Crossroads Institute for Arts, Learning & Community

Crossroads Institute for Art, Learning, & Community works with children, youth, and adults throughout the United States to spread knowledge and build capacity regarding the use of the creative arts for learning and social change. For its first five years, Crossroads Institute was focused on the completion of a ten-year effort to research, create, and publish its seminal publication, Beginner’s Guide to Community-Based Arts (New Village Press, 2005). Since then, it has focused on expanding use of the Beginner’s Guide as a resource for universities, schools, and community organizations throughout the United States and the Americas. Crossroads Institute employs teams of highly trained youth and adults to pass on the basics of community-based arts to other artists, educators, and activists. The organization offers three basic seminar formats that can be adapted to fit the needs of many different types of communities and organizations. Crossroads also offers an online library that contains program curricula, sample lesson plans and plays, and organizational forms and procedures that can be used to administer, evaluate, and document community arts programs. Crossroads has also developed a program for at-risk youth in New Orleans that is based on the Beginner’s Guide model. Creative Forces Youth Educational Theater Corps is a youth ensemble that creates and performs original songs, plays, poetry, and dance about urgent social and educational issues.