Today CAN brings you a new story by Dana Edell, "World Savvy: Mapping a Creative Path to Global Education." Edell spent several weeks in New York City with World Savvy's Global Youth Media and Arts Program, in which 500 teens from all over the globe explored themes of immigration and identity. She writes about how the global arts-education organization worked with immigrant students from 200 New York public schools while they researched immigration and sculpted their new knowledge into visual arts and performance projects. World Savvy's methods helped the teens, all of whom were born outside the U.S., mine their own stories and create group identities as well. They created t-shirts with social-justice messages, poetry banners, altar installations, a migration map, collages, animation videos, performance works and more -- and showed them in a gallery exhibition at NYU and a festival at LaGuardia Community College.

Today CAN brings you some intriguing additions to the two most recent book reviews on the site: excerpts from the books themselves. Craig Zelizer's July review of Bill Cleveland's "Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World Frontlines" is accompanied by a section of the book describing how a small NGO called Reyum has helped to rebuild Cambodia’s decimated cultural and civic infrastructure in the post-Khmer Rouge era. Richard Owen Geer's August review of Petra Kupper's "Community Performance: An Introduction" is accompanied by three excerpts from the book, illustrating the complexity and multivocality of the book's design. The Kuppers excerpts are from chapters on "Setting Up and Running a Group," "Findings Motivations" and "Building Sustainability." These excerpts may be accessed by clicking on the links below the book covers that illustrate the reviews.

One thousand kids will march in the Mississippi Delta's first-ever “Blues Harmonica Parade,” to kick off the opening of the B.B. King Museum & Delta Interpretive Center. The students in the September 11, 2008, parade in Indianola, Miss., will perform a B.B. King song from the "Indianola, MS Seeds" CD, and will be provided a music instruction sheet, instructional DVD, a harmonica and a button reading "I Got Harmonica Love for B.B. King." The organizers encourage students to make their own original artwork about the legendary blues musician and to bring along to the parade their cheerleaders and school banners. The new Center honors B.B. King and "his life's story of hardship, perseverance, talent and humility as a way to further the arts, youth development and racial reconciliation in the Mississippi Delta and Beyond."

September 26, 2008, is the deadline for applications to the pilot program of the MetLife Foundation Creative Aging Program. It will provide in-depth technical assistance and seed grants of $7,500 to eight community arts education organizations to enable them to design, implement and evaluate sustainable creative-aging programs (participatory, skill-based arts education programs for adults age 60 and above) using best practices detailed in the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts' latest publication, "Creativity Matters: The Arts and Aging Toolkit." Technical assistance will focus on capacity-building with particular attention to outcome-based evaluation measuring changes in the health of participants. Only organizations that are full members in good standing of the National Guild may apply (it's not too late to join!). There's a conference call for questions at 1 p.m. EDT, September 4; to join, e-mail Program Manager Johanna Misey Boyer: johanna@jmb-arts.com.

In Massachusetts, the Creative Transitions Initiative is "a state experiment that is using theater, art and music to help juvenile offenders. Run in seven settings statewide, the program is a way for officials to see what it could take to build a system of high caliber arts programs rooted in the Department of Youth Services," says a Boston Globe editorial (8/18/08), which praises the program, and recommends, "A good DYS arts program could also save public money if it steers more youth away from reoffending. Officials should find ways to track the long-term outcomes of young participants, to prove the program's worth to taxpayers. ... The next step is for Massachusetts to gather evidence by taking a long-term look at what happens when court-involved youth become involved in the arts." (Thanks, Cultural Policy Listserv.)

BrushFire is Provisions Library's guide to activist arts and culture during the run-up to the U.S. elections in November 2008. Artists, arts organizations and their community partners are submitting notices of their arts actions for social change to the Brushfire blog. At the same time, Provisions is presenting a series of public art interventions around the country designed to focus attention on key issues such as the Iraq war, immigration, global warming, civil liberties, housing and healthcare; artists include The Beehive Collective, The Floating Lab Collective, Futurefarmers, Ligorano/Reese and Jon Winet. Brushfire culminates in an exhibition, "Close Encounters: Reflections on the Future," at the American University Art Museum in September and October, along with a D.C.-wide festival of exhibitions and arts events on key social issues. Send your announcements to the blog.

Today CAN brings you a Richard Owen Geer review of "Community Performance: An Introduction" by Petra Kuppers. Geer says it's "a valuable tool for the new practitioner of the community-based arts. It begins with historical material, but the result is not history as much as an indication of the breadth and diversity of the field, as conveyed by reference to specific practices and practitioners." Kuppers, says Geer, provides the entry-level student with how-to chapters, presented in a "welter of sidebars. Constant multivocality is one of the book’s most notable characteristics." He admires her sensitivity to diversity, but questions her definition of community performance and her lack of inclusion of the voices of many of the authorities from the field as presented on CAN.

Today CAN brings you a story from China by artist Lily Yeh and the Barefoot Artists, who helped students at the Dandelion School change their environment. The Dandelion School, say Yeh and Kelly Tannen in today's story, is located in a heavily polluted industrial section on the outskirts of Beijing. It's the only nonprofit organization in the city that serves the needs of 620 children of poor migrant workers coming from 24 provinces. Its programs and activities manifest its motto, "Ai Man Tian Xia, Let the heaven and earth be filled with love." The school environment felt inhospitable, barren and harsh, and Dandelion's teachers invited Yeh to "cultivate us to have the ability to find angels in hell." New designs were crafted from recycled student art work and the work of Ku SuLan, an influential self-taught 20th-century female Chinese peasant artist, then the students installed the designs in mosaic throughout the school. Yeh and Tannen describe the "powerful effective process."