All Power To The Developing!

Ep.64 Sustainability: Building With the Community Not For It

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 their communities to help them generate new possibilities. 
 
What makes Kosi different from most non-profits is, Barasa says, is sustainability. Instead of relying on outside money, when Kosi approaches a school, it does a Resource Audit, asking the school what sort of resources do you have and how can we work with you, the parents and the larger community, using those resources, to together solve these problems?  “We’re not there to help the community; we’re there to work with the community,” he explains.  Pointing out that in English “Kosi” means “Go” or “Keep Moving,” Barasa continues, “Development is how the whole community comes together to move and grow and create power.”
https://kosiafrica.org/

Ep.63 “Co-Dreaming Theatre: Anthony Moseley and Collaboraction”

“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 he leads plays in not only bringing theatre to, but creating theatre with, the poor communities of Chicago.
 
Collaboraction, under Moseley's leadership, has devised hundreds of plays with young people and adults from Chicago’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods, plays that have been performed in parks and community centers across the city and cheered on by tens of thousands of audience members.  Most of its performances are followed by a “crucial conversation” where the audience members engage with the issues raised by the play.  Since the pandemic, Collaboraction has produced 150 digital pieces and the film adaptation of its play, Trail in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till won a Chicago/Midwest Emmy Award.  Collaboraction is about to open its new cultural center “The House of Belonging” in Chicago’s Humbolt Park neighborhood.
“The company itself is a collaboration,” says Moseley, “a never-ending devised piece of theatre.”

Ep.62 Turning Spaces of Trauma into Spaces of Power

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 who grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, during the crack epidemic, when vacant lots in her neighborhood were gathering places of desperation and despair.  Describing herself as a “compassionate revolutionary” and an “unapologetic thorn in the side of society,” she is now leading efforts from Flint, Michigan, to Lafayette, Louisiana, to transform urban ruins into centers of community power and hope.
Kathleen's  upcoming event is the National Land Bank Network Summit on September 8-9 in Detroit. Please click the link for more information. https://communityprogress.org/nlbn-summit-2025/
sign up for newsletter! https://communityprogress.org/newsletter-signup/
 

Ep. 61 Myth Breaking, Bridge Building: The Art of Akim Funk Buddha

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 movement, myth-breaking, and the liberating power of performance.
https://www.funkbuddha.net/

Ep.60 Bringing Magic to the Forgotten Places of the World

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. “If your situation seems impossible,” he says. “If you see and experience wonder, it might awaken hope that the impossible can become possible.” Chatting with host Desire Wandan, Lopez shares his journey from a privileged life in Bogota, Colombia, to teaching magic in slums and refugee camps worldwide. In the process, he has, in his words, helped to create “social tissue that is weaving lives together that were not supposed to be intertwined.”
Website: https://www.magicianswithoutborders.com/ https://www.carloslopez.co/
Instagram: @carloshlopez @magicianswithoutborders

Ep.59 What Are We Making Together?

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 as how we together create meaning.  “CMM and social therapeutics have a shared understanding of human beings as builders of the social world,” says VanMeter. This conversation provides a concise and clear introduction to this important social constructionist approach to interpersonal communication, and its potential impact on our weary and wounded world stuck in age-old communication traps.
Everything CMMi: https://linktr.ee/cmminstitute
Everything SLST: https://linktr.ee/storieslivedstoriestoldpodcast
Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abigail-vanmeter/
Direct to Podcast: https://cmminstitute.substack.com/s/podcast OR https://www.storieslivedstoriestold.com/podcast
Newsletter sign up: https://don-waisanen.kit.com/ 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/donwaisanen/
@DonWaisanen (on both Instagram and X)
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/donwaisanen.bsky.social 

Ep.58 Let’s Learn: A Free International Learning-Teaching Community

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 educational community Let’s Learn!, a joint project of Lloyd Honors College and the East Side Institute. Dr. Ali also shares his personal journey from a community organizer to world renowned historian and college dean—remaining a play revolutionary throughout.

Ep.57 Holistic Homes, Empowering Women

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, through which she hopes to provide eco-friendly, supportive housing for over 100 women in the Baltimore metropolitan area.
https://amzn.to/404vkQP  
https://sisterhoodagenda.com/
https://angeladcoleman.com/
https://youtu.be/OJjefIYnE40?si=LgkcYYqNR6HsHS2S
https://www.instagram.com/baltimoresun/reel/DA3_tWePsZN/
LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/angela-d-coleman-mba-cnm-ibiyinka-oyewola-ms-adc-4b02426/

Ep.56 Amplifying Voices: Fighting State Violence with Jazz

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” has worked with, among others, death row prisoners, Holocaust survivors, and Jason Fulford, the cousin of Eric Garner who was choked to death by New York City police officers in 2014.  “Music creates an atmosphere, a vibe, that allows walls to come down and for people to connect and listen to each other as human beings,” says Marqués.  “I want to use music against power to create power.”
Albert's website www.albertmarques.com/amplify
Book: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/el-jazz-suena-en-el-corredor-de-la-muerte-albert-marqu-s/1143693137

Ep.55 Imagine Brave Spaces

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 yet there, to picture the possibilities of what can be.”  In this in-depth interview conducted by Desire Wandan and Dan Friedman, she asks, “Isn’t it a courageous thing to dream, to hope that things could get better?” and shares how Imagine Brave Spaces uses Forum Theatre, Playback Theatre, Interview Theatre, and creative community conversations to empower people to ask, “What if?”
www.imaginebravespaces.com
Instagram- @imaginebravespaces