A People's WPA is a storytelling project with the goal of convincing policymakers to invest in arts, culture, and newly imagined sectors of labor critical to our healing and survival. Our newest publication features conversations with artists, writers, and policy makers into a policy toolkit that outlines how to create an artist jobs program at the local, state, and federal level.

We the people have the power to enshrine the #RightToBelong as public and private policy. A policy is a kind of pledge to guide future action. When an agency or institution adopts a policy, they are saying, “Hold us accountable to this.”  
 

To address our challenges, we need to engage new experiences, behaviors, and understandings—to change culture to change the world. We need creativity and freedom. The USDAC Policy Prototypes are pilot experiments that show how the Platform can be put into action. 

An Act of Collective Imagination: The USDAC’s First Two Years of Action Research is the first publication to summarize the USDAC’s work to date, along with the lessons we’ve learned about translating community members’ visions into powerful ideas and action. 

A People's WPA is a storytelling project with the goal of convincing policymakers to invest in arts, culture, and newly imagined sectors of labor critical to our healing and survival. Our newest publication features conversations with artists, writers, and policy makers into a policy toolkit that outlines how to create an artist jobs program at the local, state, and federal level.

What is the Green New Deal? How will it address the climate crisis? What are creative ways to get involved? As artists, educators, cultural workers, and community leaders, it’s our job to envision the more just world we know is possible—and to invite others to help bring it into being. Use these resources from the USDAC to get started!

Check out our newest guide: Imaginings: A DIY Guide to Arts-Based Community Dialogue, everything you need to know to host a vibrant, creative, equitable, and powerful community dialogue.

A call for artists, creative organizers, concerned citizens, and all community members to draw inspiration from and breathe new life into the prophetic words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., strengthening our commitment to speak truth to power and sparking creative action in the year ahead.

Disrupt narratives of hate. Model participatory democracy. Here are nine creative ways to step up with a Super Public Act of Compassion or Participatory Act of Culture!

We the people have the power to enshrine the #RightToBelong as public and private policy. A policy is a kind of pledge to guide future action. When an agency or institution adopts a policy, they are saying, “Hold us accountable to this.”  
 

Help spark a movement to acknowledge original Native inhabitants at the opening of all public events. 

How can we respond creatively and ethically to social and environmental crises?

"HI-LI" stands for High-Impact Low-Infrastructure.  Explore our catalogue of HI-LI models for building creative community. Every project listed is participatory, replicable, and volunteer-friendly.

This July 2016 petition delivered to members of the Democratic Platform Committee in advance of the Convention in Philadelphia, calls on elected officials and policy-makers to invest in artists and community development.  A healthy democracy embraces the right to culture, engaging us as whole people, not just workers or consumers, but as creators and communicators. This platform shared with the DNC demands equitable investment in cultural infrastructure and in artists who put their gifts at the service of community.

On 27 January 2017, a presidential executive order was issued blocking refugees and restricting immigration from Muslim countries. Protest has been immediate and massive.

History teaches us that authoritarian regimes start their mission of domination with the right to culture: limiting cultural communities’ freedom of movement and practice; condemning or restricting press freedom; condemning or restricting artistic expression; and denying the fullness of belonging to all but a privileged few. Artists and creative activists have key roles to play.

Join over 1,000 artists and allies who have already signed the pledge.

Following a 6-month training program, volunteer Cultural Agents hosted Imaginings—large-scale arts-infused civic dialogues in which a community envisions an ideal future and identifies creative tactics to get there.

In the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, in August, 2014, the USDAC called on all artists and creative activists to join in the movement to demilitarize the police and bring justice to victims of publicly funded racism. Find links and resources to other post-Ferguson activist projects here too.

This call was issued in advance of the People's Climate March in September, 2014, and featured numerous ways that Citizen Artists in NYC and beyond could get involved and make their voices heard.

This February 2015 statement called on artists, cultural organizers, elected officials and policy-makers, on all people of goodwill to stand in support of the movement to preserve sacred Apache lands, in the name of the first principle of cultural values establishing the USDAC: that culture is a human right. 

In November, 2015, the USDAC called on all artists and creative activists to use our gifts for compassion and justice, sharing images, performances, experiences, writings, and other works of art that raise awareness, build connection, cultivate empathy, and inspire us to welcome those who are forced from homes that are no longer safe.
The statement was adopted at a time that more than four million Syrians have been driven from their homes, becoming refugees, while many U.S. governors issued statements rejecting Syrian refugees within their borders and polls showed that many Americans opposed accepting them.