Broadway Advocacy Coalition Teams Up With Columbia Law School For Groundbreaking Course

Broadway Advocacy Coalition and Columbia Law School continue their multi-year partnership with an upcoming January workshop entitled The Theater of Change: Building the Capacity for Impact through Artistry, Law, and Activism.

Applications are open to Broadway artists and other members of the New York Theater community interested in learning how to use their artistry for social change. The course is open to theater artists of all disciplines, including performing, writing, directing, and design. The course will run from January 14th to January 19th, 2019. The course is created by Britton Smith (Be More Chill, Shuffle Along), Ben Wexler (2018 Jonathan Larson Grant finalist), Zhailon Levingston and Columbia Law School professor and Director of the Center for Institutional and Social Change Susan Sturm, with a guest lecture by Tony-Winner Jeanine Tesori.

An informational session and initial training day will be held on Monday, November 19th from 5pm to 7pm. Participation is encouraged but not required for artists interested in the January course. To RSVP for the informational session and training day, please email Robb@bwayadvocacycoalition.org.

Applications are due on on December 1st and can be found online at

www.BwayAdvocacyCoalition.org/application

Building on our two years of work with artists from Brian Stokes Mitchell to India.Arie, with organizations from New York City Council to The Alliance for Quality Education, Broadway Advocacy Coalition is excited to announce a groundbreaking week-long course at Columbia Law School. We are living in a sociopolitical moment where so many of us are activated to push for justice, but are too often speaking to our own, separated by our professions, our social circles, and our degrees of privilege. This course is offered to an equal representation of artists, Columbia Law students, and community changemakers - some formerly incarcerated leaders, some parent organizers.

The course will be focused on how these three disciplines (arts, policy, and the voices of directly affected individuals) can m eld to create work that changes hearts and minds, then follows through with embedded policy goals. The week will focus on issues of educational and criminal justice, and the community leaders present all have extensive experience both fighting and feeling the effects of these systems. Artists will work alongside community members to create work (music, playwriting, spoken word, dance, or a hybrid) that responds to these experiences, and will join forces with law students to strategize as to how and where these performances can happen to achieve sustainable impact. The goals of this week-long course are not only to facilitate an exchange of ideas across disciplines, but to form lasting partnerships that can continue to generate game-changing work into the future.

The Broadway Advocacy Coalition is a group of Broadway artists committed to building the capacity of advocates, students, artists, organizations and communities to use the arts as an integral part of their social change work. Past projects have included collaborations with the Alliance for Quality Education, New York City Council, the Center for Popular Democracy and artists like India Arie, Audra McDonald, Brandon Victor Dixon and more.

Founded in 2007, the Center for Institutional and Social Change (the "Center") has become a facilitator of innovation and collaboration for scholars, practitioners, and students striving to address structural inequality through institutional transformation. Housed at Columbia Law School and begun as a pilot collaboration with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), the overarching goal of the Center is to develop new frameworks, strategies, roles, and institutions for effective institutional and social change directed at addressing structural inequality and achieving inclusive institutions. The Center grew out of a shared recognition that the existing frameworks and strategies for advancing equality need to be rethought, and that institutional change should be a central focus of that rethinking project. Its work is designed to build this capacity to address structural inequality through strategic analysis, empirical and field research, and brainstorming by researchers, students, and innovative practitioners. Its work proceeds primarily through collaborative projects focused on addressing structural inequality in different institutional settings.

More information can be found on the Broadway Advocacy Coalition website: bwayadvocacycoalition.org