Today CAN brings you a look back at the energy that coursed through the field of community arts in 2007. CAN Co-director Linda Frye Burnham writes about the new juice pumping into struggles for national cohesion, cultural equity and effective activist strategies. Significant movement took place in several community arts sectors: national cultural organizing, community arts in higher education, arts in criminal justice and youth arts. Read the news about a several coalitions at work right now: Voices from the Cultural Battlefront: Organizing for Equity, structuring an international conversation; the Community Arts Partnership Institute, planning a 2008 meet-up and peer-reviewed publications; and Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, getting some fresh blood with new Director Jan Cohen-Cruz. Also get the news on the Arts in Criminal Justice conference, the new Creative Forces team in New Orleans and a pioneer regional arts festival in CAN's own backyard. [LINK]

Reclaiming the power of the poster from corporate advertisers is what Zimbabwean graphic designer Chaz Maviyane-Davies calls "Creative Defiance," says Beandrea Davis in Utne Reader Magazine (1-2/08, from a story in ColorLines). Maviyane-Davies, who now teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, defined his strategy during a month of “graphic activism” in Zimbabwe in 2000. Each day, he created one or two politically charged posters to counter voter intimidation by President Robert Mugabe’s government. Maviyane-Davies’ posters, appearing daily on the Web site of the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, helped inspire an international community of support for fair elections in Zimbabwe. He now creates posters that he believes will inspire "hope for a more just future not only in Zimbabwe but wherever human rights violations occur." [LINK]

Headlines Theatre, in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, invites you to join a global initiative: a Jokers' International Day of Action on Global Warming, March 16, 2008. A "Joker" is the facilitator/director theatrical events using Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed techniques. The idea is to create an event in your community using these techniques. Headlines offers its own example from November 2007 at the Rhizome Cafe in Vancouver, "2º of Fear and Desire," an "intimate evening of theater (without a play) that investigated our fears, desires and challenges to change our behaviors that hurt the planet," using TO methods. Headlines is already gathering online listings of Jokers Day events and will publish reports afterwards. March 16 is the birthday of Augusto Boal, who is nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize. [LINK]

People all over the world are getting ready for the second annual World Community Arts Day, February 17, 2008. Instigated by Craigmillar Communiversity in Scotland, World Community Arts Day is an occasion for celebrating "arts as a catalyst for sharing and caring." Everyone is invited to cook up a project for The Day and register it on the Web. On board so far are migrant workers in Singapore, a children's art workshop in Solvenia, Scotland's Leith Festival, Global Peace Global Healing, Belfast's Waterfront Hall and the Community Arts Forum, Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective in Los Angeles, Children At Risk Foundation in Brazil, World Peace Markers Project in Florida, Saroja Vaidyanthan in India and a host of people who have hooked up with WCAD on MySpace and Flickr. Check out last year's festival on the WCAD site -- and get busy. [LINK]

Today CAN brings you "Art and Its Transformative Power," the text of a speech by a prison inmate at the recent Arts in Criminal Justice conference in Philadelphia. Charles H. Lawson, a.k.a. Zafir, addressed the conference delegates in the chapel of SCI Graterford, the Pennsylvania prison where he will spend the rest of his life. The audience consisted of artists and others working in and for arts programs in prisons and detention facilities; the gathering, October 3-6, 2007, was produced by the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program (MAP). Zafir has been a participant in MAP's prison arts program Healing Walls, which brings together victims and offenders to plan and work on murals with the goal of seeking solutions to those affected by violent crime. Said Zafir, "I truly believe it will be through the efforts of groups such as this ... that we can and will start to win back most of our distracted youth and give meaning to our displaced men and women. Now, this is by no means an end-all. Other help will also be needed. But this is a point of entry that should thoroughly be capitalized." [LINK]

The Business Committee for the Arts will soon seek nominations for the 2008 BCA Ten: Best Companies Supporting the Arts in America. The national program recognizes the winners as models for other companies to follow. In 2007, BCA recognized a new annual summer jazz series in Chicago supported by Boeing, arts-driven initiatives by Shell to help rebuild New Orleans and surrounding areas, and community-based arts projects throughout Michigan that would have been eliminated were it not for Masco Corporation’s support. Other honorees were: The Boldt Company (Wisc.), Deutsche Bank (N.Y.), Gibson Guitar (Tenn.), McQuiddy Printing (Tenn.), Qualcomm (Calif.), Shugoll Research (Md.) and Travelers (Minn.) You can read about them in an online BCA booklet. Individuals, arts organizations and company employees may submit 2008 nominations after February 1. [LINK]

Great Leap has announced "Faith," its fifth "Collaboratory" residency program nurturing cross-cultural inter-community artistic collaboration and developing community leadership. Led by Project Director Dan Kwong and Co-facilitators Young-Ae Park and Nobuko Miyamoto, "Collaboratory V" will provide "a sacred space for exploration and exchange on the subject of faith." Eight selected artists will work together for eight weeks visiting various religious centers in Los Angeles, meeting with local mentors/elders/“wisdom-keepers,” experiencing master classes and sharing their own personal stories of faith. Questions will include: "How can multidimensional religious identities live side by side? How can we navigate religious conflicts with intelligence and compassion? How can we create progressive and respectful visions for the future?" The project culminates in a performance March 8-9. Application deadline: January 1, 2008. Download the application: http://www.greatleap.org/uploads/pr/colabapp.pdf [LINK]

CAN writer and peacebuilder Craig Zelizer invites you to join the Peace and Collaborative Development Network, a new online initiative. The network is bringing together professionals, academics and students involved in conflict resolution, human rights, international development, democratization, social entrepreneurship and related fields. "The network fosters interaction between individuals and organizations around the world and currently has over 1375 members," says Zelizer, who teaches arts and peacebuilding in the MA in Conflict Resolution program at Georgetown University's Department of Government. "The network fosters interaction between individuals and organizations around the world and currently has over 1375 members. The site is a terrific networking tool where you can find local and international partners and practitioners, share resources (including scholarships in the field), and exchange best practices." Members (free) can post/access topics, blogs and videos. [LINK]

Lily Yeh and her organization, Barefoot Artists, are exploring ways to launch a new program with Iraqi refugees in Syria. Collaborating with Red Crescent, the team recently organized an art event at Al Tijari Park in Damascus. "During our visit," says Yeh in her December newsletter, "we engaged 25 children in drawing and painting activities, collected stories of their hopes and aspirations, and together created a colorful painting using their drawings. Working with our partners in Syria, we hope to return in the near future to continue the project. We intend to collect people's stories through art and interviews so as to share them with the American audience to promote mutual understanding and peace in the Middle East and America." News about their projects in Kenya, Rwanda, China and elsewhere is on the Web. [LINK]

This month FilmAid International held its second annual refugee-youth film festival in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya, showing films by and for refugee kids. The day-long festival featured 13 ten-minute films from FilmAid’s Refugee Filmmaking Project, looking at the perils of promiscuous behavior, child abuse and forced early marriage, substance abuse, voluntary repatriation and resettlement and the prevention of sexual exploitation. The camp is home to 60,000 refugees from ten African countries. “We are all from different countries, talk different languages, and we have all experienced different wars. But through film we all become one and we are all able to express our ideas, our feelings and our ambitions. That is why the film festival was important to us," said 20-year-old project member. The festival is co-sponsored by Cinereach, The Hollywood Foreign Press and Glamour Magazine’s Reel Moments. (Thanks, Creative Exchange.) [LINK]

It's time to nominate your favorite youth-arts or humanities program for a Coming Up Taller Award. Deadline is January 31, 2008. Award recipients receive $10,000 each, an individualized plaque and an invitation to attend the annual Coming Up Taller Leadership Enhancement Conference. The sponsors encourage programs initiated by museums, libraries, performing arts organizations, universities, colleges, arts centers, community-service organizations, schools, businesses and eligible government entities to consider participating if they are "tangible examples of the power of the arts and the humanities to encourage young people's creativity and to provide them with learning opportunities, chances to contribute to their community, and ways to take responsibility for their own futures." The Awards also celebrate the contributions that educators, curators, historians, scholars, librarians and artists make to families and communities by mentoring and teaching children. Details are on the Web. [LINK]

Protectors of the Homeland is a boy band from Gaza City, part of the arts department of Hamas' domestic security service, the Executive Force, says Tim Butcher in Britain's Telegraph (10/31/07). The group pays homage to the party and its leaders with songs such as “Change” and “Reform”—and with lines like “By the shrouds of the dead we are inspired.” Fronted by Major Hasam Abu Abdu, a former police officer, they wear urban-camouflage blue fatigues, practice in a Gaza police station and perform for the police. "The group hopes to release an album," says Butcher, "as well as build a theater and support public dancing. Successful or not, the band members said making music beats what they were doing in June: fighting rival faction Fatah in the streets." (Thanks, Utne Reader.) [LINK]

Arts-in-corrections researchers will be thrilled to hear that the infamous 1983 Brewster Report is now available online from the Wiilliam James Association. Political scientist Lawrence Brewster, then at San Jose State University, was commissioned by the James Association and the California Department of Corrections to conduct a rigorous nine-month evaluation of the department's arts-in-corrections (AIC) activities, costs and benefits. In Brewster's analysis, society and the institutions benefited by significantly reduced rates of behavioral-code violations; prison racist incidents were lowered and cooperation with staff and family increased. Brewster estimated that the program's $162,790 cost generated benefits worth $228,522 in the four prisons studied. The full report and abstract are downloadable from the Prison Arts Project page of the James Web site (scroll to bottom), plus a 1983 article from the San Jose University Digest. [LINK]

A New Orleans community-based story collective called The I-10 Witness Project is documenting stories from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina through sound and video. On the Web site you can hear interviews with displaced citizens in shelters, relief workers, community organizers, neighborhood leaders, artists, medical staff, city planners and government officials. Partners in the project include local artists, educators and community organizers: Mondo Bizarro, ArtSpot Productions, Xavier University Department of Communication, Nunez Community College Audio-Visual Archive and the S.F. Bay Area's Center for Digital Storytelling. They have support from Alternate ROOTS. They plan to make interviews available through partnerships with public broadcast networks and credible local, state and national oral-history archives. The site also includes audio reports: "March On Gretna" and "New Orleans Health Crisis Eased by Unlikely Partnerships." [LINK]

Today, December 11, 2007, is the day to call Appalshop's Thousand Kites project to record a phone call to a friend in prison and be part of the annual radio show, "Calls from Home." Thousand Kites is a community-based performance, Web, video and radio project centered on the U.S. prison system. From 3 to 11 p.m. today (EST), Thousand Kites opens the recording studio's toll-free number -- 888-396-1208 -- and records calls from prisoners' families and supporters from across the country. "After the show is recorded," says the 1000K team, "we put it up [on the Web] for free downloads. Download it and get it played our your local community radio station, play a section at a meeting, get it played at a church, class or even in a prison and hold a discussion about incarceration in the U.S." [LINK]

"Mending the Gap: What Youth Want and Don't Want from Adults in the Community" is an upcoming community dialogue to be led by the Poetic Justice Theatre Ensemble. Poetic Justice is a multigenerational team of actors and activists, 14-79 years old, working in Port Townsend, Wash. A community-service project of the Mandala Center for Change, they use a blend of Theatre of the Oppressed and Playback Theatre techniques to stimulate community dialogue and invite positive action around burning social issues. "Mending the Gap" is set for January 10, 2008, in the Boiler Room, Port Townsend’s youth-driven coffee house and community center. The ensemble says it's "prepared to work with any issue or population and offers itself as a free service to local groups in need, particularly those struggling with issues of marginalization." [LINK]

"The arts and the humanities are absolutely necessary to environmental recovery. It’s not the water that’s the problem, it’s us. And if we fix us, we’ll start fixing the water.” So says AMD&ART's T. Allan Comp in "Reclaiming a Toxic Legacy Through Art and Science," a substantial article by environmental journalist Eric Reece in Orion Magazine (November-December 2007). It tells of the cleanup of acid mine drainage into Blacklick Creek in the Appalachian town of Vintondale, Pa., accomplished by Comp, local citizens and a team of designers and AmeriCorps and VISTA volunteers. Reece explains in detail how they did it, then built a park, planted 1,000 trees, and brought hope back to the area. Comp now oversees the Watershed Assistance Team at the Interior Department's Office of Surface Mining, placing VISTA workers in communities across Appalachia. [LINK]

Thousands turned up in New Orleans' Gentilly and Lower Ninth Ward neighborhoods in November for performances of "Waiting for Godot." They also got a gumbo dinner and were brought to their seats by second-line jazz bands, says Holland Cotter in the N.Y. Times (12/2/07). The occasion was an artwork by artist Paul Chan, including months of lecturing, teaching and stealth advertising. During Chan's first visit to NOLA, post-Katrina, "the vista of empty streets, bare ground and solitary trees brought 'Godot' to mind," says Cotter, as well as "the memory of Susan Sontag’s production with amateur actors in Sarajevo in 1993, and performances in prisons before that." Chan staged the play with the Classical Theatre of Harlem in front of a gutted, storm-ruined house in Gentilly and the intersection of two once-busy streets in the Lower Ninth. (Thanks, Michael Rohd.) [LINK]

Actor Brad Pitt has some suggestions for holiday gifts to the people of New Orleans: "a tankless water heater or a solar panel or a tree or a low-flush toilet." Pitt hopes you'll contribute to Make It Right, a plan he announces today for building 150 affordable, environmentally sound houses over the next two years in NOLA. Robin Pogrebin says in the N.Y. Times (12/3/07) that Pitt has personally commissioned designs by 13 architecture firms to help rebuild the impoverished Lower Ninth Ward, one of the neighborhoods hit hardest by 2005's Hurricane Katrina. He's asking foundations, corporations and individuals to join the project by adopting one house, several houses or a portion of a house through the project Web site. See the Times for pictures and descriptions of the NOLA-approprate green designs Pitt has commissioned. [LINK]

New Village Press, publisher of great books about community arts and community building, has two exceptional new publications coming out December 9, 2007. One is "Building Commons and Community," documenting 45 years of the late Karl Linn’s legacy -- creating neighborhood spaces for communities and by communities. In the illustrated landscape-format hardcover book, Linn presents his philosophies and practical wisdom on using resources we find in our own surroundings to create welcoming shared spaces. NVP's Web site has links to other Linn resources and a profile in YES! Magazine. The other book is "Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing" by Louise Dunlap, activist writing teacher who began her career during the 1960s Free Speech Movement. She writes about facing "the culture of silence -- how gender, race, education, class and family work to quiet dissent." [LINK]