and down the West Coast to plug people into the campaign, and to both inspire and train them in giant puppet-building, non-violence and media messaging. On the tour we traveled with Bay Area artists, a locked-out steel worker from Spokane, WA and a former sweatshop worker from the Philippines. We performed original songs and dances about the WTO, which became part of the culture in Seattle that winter.

• Organized a festival in the streets in San Francisco the previous June, where we premiered the WTO octopus puppet, which depicted the unconstitutional institution's multi-faceted tentacles of corporate-corruption.

Art and Revolution helped to provide a model of decentralized leadership where workers, students, people of faith, environmentalists, artists, social justice advocates, farmers and more were able to plug into a mass action in such a way that empowered their voices, tactics and mission. With a place for everyone, and not one person handing down orders, we succeeded in creating a model for mass mobilizing where various groups could leverage each other and work for the common good. We were, and still are committed to preserving the earth, while uplifting our people through creativity and mutual empowerment.