Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, the parent organization for New Village Press, is deeply concerned about the escalation of incarceration in response to violence. Rather than build more prisons, ADPSR believes in investing in the health of our communities. ADPSR’s national Prison Design Boycott has recently evolved into a Prison Alternatives Initiative and will be making an effort to learn about and promote programs that strengthen communities rather than break them apart.

Today’s New York Times featured “A Home Remedy for Juvenile Offenders”, a report by Leslie Kaufman about an alternative sentencing program started a year ago this month in New York City called the Juvenile Justice Initiative. The program allows medium-risk youth offenders to stay with their families and provides intensive home therapy instead of jail, prison or other correctional facilities. (more…)

If you read our January newsletter, you know that I am much enamored of Toronto’s Poet Laureate Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, that lyric champion of Creative Cities. One of my favorite of his public addresses is “Civic Valentines”, which starts,

When one falls in love, one becomes credible; and so it is with a city when it falls in love with itself. It becomes credible, believable to itself. And it attracts. When a civic leader is in love with a city, he/she is listened to. He/she is credible. People know this: that the quality of life is initially and inevitably predicated by love. (more…)

Works of Heart: Building Village Through the Arts was featured in two blogs this week, in both cases being read for the first time and surprising the readers enough they decided to write about it. Margaret, a social worker and educator from Eastern Washington, comments in her blog Margaret’s Wanderings, “How joyful it is to see people using their creative gifts in and for their communities. It helped reiterate something I have always known: Art can change the world.” The second blogger is a young pastor of a suburban Presbyterian church in a Mid Atlantic state, whose blog, Reverendmother, notes “One of my favorite sections of the book was about an artist who got a grant to rent out a stall at the local public market as a place for storytelling, music and performance art. How wonderful.” She found the book in the Tools for Change catalog from Syracuse Cultural Workers.

Works of Heart is being adopted by more and more college courses as a textbook. One early adopter is Professor Amara Geffen, a notable community artist and chair of the art department at Allegheny College in Western Pennsylvania. Amara has stepped outside conventional boundaries of academia by directing two initiatives in an ambitious program that involves faculty and students in college-community partnerships that address local and regional sustainability issues—The Center for Economic and Environmental Development (more…)

The work of cartoonist author Keith Knight is featured at the Euphrat Museum at DeAnza College in the show Graphic Storytelling as Activism, which runs February 11 - April 17, 2008.

Graphic Storytelling as Activism presents a variety of art forms, including cartoons, political posters, digital art, book art, and more to explore a range of imagery with an activist bent. It began with graphic storyteller Keith Knight, who sees comics and cartooning as a powerful tool for social change. (more…)

Author Louise Dunlap is on tour presenting her new book, Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing, and offering writing workshops throughout February in Grass Valley, Nevada City, Berkeley, Oakland, Washington DC, New York and Cambridge. Check the New Village Calendar for details.

Evidence of Humanity has posted a beautifully crafted review of Undoing the Silence on their webblog. What a work of grace that Evidence of Humanity! Thank you, Don Baker, for your clarity of vision and execution in creating a simple, handsome website to highlight good work in the world.

The University of California Berkeley’s Center for Community Innovation hosted an interdisciplinary symposium on the arts and community development on Friday January 25. The one-day conference came from a collaboration of Karen Chapple, Director of the Center and Professor of City and Regional Planning, and Shannon Jackson, Chair of UCB’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. A dozen presenters and nearly a hundred attendees explored the role of the arts in urban revitalization and civic engagement on the neighborhood level. (more…)

The World Social Forum has called a Global Day of Action on Saturday January 26th. “From your community to the world; from the world to your community” is their slogan. Events include an ACLU conference — Reclaiming Our Civil Liberties — in Massachusetts with Daniel Ellsberg and Rachel Maddow and a three-day Independent Media Strategy Summit in Santa Cruz, California.

Find the link to this with Louise Dunlap’s report on the first U.S. Social Forum in our magazine, New Village Online. Noteworthy in the comments following Louise’s article is a poignant letter from Gaza by photojournalist Skip Shiel.

Louise Dunlap is the author of Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing.

New Village Press is using an innovative form of copyright for our newest publication, Building Commons and Community, called “Creative Commons”. Creative Commons encompasses a spectrum of use rights for intellectual property that range from “no rights reserved” to the unprotected public domain. Offering work under a Creative Commons license does not mean giving up your copyright. It means offering some of your rights to any member of the public, but only on certain conditions.

Leading the development and employment of these new models of copyright is the 501c3 non-profit of the same name — Creative Commons.

We selected a combination of license conditions for Karl Linn’s book from a thoughtfully written menu of licensing options. We chose Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives (by-nc-nd), which are described in detail on the Creative Commons website.

You can see how we stated it on our book’s copyright page.

Friend Dwayne Parish is a magician with acronyms and specializes in a spoken word poetry that he calls hiphopnotherapy. When you hear it live, it does put you into a trance. Here is a piece he wrote for us as a gift last year and I am happy to have a place to share it. Thank you, Dwayne!

NEW VILLAGE PRESS

Near, if not nearest to the heart of humanity is our dear friend–New Village Press!
Earnestly infusing art into community-building & filling the needs of a world pleading to become
Whole. New Village Press is achieving this goal through the power of the printed picture and word. I’ve heard
Voices rise from the pages of their books. I urge you to look & it’s my wish to introduce you to works they publish. (more…)

Dear Friends,

Imagine a city learning how to love, find its true heart, awaken its own soul through the leadership of a poet! This is exactly what is happening in Toronto, Canada, and it is an inspiration for all our towns and communities. Toronto’s Poet Laureate, Pier Giorgio DiCicco, has captivated the spirit of his city’s citizens with his beautiful notions and words. Creative City is the name of a ten-year visionary strategy, which, in DiCicco’s language, aims to “restore intimacy, curiosity, trust, and play into the happenstance encounter of citizens, in an era when the happenstance and the unpredictable are a threat.”

I too am captivated by DiCicco’s wisdom as it mirrors the thrust of New Village Press and the passions of our authors to create their beloved communities. How else can we build the cities of our dreams, if not first by engaging our imaginations with each other and sharing what we find most precious. (more…)