On December 10th, Amazon is sinking to a new low. Using a fancy smart-phone app, the mega-internet-behemoth is offering $5 or 15% off to customers who walk into a store, scan the barcode on an item, and then purchase the item through Amazon. Small businesses and smart people everywhere are fighting back and encouraging people to Occupy Amazon. Shop at your local businesses on December 10th: support your community by supporting local stores and paying sales tax.

If you absolutely must shop online, support your local, small publisher. We’re offering a 20% discount on all purchases from now until December 11th (discount code OccupyAmazon). If you live in California, you will pay sales tax. You will still pay more for your purchases than you will on Amazon, but the little extra you give New Village Press, an Oakland-based nonprofit, will ensure that more good books are published. And Amazon will receive none of it. Read local this week!

New Village Press is of course in the business of publishing the words of visionary authors. In this vein, we’ve decided to launch a Guest Blogger series, where we will feature the words of others who share and act on the vision of NVP.

Our first guest is Ross Holzman of the Create Peace Project, a San Francisco-based nonprofit devoted to peacebuilding through the arts. I first met Ross during Lily Yeh’s recent visit to the Bay Area, and we connected over the vision shared by Lily, the Create Peace Project, and New Village Press of the expression of creativity as a pathway to peace. Ross graciously answered some of my questions and provided the photos of artwork created by students involved in the Project below.

NVP: Ross, tell me a little about yourself.

ROSS: I grew up in Gates Mills, Ohio, and moved to San Francisco in late 2000. I lived here for about eight months during the dot-com crash, when jobs were tight and there was a sense of general dismay in the Bay Area. Struggling to find work, between August 2001 and September 2002 I took a job at a call center consulting firm in New Delhi, India. During that year I witnessed the extremes in poverty and overpopulation, got sick and lost twenty-five pounds, felt the intensity of Indian sensory overload, discovered Hinduism and Buddhism, and found spirituality through yoga and meditation. Upon my return to the States, in December 2002, I moved to Los Angeles where I had a profound wake-up call and shift in consciousness.

In March of 2003, George W. Bush announced we were going to war with Iraq, and that is when this pathway towards peace began. My outrage catalyzed a movement into political art, transforming newspapers through collage into statements about the war. Once I realized that making political art was not the positive response I wanted to be sharing with my audience, I began making art for peace. I wanted to respond to the inundation of violence in the news, the excessive push for consumerism across billboards, and the general inundation of negativity in our daily lives by making something positive. I wanted to promote messages of self-empowerment, joy, love, and something uplifting in the hearts and minds of my audience.

For years I was in a constant creative exploration and pouring it out. I learned a lot about myself through making art and writing. I also realized that I loved to make art with others, and that even though the act of collaboration was extremely difficult for me, it was a powerful and insightful learning experience that I wanted to embrace. My passion for art and my curiosity around how people would work together in a creative space brought about an experience called Collaborate & Create. C&C happens as an independent activity or as part of a larger event, and people in it are invited to co-create using a variety of visual arts mediums on a multitude of canvases, including found objects. Countless Collaborate & Create experiences have happened since 2005, and they continue to uplift and inspire all who participate, including me.

NVP: Tell me about the Create Peace Project, your San Francisco-based nonprofit.

ROSS: Coming out of Los Angeles, I relocated back to San Francisco where I launched one of our current key projects, Banners for Peace. This was initially a personal arts initiative in which I was painting simple, uplifting messages on billboard-size canvases. I really wanted to see these Banners for Peace on billboards, and am holding that vision tight for the years ahead. I painted five of these larger works before this idea morphed from a personal undertaking into a community-building arts activity.

I developed the Banners for Peace project into a ten-week after-school program in which I work with groups of ten to twenty students to create a slogan, design the accompanying mural, and paint a large canvas together. Since 2006, my team and I have led more than thirty Banners for Peace workshops in Bay Area schools.

In 2007 I formed the Create Peace Project, an arts-for-peace education organization, as the container for Banners for Peace, Collaborate & Create, and the many other projects and ideas that were still being developed.

NVP: At NVP, we think that new forms of community building, especially through the arts, are vital for the future. It’s a cliché that “children are the future,” but does working with children *and* collective arts help you to believe this?

ROSS: I love making art. And as much as I enjoy personally creating art, I may just love seeing other people express themselves with art even more. Making art with people, and especially kids, is so amazingly inspiring and uplifting because of what you see when people drop in and begin to fully express themselves with their choices of color, form, and shape. It never ceases to amaze me what kids will come up with when given the freedom to express themselves and how willing they are to be experimental when making art. I love to watch how a child can come up with a whole story and new world in a simple drawing and just get lost in their art making.

Having led numerous workshops in many different school settings and with countless kids, I can recall a particular instance that was particularly inspiring. I was working at New Comer High School with a group of newly arrived Chinese students with very little English language skill. I had tremendous doubt that they would understand the project and be able to complete the task at hand. Little did I know that as soon as I brought out the canvas and paints, any language barrier was quickly and easily transcended. The students knew exactly what to do, and even with their remedial English skills, they easily created a slogan together, formulated a message and theme for their banner, and enthusiastically got to work. Throughout the ten weeks together, the students spoke mostly in Chinese to each other, and in the best English they could to me, but their ability to work together, paint, and share their artistic skills moved me to realize that even without a strong ability to converse, something beautiful can be created.

In other Banners for Peace workshops, I have seen how young people have a strong capacity to relinquish their need to be in control. On many occasions I have seen how the power of the group has allowed a number of students who demonstrate a louder, more confident voice to simply and easily calm into the decision-making process of a collaborative group. It’s wonderful to watch as a group of young people who work together for a few weeks will easily and effortlessly invite their friends or passersby to participate, as if to say, “we’re having so much fun, you must join us.”

In the past couple of school years, I have been focusing my energy on a project called The Peace Exchange. During The Peace Exchange, students are asked to create a work of art and share a message of peace on a 6 x 8 inch postcard. Every time I do this project with students, I feel a sense of joy and fulfillment like nothing else in my life. I love to watch young people express their ideas and thoughts on peace through art. When I do workshops with students in Uganda or India and they are asked to make art for the first time, you can see their eyes lighting up and their sense of excitement is palpable. I have seen countless kids who had never handled a crayon or colored marker before my arrival being filled with joy and happiness at the opportunity to get creative in my workshops. This is just a taste of why I love to make art with kids and the power I have experienced working with kids of all ages, in groups of all sizes, throughout the Bay Area, and around the world.

At New Village Press, we applaud projects like the Create Peace Project and their innovative methodologies. Ross, like many of our authors, exemplifies a peaceful, creative way forward.  If you or someone you know is interested in sharing world-changing methodologies through our blog, please contact us!

New Village sent out the following newsletter on November 4, and got so much response, we wanted to open up the subject for dialogue on our blog. Please feel free to share your opinions with us!

As you all know, something truly transformational is happening in cities across the country spurred by Occupy Wall Street. Oakland, our beloved hometown, is becoming an epicenter of this exciting new movement that is reclaiming our streets and cities and advancing ways to build a more equitable society. As a nonprofit organization dedicated to grassroots community building and participatory democracy, we celebrate this upwelling of civic engagement across the land. We embrace the questions the movement is asking and the challenges it is taking on. So we share with you a view of what is going on in our Oakland, knowing it is a vibrant part of the growing whole.

Occupy Oakland started on October 10, 2011 as protesters set up camp in Frank Ogawa Plaza, a park in front of Oakland’s City Hall. On October 25, a forced eviction of the campers occupying the plaza degenerated into a violent clash between protesters and police, which only fueled citizens’ will to reclaim public space for gathering and discussion. The encampment is now back, bigger than ever, and on Wednesday, November 2, Oakland was the theater of an historic general strike. This was the first general strike in the United States since 1946, which notably also happened in Oakland. New Village staff joined thousands of people joyfully occupying downtown for a day of celebrations and direct actions. Individuals, families, and community organizations congregated en masse to share their messages, ideas, and desires. From bandstand speeches and amphitheater general assemblies to interfaith meditations and Buddhist drummers, from anti-police brutality groups to food justice workshops, the typically quiet plaza burst with activities and resonated all day with music and chants. A multitude of people of all colors and ages marched in the late afternoon to the Port of Oakland, and successfully shut down the third busiest port in the United States.

“This is what democracy looks like,” said a banner rolled out at the Oakland port; Occupy Oakland is proof that real democracy needs practice and creative experimentation. Diversity is voiced and heard in all of its expressions. The “99%” does not speak in a singular voice. The past few days saw an outpouring of initiatives and events—mostly in the form of positive propositions and constructive protests. However, dissent has not been entirely non-violent, and anger broke bank windows Wednesday despite efforts of activists themselves to keep the peace. Rather than being a reason to disqualify the movement as a whole, we believe this diversity should be seen as the consequence of the open, leaderless nature of the protest.This movement is not perfect and does not have all the answers, because part of democracy is the process of looking for answers. Community organizations, faith groups, unions, artists, students, educators, and individual citizens are coming together to share their ideas and suggest solutions to the social and economic crises this country and the whole world are facing. A spirit of respect and mutual listening is prevailing. Hundreds of people of all ages and social origins come together four times a week after a day of work to discuss issues of common interest, signaling a new, exciting level of social participation. Our New Village staff meeting yesterday turned into a mini-assembly discussing Wednesday’s events and our feelings about them in further proof of this movement’s power to spark debates and stimulate critical thinking. The movement is teaching us ways we can work with our neighbors and fellow citizens to find local, sustainable, enlightened solutions to problems that previously seemed overwhelming.

Everyone contributes to what happens next. On Wednesday night a group of protesters occupied a vacant building that once hosted an organization providing services to homeless people (government cuts to funding for social services had forced the organization to shut down). Protesters declared that the occupied building would be returned to its previous function or turned into a public library and community center. The occupation lasted little more than an hour before police intervention. Yet this symbolic action points to one of the many possible futures of this protest: the reclaiming of our cities through the creation of community centers that can serve neighborhoods and provide a stable space for discussions and initiatives that benefit our communities. Last night, November 3, a five-hour open City Council meeting featured a lively forum for Oakland citizens and council members to discuss the future of the Occupy Oakland encampment. After listening to more than two-hundred protesters, sympathizers, and business owners presenting their views who generally urged the city to endorse the movement, the Council presented their own diverse views about large systemic issues as well as practical local considerations that included providing a dry safe place for the movement to continue its public discourse through the coming rainy season. What will happen in Oakland will depend on the deliberations of the general assembly as much as, if not more than, those of the city’s elected representatives.

We don’t all have to agree on everything this diverse movement expresses, and we invite all of you to listen to the questions being asked. As we continue an open discussion we will find answers that work for the greater good and will build a more just society for all. Please feel free to repost or forward this message to invite other members of your communities to join the discussion.

In peace and community,

New Village Press staff

On Saturday, October 8th, at 12 pm, Judith Tannenbaum, coauthor of By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives, will be facilitating a talk at San Francisco’s prestigious literary festival, Litquake. Published in 2010, By Heart is a two-person literary memoir narrating the encounter between Judith, a dedicated educator and writing instructor, and Spoon Jackson, a man who is serving a life sentence in prison. Judith and Spoon met in San Quentin when Spoon attended a poetry class taught by Judith and sponsored by the Arts-in-Corrections program. Spoon’s portions of By Heart give insight into prison life in a way that few books do, and eloquently illustrates the importance of creativity in human survival. Spoon describes finding poetry: “I had found my niche, my own humanity, through my journey, studies, and poetry.  I had uncovered inside myself a way of transforming my anger, sadness, pain, and unrealness into art by embracing the moment… I had humbly become a poet.”

According to the Sentencing Project, 458 out of 100,000 people in California are incarcerated (as of 2009).  In 2003, the funding for the Arts-in-Corrections program and for artists like Judith was cut even as “a pair of university studies found that participants in the AIC program had 75% fewer disciplinary actions and a 27% lower recidivism rate than the general prison population (William James Association).”  Currently, thousands of prisoners are participating in rolling hunger strikes across California to protest inhumane conditions in prisons and jails around the state. Judith and Spoon and other artists and writers creating in prison settings are participating in their own form of resistance: in a system that demands conformity, these men and women are voices in the silence, demanding to be heard.

Pick up a copy of By Heart and stop by on Saturday to learn more about the flaws of our corrections system and be inspired to make a difference.

The hard work that’s been put into the Acting Together project keeps bearing fruit. The second volume of the anthology, Acting Together, Vol. II: Building Just and Inclusive Communities, is currently with our team of graphic designers, and close to being an ink-and-paper book! In the meantime, author Cynthia Cohen has shared her transformative ideas about peacebuilding through the arts with KadmusArts: you can listen to a full podcast here.

This is just one example of the preparations underway for the big release of Acting Together II and the companion documentary film, Acting Together on the World Stage. The editors of the Acting Together anthology have been arranging multiple screenings and events. Check them out, if you can, and join our authors for an enlivening discussion!

- On October 21-23, Brandeis University (Waltham, MA) is hosting a Peacebuilding and the Arts Weekend Intensive, an opportunity for peacebuilders to discuss their work and exchange ideas. There is also going to be a screening of Acting Together on the World Stage at the nearby Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy. Check the program here!

 - On December 1-2, Dr. Salomón Lerner Febres, former president of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, will deliver a keynote address to Brandeis University’s Just Performance Conference. The event will assemble authors from Acting Together Volumes I & II to examine the question of how justice is enacted in the wake of violence. The event is free and open to the public, so anyone has the opportunity to attend. New Village director Lynne Elizabeth will participate, and the Press will have a book table there as well!

 - If you are on the West Coast, don’t worry, you’ll get a piece of the action, too! Dr. Lerner will be in the Bay Area as a guest of the University of San Francisco at the end of October/beginning of November (date TBD). Roberto Gutiérrez Varea, one of the anthology’s editors and organizer of this event, will join Dr. Lerner in a one-of-a-kind event, so stay tuned! We’ll post the exact dates as soon as possible.

At New Village Press we sometimes find ourselves inundated with amazing activities outside of the office. Yesterday marked the beginning of a whirlwind of conferences and events that New Village will be participating in and even co-hosting! These events provide wonderful opportunities to support and learn about exceptional people and positive movements that are taking place right now all over the world.  Many will feature some of our talented authors, including Sharon Danks (Asphalt to Ecosystems), William Reichard (American Tensions), Lily Yeh (Awakening Creativity), Arlene Goldbard (New Creative Community), and Linda Frye Burnham (Performing Communities).  Each of these events promises to provide inspiration, and hopefully we will see some of you there – there’s still just enough time to register!

Yesterday New Village director Lynne Elizabeth attended the resource fair portion of “Transforming Urban School Systems Through the Arts,” a two-day national forum hosted by Arts Education Partnership and coinciding with the National Arts in Education Week (September 11-17) in San Francisco.  She reports being truly inspired by Charles Chip McNeal, the director of education at the San Francisco Ballet, and by a performance by the UC Berkeley’s Young Musicians Program.

Of course we’re practically sleepless with excitement about Engaging Our Grounds, which starts tomorrow, Friday, September 16th! The 2011 International Green Schoolyard Conference runs until Sunday and is co-hosted by New Village.  We have been hard at work with Sharon Danks of Bay Tree Design and author of Asphalt to Ecosystems to make this an amazing experience: the conference will showcase how the green schoolyard movement is growing rapidly and flourishing around the world. Attendees will have the opportunity to visit local schools and hear from visionary leaders of the school ground movement from Europe, North America, and Japan who will share their experiences, case studies, and best practices.

The moment Engaging Our Grounds ends, Lynne will hop on a plane to Minneapolis-St. Paul for the Imagining America Conference.  In San Francisco yesterday we connected with local primary, secondary, and high school teachers, and in Minnesota New Village will have the opportunity to establish and reconnect with existing allies in higher education. Imagining America seeks “To realize the democratic, public and civic purposes of American higher education,” and many of our books strive to reorient education towards a more holistic, worldly outlook. Historically we’ve found Imagining America conferences to be exhilarating meetings of the minds – this year promises to be even more special as William Reichard, editor of American Tensions, will be presenting! And Linda Frye Burnham, editor of Performing Communities, will be honored for three decades of “democratic arts journalism.”

We will have a moment to catch our breath before Arlene Goldbard (New Creative Community) and Lily Yeh (Awakening Creativity) appear at Bioneers in Marin in October, but we’ve been working behind the scenes to make sure that those not attending the conference will have other opportunities to catch Lily Yeh on one of her rare extended stays in the United States.  Like Imagining America, Bioneers is a chance for thinkers, artists, and educators to come together and look forward with a “‘solve-the-whole-problem’ approach.” At New Village we feel honored to be part of the extended Bioneers family through Arlene Goldbard and Lily Yeh and can’t wait to attend the conference. Don’t forget, friends of NVP can use the above Bioneers link for a 20% discount!

There are a lot more fun things on the horizon, but right now our horizon is looking pretty packed with these events, and we’ll leave you with this. Hopefully we’ll see you at one or all of these events, and we look forward to hearing your feedback!

New Village Press is proud to be the distributor of William Cleveland’s newest book, Between Grace and Fear: The Role of the Arts in a Time of Change. William Cleveland, who co-authored Between Grace and Fear with Patricia Shifferd, previously published Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World’s Frontlines with New Village Press. In Art and Upheaval, Cleveland tells stories of artists all over the world, particularly in conflict zones, using art as a tool for individual, institutional, and community change. Primarily in his words, Cleveland visits six communities and details “human potential in the face of evil.”

The new book, which serves as a beautiful complement to the first, allows artists working with communities to speak in their own words, addressing the questions “How can the arts help build caring and capable communities?” and “If a major shift in worldview is taking place, what role might society’s arts and cultural resources (artists, arts institutions, and cultural creatives) play?” Artists like Lily Yeh (Awakening Creativity), Arlene Goldbard (New Creative Community), and Linda Burnham (Performing Communities) share their experiences and hopefully inspire “people concerned about the future to engage their creativity and to learn through grace.”

In a recent, three-part interview on Barry’s Blog, a blog for the arts provided by the Western States Arts Federation, Cleveland discusses his thoughts on the important role of the arts in a changing world: Read the rest of this entry »

Lily Yeh, author of Awakening Creativity, sent along the following letter of thanks from a teacher at Darien High School in Darien, Connecticut, whose students recently visited the Dandelion School in Beijing China, the centerpiece of Awakening Creativity, and were moved and inspired by their experience.

Dear Lily,

Our students returned to school last week after the cleanup from Hurricane Irene.  Although teachers and students lament the end of summer, I believe everyone is genuinely glad to be back in the business of learning.  Our students, who visited the Dandelion School last April, continue to be inspired by your work.  They are meeting this week to design a mural for their own school in honor of the work you do and the creativity you ignited in them.

We teachers are busy preparing for a 10-year anniversary celebration of Darien High School’s US-China Exchange.  The celebration will be held on the evening of September 30th in Darien, CT when a delegation of students and teachers from the Shanghai #3 Girls’ School and the the #58 Qingdao School will be visiting us for a few weeks.  . . .

Your work has deeply moved my students; they returned to school last week with an avid interest in your work and the work of Dr. Hong at the Dandelion School.  What so utterly impressed them was the fact that you engaged the entire school community in the creative process.  They understand the value of the process you used to create a transformation at the Dandelion School; they have such respect for the work you do; they talk about you as their hero.  I know that they would like to return to the Dandelion School and help in some way.  Having spent some time there, they feel a personal connection to so many of the students they met.  I don’t know what will be possible, but the students hope to explore a sustainable relation with the Dandelion School.

I hope this e-mail finds you well, Lily.  On a personal note, I want to tell you that I just finished watching the video on the memorial in Rwanda.  I loved watching the villagers work with you as they placed small pieces of tile side by side.  The memorial, with its bright colors, seemed eternal and reverent and hopeful.  I have learned in my own life that a return through the memory of our loved ones, can lead us to a world that offers us more light, more hope.

I wish you the strength to keep doing the wonderful projects you are doing around the world.  One of  the first things my students said when they returned from the Dandelion School was, “Lily Yeh knows how to inspire beauty that lasts…not just like a sunset that vanishes…there is something from the murals at the Dandelion School that still lives in us even though we have returned home to Darien.”

Warm regards,

Lynda

Darien High School

New Village Press published Acting Together as part of a wider project that started in 2005, when a prestigious academic institution, Brandeis University, and the most prominent international organization of theatre artists, Theatre Without Borders, established a partnership that brought the Acting Together Project to life. The first volume of the two-book set focuses on the role theatre and ritual play in both the midst of and in the aftermath of violence. It highlights the stories of courageous artists and community leaders who create works of great power and beauty while telling truth to power and rebuilding severed relationships. Since theatre and ritual are very visual, the editors and folks felt a visual component was crucial to disseminating this important work, and last month the DVD Documentary and Toolkit, Acting Together on the World Stage debuted. This week, New Village Press sent off production copies of the second volume Acting Together: Building Just and Inclusive Communities, to our team of graphic designers. This means that Acting Together II is one step closer to fruition, and Acting Together one step closer to a complete set.

There’s a lot more going on here than “just” product development and production. Lorenzo Estébanez, the new Marketing and Publicity Apprentice at New Village Press, has been coordinating with Betsy Plumb at the Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts at Brandeis for the official launch of the DVD this fall. Thanks to the dedication of this cross-country team, there will be screenings and lectures worldwide where viewers will be able to come together to appreciate the work that has been done in conflict resolution and strategize about more peacebuilding opportunities.  Please stay tuned to our events page, as we update as soon as each screening becomes settled.  If facebook is more your thing, you can also “like” the book on facebook and get updates from there.

There has been a lot happening lately under the banner of “green.” At New Village we agree green is extremely important. We seek out projects, however, that go a few steps further than simple green to encompass whole-systems thinking and integrated ecological change. In this vein, last fall New Village published Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation by Sharon Danks, a design guidebook that addresses the holistic realm of outdoor teaching and play environments. The book has also been called a “call-to-action” which is the kind thing inspired ecological thinking leads to.

If you attended school or have a child in school, you’re probably familiar with the picture on the left: a bleak plot of asphalt, intended as a playground for children. Danks has other ideas, and Asphalt to Ecosystems is a guidebook to converting barren wastelands into dynamic living ecosystems. As Danks writes, schools and playgrounds are an ideal place for students to learn about environmental renewal: “they are responsible for educating our society’s future leaders… students learn that they have an impact on their environment and have opportunities to heal it.” Beyond teaching children about the environment, green playgrounds also re-invigorate the idea of play. The opportunities for play and growth on that hard tarmac are limited to linear, often competitive games; on a green schoolyard, children have multi-surfaced, diverse areas for open-ended, cooperative play.  Teachers have many more resources for teaching right in their own (school)yard, and who wouldn’t want a garden as a break room?

Further, schoolyards effect more than students and teachers: everyone lives near a school. Which school would you rather live near—the one with the yard in the picture on the left or the one on the right? Incredibly, both photos were taken at Commodore Sloat School in San Francisco: the green picture was taken only a year and a half after the transformation to a green schoolyard began. Choosing the green path involves embracing community stewardship as a neighborhood value. Danks explains that the traditional blacktop models rely on a few maintenance workers to trim and fertilize patches of grass and bushes, and to sweep the paved surfaces. The newer paradigm requires sharing responsibility among a network of people: “empower[ing] children, teachers, and families to take on a portion of the increased work load.” Again, in this example, green takes on a much larger and more important meaning as the school grows to encompass larger swathes of the community.

We’re so happy to be co-hosting the upcoming Engaging Our Grounds International Green Schoolyard Conference. The conference, September 16th to 18th, will fill in all the blanks that you need to get the green schoolyards movement going in your community. There is still time and space to register, and it’s really not to be missed. The conference includes presentations from the foremost international green schoolyard designers and researchers and tours of exemplary schoolyards in the Bay Area. So, register for the conference, buy the book, and collect your bonus freebies: check out Asphalt to Ecosystems on Facebook and New Village Press on Twitter!