Broadway Advocacy Coalition Opens Applications for its Flagship Programs

The Broadway Advocacy Coalition has teamed up with New York City based advocacy organizations to ground and expand their upcoming BAC Artivism Fellowship and Theater of Change course at Columbia Law School. Applications for both programs are now open.

In its fifth year, the Theater of Change is Broadway Advocacy Coalition's cornerstone program. Created in partnership with the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School, the course blends artistry, law, policy, and community engagement to produce powerful artistic projects with the potential to dismantle the current criminal justice system and imagine new ways forward. In social change work, the arts provide a critical space to imagine alternatives and promote those envisionings as achievable realities.

Artists will join forces with law students and directly impacted community leaders to create performance pieces that further the advocacy efforts of the three partner organizations and strategize how and where these performances can occur to achieve sustainable impact. The course will also build artistic capacity to merge high quality, high impact, rigorous artistry with community narratives, policy analysis and effective policy advocacy. The goals of this 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.

"This year, BAC is thrilled to deepen our criminal Justice advocacy work through the guidance of organizations who are already shifting the landscape of the criminal justice system," said Co-Director of Programming Leia Squillace. "These organizations have been central to furthering pieces of legislation that will reduce the prison population and the use of punitive tactics in New York State. We're honored to support their efforts with strategic artistry through partnership on our Theater of Change course."

This year's advocacy organizations - including the Alliance for Quality Education and the Survivors Justice Project - will work alongside a team of artists to build arts advocacy projects to support their current campaigns and efforts.

"The Survivors Justice Project is thrilled to continue to work with Theater of Change," said Kate Mogulescu, the Director of the Survivors Justice Project, who participated in Theater of Change last year. "The issues we confront transcend systems or disciplines. Artivism is necessary to bring our work to a broader community. It also gifts us with the opportunity to challenge the harms inherent in our criminal legal system in new ways."

The Theatre of Change course, which will run from January 9 - 13, 2023, and will provide a foundation for this year's Artivism Fellowship.

To learn more and apply, please visit https://www.bwayadvocacycoalition.org/theaterofchange

The Artivism Fellowship is one of Broadway Advocacy Coalition's other flagship programs. Started in 2020, the program supports a group of artists activists in developing their own artivism pieces over the course of a several month long residency with the organization.

This year's fellowship will be an evolution of the past two years, providing even deeper support and more focused mentorship for a smaller pool of fellows. The fellowship will enable participants to blend artistry, law, policy, and community engagement, and produce narrative-based pieces with powerful impact in the policy spaces where change can happen. Artivism - art that attempts to sway policy and culture to create a more just and equitable society - is a core part of BAC's work.

This year BAC will support two narrative based creatives - writers, poets, playwrights, composers - in advancing social change in NYC through a partnership model alongside Alliance for Quality of Education and Jazly Liriano as the Fellowship's Policy and Research Advisor.

"We are so excited to be partnering again with Broadway Advocacy Coalition (BAC) for their 2023 Artivism Fellowship," said Zakiyah Ansari of AQE. "In 2018, BAC introduced the Alliance for Quality Education's (AQE) parent and community leaders to the power of infusing "Artivism" into our advocacy. We performed together before State Legislators in Albany, telling stories of school funding inequities through the monologues and performances created by Broadway and Off-broadway actors. It was an experience that our parents still talk about today. The next phase of AQE's partnership with BAC will allow us to be even more creative and impactful. We know the struggle for educational justice is a marathon, not a sprint, and we are eager to be running the next leg with BAC."

Through the fellowship process all the participants will work with community members to amplify the power of their stories informed by legal and policy research culminating in a 30 min workshop presentation to advance Alliance for Quality Educations campaign: Solutions not Suspensions.

The fellowship, which will begin in January 2023 and run through September 2023 Applications are due by November 25, 2022 at 11:59PM ET. Each participant will be compensated $14,000 as a fellow stipend and $4,500 in production support.

Applications are now open for both programs.

To learn more about the Artivism Fellowship and apply, please visit https://www.bwayadvocacycoalition.org/artivismfellowship

ABOUT THE ORGANIZATIONAL PARTNERS

Alliance for Quality Education

The Alliance for Quality Education is a coalition mobilizing communities across the state to keep New York true to its promise of ensuring a high quality public education to all students regardless of zip code. AQE is working to end the systemic racism and economic oppression in New York's public schools that continues to shortchange generations of Black, Brown, low-income and immigrant students. Combining its legislative and policy expertise with grassroots organizing, AQE advances proven-to-work strategies that lead to student success and ultimately create a powerful public demand for a high quality education.

Survivors Justice Project

The Survivors Justice Project fights for decarceration through the New York Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act (DVSJA). After the DVSJA was passed, it was clear that a vast network of lawyers, advocates, social workers, researchers, and organizers would need to mobilize to assure that the survivors most in need would be able to access the law's relief. A great, progressive law means nothing without organizing, documentation, public education and social movements. SJP is COLLECTIVE of advocates, lawyers, social workers, activists, researchers, and teachers. Most of us have been incarcerated, many of us have experienced domestic violence, and all of us are committed to deeply participatory work by and with impacted women. Our shared commitments include a deep LOVE and appreciation for the gifts that each of us brings. We ground our work -- legal, research, resource building, organizing, advocacy -- in the knowledge held by the women most impacted by domestic violence and the carceral state, and we bring a strong INTERSECTIONAL lens attentive to how racism, classism, and sexism intersect in the criminal legal system.

ABOUT THE BROADWAY ADVOCACY COALITION

Founded in 2016 by members of the Broadway community as a direct response to the nation's pandemic of racism and police brutality, the Broadway Advocacy Coalition is a multidisciplinary organization which unites artists, legal experts and community leaders to create lasting impact on policy issues from criminal justice reform to education equity to immigration. In 2021, BAC received a Special Tony Award for providing an unparalleled platform for marginalized members of the theatre community and tools to help the theatre industry move toward a more equitable future. Via its partnership with the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School, BAC has collaborated with institutions across New York City, including the New York City Council, Bronx Defenders, and the Brooklyn District Attorney's office. To learn more about their work, and to get involved, visit their website at https://www.bwayadvocacycoalition.org/ or follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

To post a comment, you must register and login.