With support from California Arts Council, The AjA Project will urgently advance our mission of collective empowerment through participatory storytelling, focusing on underrepresented youth, emerging artists, and cultural bearers from refugee and immigrant backgrounds in historically disinvested areas of San Diego. Funding will allow The AjA Project to continue delivering accessible media arts workshops, fellowships, and public exhibitions that center and uplift first-person narratives from these communities through core programs such as Civil Liberties, Back Alley Poetry Club, INTER+Regeneration, and Journey, AjA’s work fosters much-needed civic dialogue to counter rising anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies while developing local youth as engaged artists and community leaders.
The AjA Project has a strong reputation of delivering high-quality, high-impact programs to young people from diverse cultural, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds. This includes in-school and after-school programs as well as participatory workshops in collaboration with cross-sector partner organizations. AjA’s programs support young people to process experiences, understand their social and political landscapes and use the arts as a tool for creative self expression and social change. This year we have provided programming to newly arrived refugees, teen mothers, youth in detention, young people in military families, and youth across San Diego. The work at AjA remains grounded in the power of photography and visual arts as a tool for all youth, regardless of background, to see themselves as agents of change. AjA remains committed to igniting individual and social change from a grassroots, creative approach.