AWE / Another World Exists

Another World Exists (AWE) is an edge zone gathering and action space for artists, organizers, cultural strategists, researchers, policy heads, technical practitioners, healers and others working to connect radical imagination and care with the implementation of systems that support collective liberation. AWE creates spaces and opportunities for poetic knowledge (what Aimé Césaire called “experience as a whole”) to move across disciplines, issues and sectors to shift what knowledge and practices are valued in remaking political and economic systems. Out of this approach emerges stories, practices, visuals, public installations, events, relationships, research tools, websites, policy, writing, networks, curriculum, workshops and more.

Another World Exists (AWE) is founded in the experience that the practices, knowledge, and insight needed to support collective liberation already exist. Connecting radical imagination to sustainable implementation of systems requires creating more fluid, flexible and connected feedback systems that honor insistent humanness – or the complexity, specificity and differences in the logic, desires, hurts, fears and passions of human experience. To do this, AWE creates action-oriented learning spaces for peers, for people working in different sectors, and for the field of arts, culture and narrative strategy more broadly that seek to revalue a holistic approach to remaking political and economic systems.

AWE is guided by four core practices: (1) bridging radical imagination and implementation, (2) mobilizing poetic knowledge into spaces that typically resist or devalue it, (3) tending to the fracture between the symbolic and material, and (4) creating or working in edge zones. AWE uses the Just Transition Strategy Framework.

Current and recent projects include:

• Practitioners Exchange Circle – A bi-monthly meeting space for practitioners
• Documentation and Management of the Cultural Strategists-in-Government program for the City of Oakland
• Cultural Strategy Intermediaries Conversation Space – A regular conversation space to strengthen dialogue and learning in the field
• Authored the Operational Plan for Youth Speaks’ Power Lab, a new cultural and narrative strategy program
• Parents Against the Future – A multipronged approach to mobilizing parents through arts and action at the intersection of climate, capitalism and grief.
• Conversations on the Racial Contract – Arts-based facilitation before and after intimate conversations on white supremacy and racial justice informed by Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract, with Dr. Joseph Ewoodzie at Davidson College.
• TRTL Homes – A partnership with Community Development Partners to catalyze the use of low-cost, fast, mobile housing on privately owned land in Oakland, protected by rent control and just cause eviction and keeping people in their neighborhoods.