About Unity Through Art’s Saturday Night Revues
Who we are:
We’re a group of organizations and individuals who share both a belief that art can help change (our corner of) the world and a penchant for getting involved in change-making endeavors. Member groups include SIRX, TAVEER, Somali Community Services of Seattle, Runta News (Somali-language newspaper); individual members include long-time Seattle activists who have long been involved in local (and not-so-local) Asian-American, East African, Latino, LGBT, and Muslim communities.
We have been working together for about five months to develop the project outlined below.
What we do (and what we are seeking funding to do):
Unity Through Art’s mission is to harness the power of art to make our corner of the world – Greater Seattle – a more tolerant, inclusive, and neighborly place.
We seek funding to support the production of our Saturday Night Revues, the goals of which are to:
- generate audiences comprising people from Seattle’s many diverse communities – people whose paths rarely cross;
- generate discussion of difference; and
- promote mutual understanding and friendship.
We plan to accomplish our Revues goals by:
- making our quarterly revues free,
- featuring local performers from different ethnic/cultural communities,
- featuring a variety of art forms to promote a broad, something-for-everyone appeal (we want a lot of people to see our shows), and
- inviting audience participation.
When we will do it:
We plan to hold our shows from July 2017 through June/July 2018.
Where we will do it:
Revues will be held at venues throughout Seattle. Examples include the Filipino Community Center of Seattle, Daybreak Star (Native American) Cultural Center, and the Black and Tan Hall, which “seeks to maintain Rainier Valley as a destination for cross-cultural arts and education.”
Why we are doing what we are doing:
We were inspired to launch this project for three reasons. First, hate speech and crimes have increased in Seattle in recent months (see example of news coverage in MyNorthwest.com, 3/14/17); we wanted to create a highly visible antidote to this behavior. Second, our founding committee members have individually witnessed what happens when disparate people come together in a social situation: People begin to get to know one another and start to enjoy one another’s company. We suspect that it is harder to dismiss and denigrate a group of people after having positive interaction with some of them. Third, research (e.g. Zebrowitz, et al., 2009) shows that the more people come into contact with members of another ethnic group, the more they are likely to regard that group favorably.
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mynorthwest.com
A bias crime wave has struck the Seattle region targeting Jewish temples to mosques, and local authorities are taking notice.
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How (we will fund our project):
We are seeking grants from corporations, private foundations, City and County agencies, and individual donors. Individual donations are also enthusiastically accepted!
One more thing:
In addition to building community, our initiative will: 1) make art accessible to members of underserved communities, 2) inspire them to create art, and 3) introduce “new” consumers to arts venues that typically serve a single ethnic/cultural community.
Unity Through Art 