The Millennial Who Uses Comedy to Help Veterans Heal

"Songs in the Key of Free" is a program in a Pennsylvania prison brings together inmates to play music and write songs that they perform inside, while professional musicians also play the songs in venues outside prison. The program is just a year old and is based on a successful theater program in California that cut recidivism rates and helped decrease prison infractions. The founders of "Songs in the Key of Free" are creating an album of the work, but after that, future funding is unclear.

Vania Masías abandoned her prolific career as a professional ballerina to teach impoverished youth in Peru hip hop. “More than 100,000 children have passed through the programme over the years.”

Dario Calmese’s Black Art Yearbook captures candid portraits of curators, collectors, dealers and other people who support the creation of black art. In this way, Calmese is making a historical record of an exciting moment as well as commemorating people that are often marginalized or erased by the creation of ‘official’ art history.

Founded in the Bronx in 2000, the Ghetto Film School’s mission is to train a diverse student body in the skills of making narrative film. Eighteen years later, the school teaches classes in New York, Los Angeles, and London, and has become a pipeline for graduates to find work not only as directors or writers but also in film crews and production companies.

LGBT adolescents are invited to come to the PRISM Art Education classes put on by an Athens, Ohio arts organization. Through these classes, the youth learn skills, but more importantly get to know peers and build a supportive community.

An initiative in House schools that gives students access to the arts in the classroom has positively affected students' ability to concentrate, write, and even show compassion to one another. The initiative, known as the Houston Arts Access Initiative, encourages schools to provide exposure to dance, music, and visual arts to encourage creative and kind interaction.

Layette is replatforming itself to embrace local culture over a dangerous oil dependency. CREATE, a voter-approved initiative in the city, funds cultural events and festivals to create new economic drivers and to promote the cultural legacy of the region. The fund draws upon money designated from a larger pool of surplus property tax revenue, as well as from philanthropic donations.

Contextualizing artistic representations creates more complex narratives and offers an opportunity to educate about historical memory. The Atlanta History Center has opened an exhibition that illuminates the absence of people of color in the “Battle of Atlanta” Cyclorama, an artwork that celebrates the 1864 Union victory. The museum presents the work alongside interactive guides and films that explain the erasure of African Americans from the memory of the scene.

Virtual classes have become an unexpected advantage for children with autism and other sensory processing disorders. In-person acting classes can make some children with these disabilities uncomfortable and unable to reap the full benefits but students of virtual acting classes have been willing and able to take on new experiences in the comfort of their homes, allowing them to flourish in a way that is new to them and their families. Additionally, students with physical disabilities are also able to take part without the extra hurdles of transportation.

Building community around storytelling preserves cultural heritage. Across Lebanon, individuals and institutions like the Lebanese Ministry of Culture and the Theatre Monnot in Beirut are working to preserve oral culture as a medium for storytelling. Initiatives, including the long-running International Storytelling Festival and Beirut’s Hakaya, bring together storytellers, known as hakawati and hakawatiye.