Our mission is to facilitate culturally responsive, multidisciplinary art programs for students, teaching artists, and communities to develop and amplify their voices and creative skills.
Community-Word Project, founded in 1997 by Executive Director Michele Kotler, uses creative writing and multidisciplinary arts as a necessary element of public school education to ensure that young people have the chance to envision, invest in, and build a community different from the one failing to meet their needs.
Inspiration to establish Community-Word Project stemmed, in part, from Michele’s experience growing up with an undiagnosed learning disability in a low-income neighborhood. Budget cuts had virtually eliminated arts education in public schools and she found the teaching methods she encountered alienating.
Michele’s 6th-grade classroom teacher, who was also a drummer, taught curriculum by integrating music into the classroom. The experience was transformational for her, and for other non-traditional learners. They were being taught in a way they could learn. The arts provided a point of entry into the curriculum.
Inspired by her experience, Michele and the Community-Word Project team have built an organization committed to expanding interdisciplinary arts education; to helping students express themselves; to supporting artists in learning to teach; and to forging creative partnerships across disciplines.
The heart of Community-Word Project’s activities is the empowerment of students’ voices through the creative arts in schools, libraries, and transitional housing locations. Community-Word Project operates in NYC neighborhoods where 70% of residents live in poverty and students struggle with the effects of underinvested schools; the linguistic challenges that come with recent immigration; and inequities in physical and mental health resources that severely impact their focus and ability to learn.
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that Community-Word Project is located on the unceded, traditional territory of Munsee Lenape on the island known as Mannahatta in Lenapehoking, now called Manhattan.
We acknowledge the systematic erasure of many Nations, we recognize those still among us, and we commit to the process of dismantling the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.
We also acknowledge the enslaved Africans whose labor built Manhattan during the colonial era and beyond and the harm inflicted upon Black, Indigenous, and People of Color across the country and specifically in New York through systemic forms of oppression.
