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.
LEARN MORE ABOUT STORIES OF ARRIVAL, A WORD TRAVELS PROJECThttp://mernahecht.com/projects1/student-voices/