This full-color celebration of communities engaged in creative cultural expression profiles nine exemplary grassroots arts projects depicting an intersection of creativity with love of place. Stories range from children building an African-inspired mud facade on their Oregon middle school to an annual blessing-procession and festival in North Philadelphia that brings to life dozens of the most depressed blocks in urban America. Other regions represented include Minneapolis, Boston, Berkeley, rural Maine, San Francisco, the New York Bronx, and Vancouver, Canada. Community-based arts resources are sited throughout.
Works of Heart offers a compendium of multicultural human-interest stories that will inspire and inform both community development professionals and citizen activists. Among those profiled are Lily Yeh and the Village of Arts and Humanities, Clara Wainwright and the Faith Quilts Project, Dolly Hopkins and Public Dreams, and the Beehive Collective.

Works of Heart: Building Village through the Arts

Lynne Elizabeth

SUZANNE YOUNG

Arts & Photography

New Village Press

The only directory of its kind in North America, this comprehensive guide features an annotated listing of schools and educational centers offering programs in ecological architecture and construction. Included also are a 10-year overview of sustainable design education, tables comparing school programs, and listings of instructors, green building organizations, selected textbooks, and publicly available curricula.
Sandra Leibowitz Earley is a registered LEED®-accredited architect. She founded Sustainable Design Consulting and provides green design specifications for commercial, institutional, and multi-family residential projects throughout the country. Earley has coauthored several guidance documents, including the HOK Guidebook to Sustainable Design and the US Green Building Council Toolkit.

Ecological Design and Building Schools: Green Guide to Educational Opportunities in the United States and Canada

Science & Math

Earley, Sandra Leibowitz

Earth Sciences

This is the first comprehensive guide to in-prison and post-release horticultural training programs. James Jiler combines an engaging personal account of running a highly successful horticultural vocation program at the largest jail complex in the United States with a practical guide to starting and managing prison and re-entry gardening programs.
James Jiler directs the Greenhouse Project for male and female inmates at New York City’s Rikers Island jail system. He also directs the GreenTeam of ex-offenders, who work on landscape-related projects throughout New York State. Jiler’s humor and heartfelt stories about prison community and clear explanations of what works broaden this book’s appeal to social activists, educators, and those involved with at-risk populations and community gardens.

Doing Time in the Garden: Life Lessons through Prison Horticulture

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Jiler, James

Gardening & Landscape Design

Ten transformative local arts projects come alive in this illustrated training manual for youth leaders and teachers. This energetic guidebook demonstrates the enormous power of art in grass-roots social change. It presents proven models of community-based arts programs, plus techniques, discussion questions, and plentiful resources. Writer Mat Schwarzman directs the Crossroads Center at Xavier University, which trains youth leaders nationwide in community-based arts activism. He holds a PhD in transformative learning. Graphic storyteller Keith Knight is an award-winning cartoonist, rapper, and hip-hop musician with three nationally syndicated comic strips

Beginner's Guide to Community-Based Arts , 1st Editon OUT OF STOCK: Ten Graphic Stories about Artists, Educators & Activists Across the U.S.

Schwarzman, Mat

Performing Communities: Grassroots Ensemble Theaters Deeply Rooted in Eight U.S. Communities

Ensemble theater is one of the vibrant, meaningful American performance forms today. It's more than art- it's a social movement. 
Ensemble theater is one of the hottest, most engaging American performance forms today. It's more than art- it's a movement. Performing Communities is an inquiry into a genre of theater that arises from and empowers the grassroots. The book profiles established ensemble groups from inner-city Los Angeles, small-town northern California, African-American South, multicultural southern Texas, low-income central Appalachia, economically struggling South Bronx New York, and cross-continental Native America. This compendium of critical writing about the role these theaters play in building community shows how these artist groups are forged by working in and with their communities over time. Ensemble theater is discovered to be neither alternative nor marginalized, but vanguard, a natural evolution of the movement that propelled regional theater "away from the commercial restraints of New York and toward a theater expressive of the rich diversity of American culture." It is theater that is politically and emotionally charged. It can be cathartic, healing, and has a proven ability to effect social change. The book Performing Communities is a project of the Community Arts Network. It has been created from interviews, analytical essays, and play excerpts from the "Grassroots Theater Ensemble Research Project," an inquiry into American ensemble theaters that have been working in communities for 10 to 35 years. Although originating from a scholarly report, the language has been edited for a popular audience and offers an intimate glimpse into each local ensemble community. The book will appeal to followers of contemporary and popular theater, social change activists, community building specialists, and a public curious about cultural development in the United States.

Robert H. Leonard

Ann Kilkelly

Humor & Entertainment

An inspiring, foundational book that defines the burgeoning field of community cultural development. 
An inspiring, foundational book that defines the burgeoning field of community cultural development. Through personal stories, rousing accounts, detailed observation and histories, Arlene Goldbard describes how communities express and develop themselves via the creative arts. This comprehensive, photographically-illustrated book, which covers community-based arts such as theater grounded in oral history and murals celebrating cultural heritage, will appeal to the curious non-specialist reader as well as the practitioner and student.
Author Arlene Goldbard is one of the best-known authors on community cultural development. Her seminal books and essays are widely read in the US and other English-speaking countries -- among them, Community, Culture and Globalization and this book's antecedent, Creative Community.

New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development

Goldbard, Arlene

Study & Teaching

Citizen artists successfully rebuild the social infrastructure in six communities devastated by war, repression and dislocation. Author William Cleveland tells remarkable stories from Northern Ireland, Cambodia, South Africa, United States (Watts, Los Angeles), aboriginal Australia, and Serbia, about artists who resolve conflict, heal unspeakable trauma, give voice to the forgotten and disappeared, and restitch the cultural fabric of their communities. Art can be a powerful agent of personal, institutional and community change. The stories in this book have valuable implications for artists, academics, educators, human service providers, philanthropists, and community leaders throughout the world. The artists documented in the book have generated new technologies for advocacy, organizing, peacemaking, healing trauma and the rebuilding of community. Creativity is our most powerful capacity, and it can mitigate and heal our most destructive tendencies.

Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World's Frontlines

William Cleveland

Building Commons and Community documents 45 years of the late Karl Linn's legacy creating neighborhood spaces for communities and by communities. In this richly-ilustrated landscape-format hardcover book, Linn presents his philosophies and practical wisdom.
Linn created some of America's first community design centers, and his work inspired Eunice Shriver to initiate Americorps. In this richly-illustrated book, Linn presents his philosophies and practical wisdom to help people use the resources they find in their own surroundings to create welcoming shared spaces.
In addition to an extensive addendum of resources for creating community commons, this work contains colorful photo-essay case studies of projects that cross boundaries between professional design and neighborhood activism provide inspiration and guidance for citizens and professionals who wish to collaborate to strengthen communities. Projects include community gardens, playgrounds, parks and other gathering places built on derelict or unused property by the people who use them.
Landscape architect and child psychologist Karl Linn (1923-2005) was a beloved, down-to-earth, visionary leader of grassroots community building, who brought life to economically disenfranchised neighborhoods in cities from Boston to Berkeley. His book documents the creativity and ingenuity of working-class citizens, students and volunteer professionals who transformed derelict vacant lots and drab institutional settings into colorful and lively community commons in Boston, New York, Newark, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Louisville KY, Pittsburgh, Columbus OH, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco and Berkeley.

Building Commons and Community

Linn, Karl

Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation

Case Studies from North America, Scandinavia, Japan, and Great Britain demonstrate natural outdoor teaching environment that support hand-on learning in science, math, language, and art in ways that nurture healthy imagination and socialization 
Asphalt to Ecosystems is a compelling color guidebook for designing and building natural schoolyard environments that enhance childhood learning and play experiences while providing connection with the natural world. With this book, Danks broadens our notion of what a well-designed schoolyard should be, taking readers on a journey from traditional, ordinary grassy fields and asphalt, to explore the vibrant and growing movement to "green" school grounds in the United States and around the world. This book documents exciting green schoolyard examples from almost 150 schools in 11 countries, illustrating that a great many things are possible on school grounds when they are envisioned as outdoor classrooms for hands-on learning and play.
The book's 500 vivid, color photographs showcase some of the world's most innovative green schoolyards including: edible gardens with fruit trees, vegetables, chickens, honey bees, and outdoor cooking facilities; wildlife habitats with prairie grasses and ponds, or forest and desert ecosystems; schoolyard watershed models, rainwater catchment systems and waste-water treatment wetlands; renewable energy systems that power landscape features, or the whole school; waste-as-a-resource projects that give new life to old materials in beautiful ways; K-12 curriculum connections for a wide range of disciplines from science and math to art and social studies; creative play opportunities that diversify school ground recreational options and encourage children to run, hop, skip, jump, balance, slide, and twirl, as well as explore the natural world first hand. The book grounds these examples in a practical framework that illustrates simple landscape design choices that all schools can use to make their schoolyards more comfortable, enjoyable and beautiful, and describes a participatory design process that schools can use to engage their school communities in transforming their own asphalt into ecosystems.

Danks, Sharon Gamson

Photography & Video

Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing

Undoing the Silence offers guidance to help both citizens and professionals influence democratic process through letters, articles, reports and public testimony. Louise Dunlap, PhD, began her career as an activist writing instructor during the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. She learned that listening and gaining a feel for audience are just as important to social transformation as the outspoken words of student leaders atop police cars. "Free speech is a first step, but real communication matches speech with listening and understanding. That is when thinking shifts and change happens." Dunlap felt compelled to go where the silences were deepest because her work aimed not just at teaching but also at healing both individual voices and an ailing collective voice. Her tales of those adventures and what she knows about the culture of silence -- how gender, race, education, class, and family work to quiet dissent -- are interwoven with practical methods for people to put their most challenging ideas into words. Louise Dunlap gives writing workshops around the country for universities and social justice, environmental, and peace organizations that help reluctant writers get past their internal censors to find their powerful voice. Her insight strengthens strategic thinking and her "You can do it!" approach makes social-action writing achievable for everyone.

Reference

Dunlap, Louise

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

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