How do artists help communities survive violence, heal trauma, and imagine a future beyond conflict?

In this episode of Art Is Change, Bill Cleveland speaks with activist, educator, filmmaker, writer, and peacebuilding scholar Cynthia Cohen about a lifetime spent exploring the relationship between creativity, storytelling, conflict, and democratic life.

Drawing on experiences ranging from Jewish-Palestinian dialogue projects in Boston to peacebuilding initiatives in Peru, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Northern Ireland, and beyond, Cynthia reflects on the role artists play in helping communities navigate violence, hold competing truths, and create the conditions for healing and transformation.

In this episode you’ll discover:

• Why listening may be the most important creative and civic skill of all — and how deep listening can help people move beyond fear, polarization, and inherited narratives.

• How artists and cultural workers contribute to peacebuilding — by creating spaces where difficult stories can be shared, contradictions can be held, and communities can imagine alternatives to violence.

• Why arts and culture matter in the struggle against authoritarianism — and how creativity, empathy, and conflict transformation can strengthen democratic life during times of upheaval.

PEOPLE

How do artists help communities survive violence, heal trauma, and imagine a future beyond conflict?

In this episode of Art Is Change, Bill Cleveland speaks with activist, educator, filmmaker, writer, and peacebuilding scholar Cynthia Cohen about a lifetime spent exploring the relationship between creativity, storytelling, conflict, and democratic life.

Drawing on experiences ranging from Jewish-Palestinian dialogue projects in Boston to peacebuilding initiatives in Peru, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Northern Ireland, and beyond, Cynthia reflects on the role artists play in helping communities navigate violence, hold competing truths, and create the conditions for healing and transformation.

In this episode you’ll discover:

• Why listening may be the most important creative and civic skill of all — and how deep listening can help people move beyond fear, polarization, and inherited narratives.
• How artists and cultural workers contribute to peacebuilding — by creating spaces where difficult stories can be shared, contradictions can be held, and communities can imagine alternatives to violence.
• Why arts and culture matter in the struggle against authoritarianism — and how creativity, empathy, and conflict transformation can strengthen democratic life during times of upheaval.

PEOPLE

Cynthia Cohen — Peacebuilding scholar, educator, writer, and cultural worker whose research and field-building efforts have helped establish the international field of arts, culture, and conflict transformation.

John O’Neal — Civil rights organizer, theater artist, and co-founder of the Free Southern Theater. O’Neal championed the role of arts and storytelling in advancing freedom, civic participation, and social justice.

Dijana Milošević — Serbian theater director, peacebuilder, and founder of DAH Theatre, internationally recognized for using performance to confront war, nationalism, and social division.

Roberta Levitow — Co-founder of Theatre Without Borders and a leading advocate for international theater collaboration, peacebuilding, and cultural exchange.

John Paul Lederach — Influential peacebuilding theorist whose concepts of conflict transformation and “elicitive” practice have shaped reconciliation work worldwide.

Jane Sapp — Musician, educator, and cultural worker whose community-based arts practice connects storytelling, history, civic engagement, and cultural memory.

Ana Correa — Actor, activist, and longtime member of Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani whose work has focused on memory, human rights, and community healing in Peru.

Ocean Vuong — Acclaimed poet and novelist whose work explores language, migration, identity, memory, and the dignity of lived experience.

ORGANIZATIONS

The Charles F. Kettering Foundation — The Charles F. Kettering Foundation, headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, operating foundation with a mission to advance inclusive democracies worldwide by fostering citizen engagement, promoting government accountability, and countering authoritarianism.

Democracy and the Arts — The Kettering Foundation’s focus area for integrating the power of the arts into democratic life locally, nationally, and globally.

Theatre Without Borders — International network of theater artists and cultural workers committed to global collaboration, peacebuilding, and social change through performance.

Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani — Peru’s renowned theater collective whose work combines indigenous traditions, political theater, ritual practice, and human rights advocacy.

DAH Theatre — Belgrade-based theater company using artistic practice to confront violence, build dialogue, and foster civic engagement.

Palestinian House of Friendship — Community-based organization in Nablus supporting young people through arts, education, cultural programs, recreation, and civic engagement.

Free Southern Theater — Groundbreaking Civil Rights-era theater organization dedicated to bringing performance and cultural expression to underserved Black communities throughout the American South.

ACTIVITIES & EVENTS

Acting Together on the World Stage — International research, documentation, and convening project exploring how artists and cultural workers contribute to peacebuilding, reconciliation, and conflict transformation.

A Passion for Life: Palestinian and Jewish Women in Boston — Cynthia Cohen’s oral history and cultural exchange project bringing Palestinian and Jewish women together through storytelling, folk traditions, family histories, and artistic practice.

Peru Truth and Reconciliation Commission — National truth commission established after Peru’s internal conflict. Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani collaborated alongside communities affected by violence and displacement.

PUBLICATIONS & MEDIA

Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict (Volume 1) — Landmark collection documenting artists, cultural workers, and peacebuilders using performance to address conflict and social division around the world.

Acting Together on the World Stage (Film) — Documentary film featuring artists working in regions affected by violence, oppression, and conflict, highlighting the role of performance in healing and transformation.

Someone Sang for Me — Documentary by filmmaker Julie Akeret chronicling Jane Sapp’s community-based cultural work and its impact on education, civic life, and social change.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous — Ocean Vuong’s celebrated novel exploring migration, family, memory, identity, and the transformative power of language.

*******

Art Is CHANGE is a podcast that chronicles the power of art and community transformation, providing a platform for activist artists to share their experiences and gain the skills and strategies they need to thrive as agents of social change.

Through compelling conversations with artist activists, artivists, and cultural organizers, the podcast explores how art and activism intersect to fuel cultural transformation and drive meaningful change. Guests discuss the challenges and triumphs of community arts, socially engaged art, and creative placemaking, offering insights into artist mentorship, building credibility, and communicating impact.

Episodes delve into the realities of artist isolation, burnout, and funding for artists, while celebrating the role of artists in residence and creative leadership in shaping a more just and inclusive world. Whether you’re an emerging or established artist for social justice, this podcast offers inspiration, practical advice, and a sense of solidarity in the journey toward art and social change.

AIC 181 AIA 5 Cindy Cohen Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

My name is Bill Cleveland. In this episode, our exploration of that provocative opening question is part of a special Art in Action series produced in partnership with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation’s Art and Democracy program. In these episodes, we’ll be speaking with artists, cultural organizers, and arts leaders who are navigating and challenging current efforts to limit free creative expression and free speech.

Together, we’ll explore what freedom of expression means in practice, not as an abstract right, but as a lived responsibility at the heart of democratic life.

Now, before we get into our conversation with activist, writer, educator, filmmaker Cynthia Cohen, let’s listen to a few of the creative peace builders Cynthia has worked with and supported over these many years.

[00:01:56] Mary Ann Hunter: In Australia, it was official government policy to remove Aboriginal children from their parents.

[00:02:07] Bill Cleveland: That was Ugandan director Charles Mulekwa, theater artist Maryanne Hunter from Australia, and Argentinian director Roberto Gutierrez Area reflecting on the events that made it impossible for them to avoid making theater to survive in and make sense of a world gone mad.

Here are theater directors John O’Neal and Diana Milosevic describing how their work in Mississippi and Belgrade respectively insinuated new and disruptive voices into the stifling quicksand of tyranny

What we can do as artists? We can let our imagination soar and say, “I can envision the time when we will be able to plant the rice and eat it too.” You know, I can see that.

[00:03:27] Roberta Levitow: Theater requires engagement with the fundamental questions of our lives. These questions are crucial, essential. We’re endangered by not answering them. All of these theater artists refuse to be in denial.

Now, this multi-year initiative explored creative peace-building stories like the ones we just heard, excerpted from the film Acting Together on the World Stage, and the extraordinary two-volume book of the same name on which it is based. As is often the case with our guests, these projects are just the tip of the iceberg that constitutes Cynthia’s powerful and far-reaching network of colleagues and her body of work.

We begin by exploring how she defines that work.

Act One: A Passion for Life

So Cindy, when people ask you what you’re up to, how do you describe your work? Or even better, is there a metaphor or even a street name that you think paints a picture for curious others, particularly those who have no idea what you’ve been doing?

Lately, I’m really focused on strengthening the contributions of arts and culture to opposing authoritarianism because authoritarianism is rising all over the world, and democracies, as flawed as they have been and as much work as they need, you know, we’re going to be set back so far if we have authoritarian leaders that seem to be coming into power. So I thought, well, maybe my handle would be The Listener.

[00:06:20] Cynthia Cohen: Or maybe the street name would be The Ear.

[00:06:24] Cynthia Cohen: I will say that I aspire to embodying what I take to be the spirit of Kuan Yin. You know, the best bodhisattva of compassion? The one who listens. I find that image inspiring and humbling.

And the other thing is the context of what I would describe as your service mission is the fact that you know deep in your heart that you’re in service to something that’s powerful and makes a difference in the world. That you have seen that over and over again and have provided one of the richest compendiums of the evidence of that. Just all these amazing stories told to you by the people who have had the lived experience of making a difference using the creative process.

So the second question, and you can, you can translate this in whatever way you want, is how did you get this way?

So my home was always filled with these just gorgeous, beautiful flower arrangements of a certain aesthetic. That is really a deep part of me, I think. So that’s one way. And coming of age during the anti-war movement and the women’s movement. Of being around people, my peers, who said, “Of course we’re going to be engaged in these big questions of the day.”

Of course we’re going to try to lower the voting age. Of course we’re going to oppose the war.” That was really important to me. We were blocking the shipping and receiving gate of a factory that made fuses that were used in anti-personnel bombs and going through a trial together, and falling in love, and coming out, and all, yeah, all these things.

And that was all part of the work for social justice, and it was the best, you know. Having all that energy and a long time horizon, and then realizing through some painful experiences that my path wasn’t to be an activist in the women’s movement, but to be kind of an educator and a cultural worker, and finding my way through work with the Cambridge Arts Council to developing the Oral History Center. And that experience of a decade of listening to a lot of stories and teaching people to listen, and of working with artists to represent community stories to their own communities and to each other’s communities, that was really formative for me. And that culminated in the project of A Passion for Life.

[00:09:54] Cynthia Cohen: A Passion for Life was an attempt to take the philosophical basis of the Oral History Center, which was everyone has a story to tell (and it’s through our listening that we can elicit the stories that people need to tell) and applying it to relationships, non-existent, existent relationships between Palestinian women who were living in the Boston area.

It was a way of bringing my Jewish self into this process more. And I had met a Palestinian embroiderer, and we crafted this project together. So the project involved gathering stories from women who were folk artists of various ways or bearers of cultural traditions. And in the end, we worked with four Jewish women and four Palestinian women who were living in diaspora communities in the Boston area and created an exhibition of their stories and their folk art, their family photographs, their recipes, their embroidery especially, their amulets of the evil eye. And using that project as a way of creating context for communication, for the sharing of the stories and the sharing of the meaning of those stories and having events that were sharing of music and discussion of folk arts in communities in crisis and dealing with stereotypes. And it was a very, very powerful project that, yes, it proved so much more difficult than we thought at the outset because we were touching on some such deep pain, basically, and fear.

[00:11:54] Cynthia Cohen: The Passion for Life oral history project taught me a lot, especially because it was shattering in the sense that it shattered the stories that I had been given as truths in the world that I was constructing my life around. And I think that experience of shattering is what we do need to be willing to do to act ethically because we live in this world that’s been constructed by harsh colonial imposition, and those of us who grew up in the West have a lot to unlearn. And it goes back to the possible damage that can be done through arts and cultural work, especially with the best of intentions, [through] bringing this great practice into a region of the world that has its own cultural practices that need to be lifted up and not informed by Shakespeare or whatever.

And also, I feel like one of the big realizations of A Passion for Life that I think holds very true today is that we need to cultivate within ourselves the capacity to hold two divergent competing narratives in view at the same time and to live within that, the complexity of that paradox. I mean, “This can’t be true if that’s true, but they both are true.” And they’re true in different ways, and I think there are a lot of situations in the world where that capacity is so needed. And I do think that engaging with the arts can be crafted to help people live with that kind of paradox. And also, the languages or the modes of communication through the arts can help articulate those paradoxes or express them in ways that can be grasped

[00:14:08] Cynthia Cohen: I realized that it was as much about asking questions as it was about finding answers. And I feel that this is really an important skill, too. I could add it to my list of other things. The framing of question is to know what questions need to be asked can be much more important than trying to answer the ones that are out there.

[00:14:29] Cynthia Cohen: Anyway, that was what A Passion for Life was about.

[00:14:54] Cynthia Cohen: That shattering of narratives is very painful, and I think it’s important as we try to do work with communities wherever they are. Our colleague, Deanna Milosovich, talks about theater of the oppressor. What are the conditions that allow people who are connected to a community that’s inflicting harm to question the stories that they take to be true?

And I think a first step in that is realizing that when one’s narratives that are so deeply embedded in us are torn apart, are shattered, it’s very painful and very destabilizing, and requires really deep and compassionate listening and accompaniment to work through, to construct new narratives that are more consonant with the world.

[00:16:20] Cynthia Cohen: It comes right down to “It is so perplexing to be a human being.”

[00:17:07] Cynthia Cohen: Towards the end of the project, as the Intifada worsened, we came under pressure, especially from the local Palestinian community, to have a project statement.

[00:17:18] Cynthia Cohen: And that forced us into this different kind of language. And it was a very good process for this small group of us who were on a directions committee. We felt very close to each other after we wrote the statement but, as I feared, at least a couple of Jewish women and maybe a Palestinian woman too left the project because the statement couldn’t find a way of saying things that could embrace everybody. We joked that we needed a two-statement solution to the project. So, in addition to this gathering of stories and presenting them, we had many different events of sharing of music and a discussion on stereotypes and the role of folk art in communities in crisis.

[00:18:06] Cynthia Cohen: Yeah.

[00:18:37] Cynthia Cohen: Yeah. If you really take a look at Palestinian women’s embroidery, first of all, it’s so beautiful, and it’s craft at the highest level of artistry. But it also makes it totally clear that there’s a strong connection between this people and this land, these animals, these feathers, these plants, this water. And for me, as a Jewish person, it undercut the untruths about the presence and the meaning of Palestinian culture. It was indisputable because it was so rich and so beautiful and so powerful.

[00:19:33] Cynthia Cohen: Yeah and the nation state anyway was a formation that had been imposed upon the area, right? With the Ottomans and then the British, and both Jewish and Arab people begged the British and American people who are making decisions to create a binational state. But that’s not who they listened to. Yeah. So I feel so much anguish at what’s happening today. And when there’s this much violence and this much suffering, it makes having the space to really try to understand so much more difficult.

Act Two: How Does Peace Building Work?

There’s a quote from your paper, “There are certain things that are virtually intolerable to know.” And, obviously, you were exploring a story at that time that had those qualities to it, and what we’re now experiencing is an exponential increase in the intolerability of the story that’s unfolding. You’ve spent a lifetime sharing stories of and studying many people who have been in terrible conflicts.

I’m wondering how you see the applicability of what you’ve learned in these various conflict and peace building situations across the globe that might be relevant now. I know there are right-time-and-place parameters that are very important to consider in this work. What have you learned about windows of opportunity and efficacy that others can learn from?

They started a skateboard park in a little village outside of Nablus, and they’re working to have a team go to the Olympics in 2028. And they have a recording studio, so young people have a place where they can express themselves and have their voices feel empowered in a completely human and life-affirming way. So I think that is a kind of project I feel really comfortable with now. I don’t know what to say about the trauma that is just unfolding. It has its tentacles around the Jewish community of Israel. Arts can help with that trauma, but honestly, I don’t . . . I feel like it’s . . . I just don’t know. I’m not there, and I worry about it a lot, but I don’t know what I would do about it.

[00:22:57] Cynthia Cohen: Yes.

[00:23:29] Cynthia Cohen: I believe that there are stories that need to be told, and it’s the quality of our listening that enables them to be told, and it’s listening for what is not being said as well as for what is being said.

And it’s listening through long silences sometimes. You don’t have to ask questions. When I was interviewing, I found that I asked less and less. I do want to acknowledge that there’s a problem when people who come from societies that really value the telling of story go into other communities where people are having some kind of trauma, assuming that everyone needs to tell their story. Because sometimes they need to act in other ways. It doesn’t mean they don’t need to deal with something, but story isn’t always the right way.

[00:24:27] Cynthia Cohen: Yeah.

[00:24:49] Cynthia Cohen: The thing that comes to mind is this. In the aftermath of the tsunami in Sri Lanka, there was a theater group that went into these villages where displaced people were and just were present there, and they lifted up whatever life was happening. So the first manifestation of something alive was a marble game. So they went out, and they just watched the marble game and made it marble theater. But then they gradually, through a process that gradually brought this community of people back to the ocean, and it was actually in ritual that people reentered the ocean for the first time after the tsunami. And I thought, “God, what brilliance,” you know? It’s just incredible.

[00:26:23] Cynthia Cohen: Just you speaking there reminded me very much of, um, John Paul Lederach, who I’m assuming you’re aware of, the peace builder. One of the things I learned from him, his work was the elicited approach. It’s like the training doesn’t involve going into a place and teaching these principles of peace building. It’s eliciting from people “What are the peace building approaches that derive from this culture?’.

[00:27:00] John Paul Laderack: We need an honest conversation about the source and the sustainability of change. In the past, we have tended to view the source of change as coming from external to situations of conflict. That has been the mainstay of a lot of peace building I think, if we took the words of the famous poet Seamus Heaney from Northern Ireland, who wrote that, “A farther shore is reachable from here.” when he was referencing this notion of the ability to believe in healing wells in times when they do not seem apparent.

What are the farther shores that we need to reach? We have typically thought that the resource for healing and for change comes from outside. That, I think, needs to be reconsidered, deeply so. The most difficult shore to reach, the one that I think we’re least able to face in our field, is the shore of our own responsibilities, self-reflection, and how much we ourselves are a part of the very systems that we’re trying to change.

This, in large part, comes with a view that suggests one of the core keys that we need to be thinking about, that open the door to something that is transformative in a long-term understanding, is that outside answers need to diminish in order to give leadership to those who are closest and most proximate to the suffering and the points of suffering in their expression. We need to put local peace building in the lead.

[00:29:12] Cynthia Cohen: I’ve made a point of clarifying that the problem isn’t conflict.

[00:29:17] Cynthia Cohen: The problem is violence. The problem is conflict that’s played out in injurious ways. And that’s actually one of the big problems that we have, is we’re not that good at engaging with conflicts in the generative, constructive ways that they need to be engaged with.

[00:29:58] Cynthia Cohen: Yeah.

Act Three: Acting Together.

One really wonderful way of understanding how this work works is to find the perfect little story that unfolds in a way that people can get a sense of the complexity, but also the power of the work. Given the hundreds of examples of how art making has come to be a constructive aspect of reconciliation or undoing conflict, is there a story that really just jumps out and says, “If you want to understand what this is about, here’s something that might make sense to you”?

That project, Acting Together, was an inquiry into the contributions of performance to the constructive and generative creative engagement with conflict. It took the form of case studies being developed by artists and documenters from different parts of the world, writing about their work, and we ended up producing two books and a film and a toolkit, and it followed what I see now is the paradigm of the way of working that I’m most comfortable with, which is research or inquiry relationship building and resource generation, and that combination is really powerful in my view. Within Acting Together, there were so many wonderful stories, and I’ll say that one of the artist’s artworks that stands out for me is the work of Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani from Peru, which is this incredible artist collective that has in its repertoire the formative practices of the indigenous people of the region, plus European Western-style theater training and a very sophisticated political analysis and a lot of spiritual integrity.

They came to Brandeis and I worked with them and I saw that in every moment of their interactions with us and with students, they were so respectful, so generous, so humble, so clear in their beings at such a deep level. And for many years, they were supporting human rights activists in Peru. At the end of the civil war there, when it came time to there to be a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC), the head of Peru’s TRC, reached out to Yuyachkani and asked this theater company to accompany the truth commission into different villages but not to become part of the TRC. Yuyachkani performed different kinds of rituals, drawing on indigenous cosmologies in helping people address the losses that they had experienced and to prepare themselves to testify before the TRC and to dignify the stories of the people who had suffered in that civil war, especially the indigenous communities that were most targeted.

[00:33:58] Ana Correa: I started to do theater within a very oppressed society where many poor people exist. And throughout these years, I had to lend my body to many women and to a lot of pain. At times, I feel and say to myself, “I am going to die and I have not achieved any social transformation.” Thus, when I act, I give strength to myself at the same time. And then I realize that what I do is simple, but very important for those few people who watch me.

[00:35:24] Bill Cleveland: Are there some powerful lessons that stand out to you from their story?

[00:36:06] Bill Cleveland: And one of, when I wrote my book, Art and Upheaval, I must have looked at 150 different possibles. The thickness of the lessons seemed to rise up most from people who had a stake in the outcome. There were plenty of stories of outside organizations doing amazing work. But at the end of the day the people who are going to share the consequences of the success or failure of their work had the greatest heft, and they were community connected. So the, the sense of, of responsibility and the accountability was just amplified. And I’m wondering if that’s something that you found, that having some indigenous skin in the game matters?

[00:37:42] Bill Cleveland: Yes.

[00:38:06] Jane Sapp: If you think of music as having the power to transform the way people think, the way people feel, the way people know, then it is a very powerful tool and it’s also an awesome responsibility. So to me, creativity, the creative arts is about more than just developing how you play an instrument, but it is, or how, you paint a picture, but it’s also about developing how you think. Take my hand.

[00:39:07] Cynthia Cohen: And also the music itself, I think, deepened her appreciation of the humanity of all people. So her work has resonated very strongly with people of different communities. Jane has been an important mentor to me and friend, and I admire her talent and creativity so much.

Act Four: Listening to Learn

So Cindy, you’ve taught, you’ve studied, you created a pedagogy for the field to learn from. You’ve also operated inside an educational institution. For your students, what do you say is core to making a difference in communities in upheaval?

And I guess one other thing I would say is to find someone or some group’s work that resonates with you, that you admire, that you think is ethical and has integrity, and if they’re open to having you hang around with them or intern with them or study with them or work with them. Like for me, having one person who was on my dissertation committee take my questions seriously and who was committed enough to me that she was supporting me, but also really challenging me. Finding that kind of a teacher or mentor with that combination of support and challenge that’s necessary for growth, I think that’s a way to go.

And the, the real question is, “Have you thought about how this gets to be like reading, writing, and arithmetic, where humans communicating well, cooperating, and finding common ground is regarded as a learned skill rather than just something that happens to happen based on self-interest and often falls apart based on our incapacity to really do it well? How do we get this to be an everyday thing?”

[00:43:34] Bill Cleveland: Yeah.

The changes that need to happen are very profound, and they have to do with these questions that you and I have been discussing about what counts as knowledge and how do we draw on knowledge from different sources. And I think what you’re asking is, “How do we make the capacities that we see are needed become, of course, these are the things that people would be learning?” I wish I felt more hopeful about it than I do.

[00:44:42] Cynthia Cohen: I mean, I don’t feel without hope. You know, people are amazing, as we’ve said. But I feel that the task is so big and so deep and so challenging, and the path is so uncertain. It really is unknown. It requires experimentation and a lot of delicateness.

One of them is I believe that little humans come ready for this. It’s not like there’s a six-year-old kid going, “I don’t wanna get along with my friends. I don’t wanna play.” And there’s a lot of good wiring in there that we can call upon. So that’s there.

So education, the other one, is people like you, taking this seriously enough to spend your life doing it and being sensitive and, I think, smart enough to ask a lot of the right questions, and just keep watching it. I think what your journey has been is to shine a light on a thing that is right in front of us. Every day, we can watch the ties that bind us break. You can watch the cooperative muscles fail, but you and I have had the privilege of seeing the opposite, of people finding new stories together and forging new common ground. And it’s not fun and games. The people that are in this podcast, the people that we’ve written about, there’s an amazing skill set there.

[00:46:13] Bill Cleveland: And I think it’s translatable and transferable.

[00:46:18] Bill Cleveland: I truly do and I think you’ve proved that. So Cindy, I’d like to close by asking if there’s a film, a performance, a book related to our conversation that you would like to pass on to our audience.

[00:46:51] Bill Cleveland: Cindy, thank you so much for sharing your stories and the incredible body of work that has produced them. Thank you for that. And thank you and so long to our listeners.

Art Is Change is a production of the Center for the Study of Art and Community. We’d like to thank the Charles F. Kettering Foundation for partnering with us for this Art in Action series. Please know that the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests. They’re not the views and opinions of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. The foundation’s partnership with us for this podcast is not an endorsement of its content. If you’re interested in learning more about the foundation and its Democracy and the Arts program, please visit kettering.org or go to the link in our show notes, which also includes links to the many people, places, events, and publications mentioned in this episode.

Thanks also to the Art Is Change team. Our theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart, and hand of the maestro Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nebe. Our effects come from freesound.org, and our inspiration comes from the ever-present spirit of Book 235. So until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word