Creative Activism

Photo www.nnekaworld.com
By Lauren Seibert, ACT:S Advocacy & Campaigns Fellow

In the car the other day, I was casually listening to a friend’s mixed CD—a fairly predictable blend of top chart hits from Usher, Drake, Lil Wayne, etc.—when an unexpected beat suddenly jolted through the speakers. It had been a Drake song, but what…?

I whipped my head around to look at my friend, confused. “Play that again!” I commanded. “Was that Nneka? No way. On one of Drake’s tracks?”

Can you be in Orlando on September 17th? World Vision ACT:S is partnering with RELEVANT Magazine to launch our newest creative activism – ACT:S TO END MALARIA.

This special activism event will feature a performance by our friend Josh Garrels, an experiential art show, and the premier of our new video by RELEVANT.

We’ll also be launching the ACT:S TO END MALARIA website – but you can check out a preview now to learn more about the plan to end malaria deaths by 2015 and get started by ordering a FREE creative activism box (NOTE: these are still being built… but sign up now and you’ll be first in line).

Here's a teaser for the new video premiering on September 17 in Orlando:

We are partnering with RELEVANT Magazine and Integrity Live for a FREE concert with John Mark McMillan on Friday, August 27, with special guests Bellarive.

We are partnering with RELEVANT Magazine and Integrity Live for a FREE concert with John Mark McMillan on Friday, August 27, with special guests Bellarive.

By Michael Arunga, World Vision Emergency Communicator

Heavy rains are mercilessly pounding Niger. They have swept some villages clean, taking away all possessions that include the little relief food that had been distributed to an already food and nutrition famished country.

Bowls contributed by the Art Creation Foundation For Children

By Lauren Seibert, ACT:S Advocacy & Campaigns Fellow

Cradling a little paper maché bowl hand-painted by a Haitian child, I felt the immediacy of the situation in Haiti sink home in a new way. Holding something that their own hands shaped—the same hands that probably helped rig up tents to live in after the earthquake—suddenly woke me up more than any news updates ever had. That’s one of the things art does best: it wakes you up, shakes you up, makes you rethink what you know.

Art can do what so many other forms of advocacy can’t: it can morph and evolve into a personal thing, something that we can associate with our own experiences. It tugs on our emotions. It fills our brains with tangible sensations—color, texture, sound. Want to make an issue come alive for your audience? Art can do that, and people will remember it long after they forget about the pamphlet on Haiti relief tucked in their pocket.

This time, a display of paper maché bowls painted with stars and watermelons made me think of my own childhood, and then those kids in Haiti suddenly became real. Those bowls, along with photographs taken in Haiti by National Geographic photojournalist Maggie Steber, hand-sequined flags by Haitian artists, and photos taken by Haitian children themselves formed the exhibit “Through Their Eyes: Haitian Artists’ Visions of Home” at the Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery in D.C. during the past month.

By Lauren Seibert, ACT:S Advocacy & Campaigns Fellow

The cloudy pain of mind and body consumed by malaria, the constant burning of an empty stomach, the humiliation of owning nothing, not even your body—these are not things the typical American college student has experienced.

But for those of us who get it, who understand the urgent need to take action to fight issues like child slavery, malaria, and poverty, how can we inject that bone-deep empathy into everyone else?

For most American students, their worlds run on entirely different tracks than those of children around the world struggling to survive. To get their attention, to get them to act, we have to stand out from all the other causes and campus groups competing for their time. We can’t just dangle an issue in front of them and expect them to snap it up. We have to surprise them, make them curious, drop them into an unexpected experience.

Here are 7 strategies for making that happen:

By Jonathan Lo, ACT:S Faith and Justice Fellow

Here are a couple things we know about the first week of school:

1. Campuses spend good money ensuring their grass is green and healthy for all the students.

2. There is a buzz at school as students return to their respective campuses.

3. Students hang out a lot on the grass from #1.

Remember when you first took a step on campus?

After you moved all your big boxes into your little dorm room, did you sit there waiting and hoping that your new roommate will be fairly organized, respectful and hygienic? After the school-organized parties that you went to with the guys or girls on your floor, did you still return to your room feeling lost and overwhelmed?

By Lauren Seibert, ACT:S Advocacy & Campaigns Fellow

The truth is, writers want their readers to become temporarily OCD. We want them to follow an inescapable compulsion to finish the article. We want them snared to the very end. And then we want them to respond.

When writing about issues like human trafficking or malaria, which are ruining millions of kids’ lives as we speak, of course we want to glue readers to our words with the same level of interest that gets “Charlie bit my finger” 200 million views on YouTube—a number that multiplied fast as people told their friends about it. But that doesn’t always happen. Why not?

There’s a big difference between writing informatively about an issue and creating a piece that becomes a catalyst in itself, reacting with readers on a level that sparks them into action.