All Power To The Developing!

Minna Kim, in conversation with host Desire Wandan, introduces us to the world of Collective Care Pods, small online or in-person support groups that meet regularly over an extended period to provide emotional support and encourage the mutual growth of its participants. With roots stretching back to 2014 and the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, Care Pods proliferated during the pandemic...

Andres Marquez-Lara is the Founder and CEO of  UFacilitate , a global facilitation company that works with foundations, NGOs, and multilateral (inter-governmental) organizations to help their leaders deal with what he calls the “messy human stuff”—egos, cultural differences, miscommunication, conflict—that put their missions at risk. UFacilitate has worked in 40 countries with groups such as the W...

Hector Aristizabal—one of the pioneers of performance activism—was born and raised in Medellín, Colombia, when it was the most dangerous city in the world, and his country was suffering through a bloody fifty-year civil war. Educated as both a psychologist and a theatre artist, as a young man, he was arrested and tortured by the military and later forced to flee into exile in the U.S., where he wo...

Performer, Playwright, Poet, Painter, and Photographer, José Torres-Tama began his passionate work as a political artist on the stage he built onto the back of his taco truck.  Born in Ecuador, raised in Jersey City, NJ and in New York City and based for decades in New Orléans, he currently tours the United States with his very witty, insightful and very powerful docu-performances pieces—Aliens, I...

In this conversation,  Aurelie Harp talks with Lois Holtzman, co-founder of the Eastside Institute, about how gender, race, and other identities can both liberate and constrain us. They examine identity politics, feminism, and the limits of binary thinking, and discuss how performance, play, and relational practices can open possibilities for more inclusive, collective futures. If you would like t...

Wycliffe Barsa is the co-founder and CEO of Kosi Africa, an ambassador for the Global Play Brigade, and a graduate of the East Side Institute’s flagship program, the International Class.  Here he shares his journey from living on the streets as a child to his work today promoting and transforming education in Kenya, and, in the process, developing young leaders as visionaries who will return to th...

“Live theatre is a way to co-dream,” says Anthony Moseley, Chief Programming Officer and Artistic Director of Chicago’s  Collaboraction theatre.  “It can connect us at a really deep level that allows us to drop seeds of new emotions and new possibilities.”  Moseley joins host Desire Wandan to discuss his artistic and political journey and the role that the multi-racial, multi-cultural theatre that...

Kathleen J. Guillaume-Delemar, President and CEO of the  Center for Community Progress shares the work of the Center in helping communities across the country transform vacant lots and abandoned buildings into community parks, food co-ops, dignified affordable housing, and other vibrant examples of mutual aid and grassroots community power.  Guillaume-Delemar, a first-generation Haitian-American w...

In this episode of All Power to the Developing, host Desire Wandan sits down with genre-defying performance artist Akim Funk Buddha for an exploration of creativity, culture, and transformation. From beatboxing and Mongolian throat singing to reimagining the Japanese tea ceremony, Akim shares how he uses art as a bridge across traditions, identities, and generations. This is a conversation about m...

Magicians Without Borders has brought free magic shows to 40 countries and approximately a million people, and it provides free three-to-four-year education programs in magic to thousands of young people in “the forgotten places of the world.”  Carlos Lopez, a leader of Magicians Without Borders, unpacks the developmental power of magic when it is taught to young people in impoverished communities...

Host Desire Wandan talks with Abbie VanMeter, Executive Director of Collaborative Innovation for the  Coordinated Management of Meaning Institute , and Don Waisanen, Professor at Baruch College, CUNY Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. Their conversation focuses on Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM)—a communication theory and a lived practice—which approaches human communication...

Dr. Omar H. Ali, the Dean of  Lloyd International Honors College , Professor of Comparative African Diaspora History and a Research Associate in the Medicinal Chemistry Collaborative at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro sits down with host Desire Wandan to discuss the importance of play, performance and improvisation to teaching and learning. They focus on the innovative online global...

For over 25 years, Angela Coleman, the author, most recently, of The Art of Chilling Out for Women and the founder of the Sisterhood Agenda, an international network active in 36 countries, has been working to support and empower women and girls.  In this discussion with host Desire Wandan, Coleman focuses on PARKS (Positively Affirming Reality & Knowledge in Sisterhood) Holistic Housing, thro...

Albert Marqués is a skilled jazz musician from Barcelona, Spain, a public-school music teacher in Brooklyn, New York, and a creative social justice activist.  In this episode, he and host Desire Wandan focus on his program “Amplifying Voices” which brings musicians together with victims of state violence to create platforms for them to tell their stories to the wider world.  “Amplifying Voices” ha...

The San Diego, California-based  Imagine Brave Spaces does just that—imagine brave spaces.  This performance activist organization, founded in 2021, uses play, performance, theatre, and other arts to help children, young people, and adults create spaces and engage in activities through which, in the words of Co-founder and Director of Programs Catherine Hanna Schrock, they can, “see what is not ye...

Katie BEE (aka Kate McGlynn) is a remarkable human being who has lived her life saying “yes” and then figuring it out.  She has been a teen peer counselor, taught improv, laughter yoga and meditation.  She worked for 12 years as a street performer in Europe, as a circus performer all over the world, and as a performance-inspired community organizer in Detroit and other cities.  In 2021 with the pa...

Larry Kirwan, the creative force behind Black 47, the Irish American political rock band, which for 25 years brought its energetic, joyous hybrid of rock and roll and Irish traditional music to the world, joins co-hosts Desire Wandan and Dan Friedman for an expansive conversation about his life, his creative evolution and the politic that informs them both.  In addition to leading Black 47, Kirwan...

In this episode of All Power To The Developing, host Desire Wandan sits down with Silvio Dos Reis, a maestro of capoeira and a dedicated teaching artist at the Union Cultural Center in Seattle. Silvio shares his journey of embracing capoeira not just as a martial art but as a powerful tool for community building, cultural expression, and personal transformation. Together, Desire and Silvio dive de...

Toiya Taylor, the Executive Director and Founder of Speak With Purpose (SWP), tells her story and the story of SWP, which is bringing the power of public speaking to students in Seattle and beyond to challenge prevailing narratives, uplift their cultures and communities, forge self-authored identities, and become forces for change. To Taylor and the educational innovators she has trained, public s...

Malia Gilbert-Neal, the executive director of ArtWell, grew up in Philadelphia and has been creating community empowerment organizations her entire adult life. In conversation with host Desire Wandan, she shares her life story and the work of ArtWell, founded in 2000 in response to chronic community violence in Philly.  Today ArtWell partners with over 400 organizations to bring arts-related activ...

La Transplanisphère, based in Paris, France, has been doing cutting-edge political theatre for two decades bringing artists, students, and “ordinary people” together to explore the political and cultural challenges facing Europe as it becomes more diverse.  In residence, since 2018, at the Lycée Albert Schweitzer in Le Raincy, a working-class suburb of Paris, La Transplanisphére has, among many ot...

Desire Wandan and Dan Friedman co-host this episode with guest Ramsey Kanaan, publisher of  PM Press , the most impactful publisher and distributor of anarchist, Marxist, and radical literature in the United States. The conversation touches on the history of anarchism (“reviled, mocked, ignored”) Kanaan’s own embrace of radical politics at the age of 13, his years touring Europe with the punk band...

Dr. Jame McCray, grew up in Brooklyn, “hanging out with the ants and caterpillars on my block.”  Today she is the Managing Director of the Alliance for Watershed Education at the National Wildlife Federation, a member of the Board of Directors of Black Marine Science, and the founder and leader of  Ecotonic Movement , an organization that facilitates conversation about climate change with people f...

Cissie Gool House was an abandoned hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, empty and decaying for 40 years, when homeless activists snuck past security on the night of March 27, 2017, and began an occupation that, seven years later, has transformed it into a vibrant self-governing community of 1,000 formerly homeless, evicted, and displaced people. Two leaders of Cissie Gool House, Karen Hendricks an...

The Homeless World Cup, founded in 2003, today brings unhoused people together in 70 countries to connect through the universal language of football, each year culminating in a World Cup tournament in a different city.  Founder and leader Mel Young, and formerly homeless player turned referee Sarah Frohwein talk with host Desire Wanden about why and how the Homeless World Cup was born, spread acro...