WORD TRAVELS: Honoring All Voices

Mission

Through the literary & visual arts this project brings refugee and immigrant voices into wide visibility providing a means for others to develop compassionate understandings of refugee and immigrant journeys toward creating communities where all are welcome and all belong.

Description

WORD TRAVELS: Bringing Refugee and Immigrant Voices to the Community

Formerly the Stories of Arrival: Refugee and Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry Project, our continued project is now renamed WORD TRAVELS. Our mission of using poetry and other arts modalities as a means of storytelling to provide safe space for refugees and immigrants to tell the deeply personal and often harrowing stories that honor their individual and cultural identities remains the same.  WORD TRAVELS is dedicated to bringing deeper understandings of the refugee and immigrant experience to others toward creating communities of inclusion, welcome and belonging. We are extending our outreach with new partnerships and innovative approaches and tools for continuing this work with diverse collaborative projects and programs honoring refugee and immigrant voices.

 Our top four priorities are: 1) To expand our support base by increasing how current and potential funders and stakeholders recognize that stories, poetry and art can work to change people's hearts and minds and dispel their preconceived biases; 2) To create more opportunities for refugee and immigrant artists of all ages to bring their art to the larger community; 3) To demonstrate how stories of migration and arrival can be elicited through poetry, creative writing and visual art that will serve as community-building tools for those community members who are not refugees and immigrants; 4) To create safe and welcoming workshop and performance spaces open to refugees and immigrants of all ages.

 We believe that our community is made stronger when the voices of those who are not often heard are more widely celebrated. Voice is at the heart of our project. The poetry and visual art created in our project is brought to the larger community through community wide podcasts, publication of a poetry anthology widely available in the community, open forum readings and community celebrations and exhibitions in which the creative work of our participants takes center stage.

We are thrilled to announce that our forthcoming and newest anthology titled OUR BEAUTIFUL HOMELANDS: AS TOLD IN SELF-PORTRAITS by GLOBAL YOUTH will be available this June. This collection of original self portraits was created in this year's project at Foster High School with Multilingual Learners most of whom are asylum seekers. It follows our 2022 anthology titled "The Voice of My Heart: Unforgettable Memories in an Unforgettable Year," published by Seattle's Chin Music Press. The visual art and poems in each of these vibrantly colorful anthologies remind all of us that we know each other best when we gain insights and understanding into how we each cohere and celebrate our individual and cultural identities. THANK YOU FOR TAKING A MOMENT TO OUR VIEW OUR SHORT VIDEO OF THIS YEAR'S PROJECT.

Recognition

We are grateful for our longstanding partnerships with the Institute for Poetic Medicine in Palo Alto, CA with whom we are a Poetry Partner Project. Support from devoted board members and the generosity of individual donors makes our project possible.