All Power To The Developing!

What does it mean to keep developing as we grow older?

In this episode of All Power to the Developing, Des Wandan sits down with Helen Abel and Nicola Pauling for a conversation about aging, community, play, performance, and the possibilities for continued development throughout our lives.

Helen and Nicola share the evolution of their work with older adults, from conversations around memory loss and dementia to broader explorations of the emotional and social challenges of aging. They discuss what happens when older people are “written off,” the cultural pressure to remain independent, and how crea...

In this episode of All Power to the Developing, Desire Wandan sits down with Dr. Chris Hoff, a narrative therapist, educator, author, and host of The Radical Therapist podcast. We get to know Chris and the journey that brought him to this work, while exploring the ideas that continue to shape his practice. Chris introduces us to narrative therapy and its unique way of relating to people, problems, and the stories we tell about ourselves. Together, they explore identity, relationships, radical helping, imagination, and what becomes possible when we challenge the stories we've inherited and create new ones together.

In this episode of All Power to the Developing, host Des Wandan sits down with Dr. Jim Martinez, human intelligence researcher, educator, and author of the Collective Development Substack, to explore what artificial intelligence reveals about human intelligence, consciousness, creativity, and development. Rather than asking whether AI will become conscious, Jim challenges us to rethink what consciousness is, how AI is reshaping education and society, and why the future of technology should be centered on human development rather than prediction, productivity, or profit. Together, they discuss AI's promises, limitations, ethical challenges, and the importance of building a future that expands ou...

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 when many people began turning to each other for survival and support.  “Isolation and loneliness are a worldwide epidemic,” says Kim.  “Modernity—colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy—is working really hard to keep us isolated, but we know how to be together.  It...

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 World Food Program, The Nature Conservancy, Easter Seals, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and many others.

Marquez-Lara, an East Side Institute Associate, attributes his successful approach to leadership development to social therapeutics. “The world today is not predictable, a...

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 worked as a therapist, primarily with the marginalized and traumatized. In 2000, Aristizabal founded ImaginAction, an international network of artists and facilitators using performance and imagination as tools for so...

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, Immigrants & Other Evildoers and United States of AMNESIA Dare to Remember—which are based on hundreds of interviews with “undocumented” immigrants living and working in the U.S.A. Join José Torres-Tama as he takes host...

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 to see this interview in video form, as well as the rest of Aurelie Harp and Womanity's work 

Womanity's YouTube Page: https://www.youtube.com/@womanityproject6740

Womanity's Website: https://www.wemanitycoaching.com/

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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 approa...

“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 poore...

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...

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/

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Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute. The Institute is a center for socia...

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 m...

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 we...

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.

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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.

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 wa...

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 S...

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 pandemic raging, Katie founded the Joy First Foundation and spent the next three years living in a trailer traveling the U.S.A. bringing joy to the nation’s front-line workers—reta...

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 is the author of 21 plays, 3 novels and a memoir.  One of his musicals, Paradise Square, was nominated for 10 Tony Awards during its Broadway run.  Kirwan is also a columnist for the Irish Echo, host of the “Celtic Cru...

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 deep into the roots of capoeira, exploring its Afro-Brazilian heritage and the unique blend of music, movement, and play that make it a dynamic practice for all ages. Silvio reflects on the...

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 speaking is “not a powerpoint, it is not text on a page, it is connecting to people at the deepest level.”

https://www.speakwithpurpose.org/

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Welcome to All Power to the Deve...

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 activities to schools, libraries, and health and social service organizations throughout the Philadelphia area.  In all her work Gilbert-Neal strives to focus on the wellness of individuals, communities, and the earth. “America makes it very hard to be well.  We’re all experien...

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 other things, developed methods for teachers who want to use play and performance to explore political issues and the challenges of cross-cultural dialogue with their students. In this episode, Bruno Freyssinet, founder and artistic director of La Transplanisphère, shares the t...

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, Political Asylum, his founding of AK Press in the UK and PM Press in the USA, the general crisis in publishing, and how PM has been able to survive and thrive in a hostile political and economic environm...

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 from all walks of life through dance and movement. Join her in discussion with host Desire Wandan about the possibilities that open when science and the arts meet.   “Tree branches and leaves dance in the wind. Water trickl...

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 and Fagmeedah Ling, join host Desire Wandan to discuss how the residents themselves renovated the building, set up working committees to deal with elder, youth, maintenance and security issues, and expanded their occupation into a movement that now convenes “Peoples’ Assemblies”...

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 across the planet, and is bringing dignity and community to those without a home. “How on earth have we created a system that leaves millions of people living on the streets?” asks Young. “It’s crazy.  We don’t have to have it.  We...

In this episode, Peter Harris, one of Israel’s major innovators of community-based theatre, shares the experiences and insights of fifty years of creating performances with marginalized communities.  With the war raging in Gaza, he also talks about his work over the last decade in the Theatre Studies Department at the Western Galilee Academic College bringing Arab and Jewish students into “the aesthetic space where memory and imagination can come together,” and painful but developmental dialogue becomes possible through performance. 

https://www.facebook.com/peter.harris.94849410

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG8pl5_zhxyg...

In this episode of All Power To The Developing, Host Desire Wandan sits down with Murray Dabby and Carrie Sackett, the authors of "Social Therapeutic Coaching: A Practical Guide to Group and Couples Work." Our conversation dives into the heart of their upcoming book, exploring the innovative approaches and transformative methods they use for group and couples coaching. Carrie Sackett, known for her expertise in coaching dynamics and group facilitation, elaborates on the practical applications of their methods in everyday scenarios. Murray Dabby, with his extensive experience in counseling and group therapy, shares his insights on how social therapeutic...

In 2020 with the pandemic ravishing Brazil and the country’s president doing nothing to combat it, a group of progressive Brazilian educators, led by Dr. Fernanda Liberali, of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and an East Side Institute Associate, found a way to move forward through play.  Inspired by the Global Play Brigade, which was (and is) bringing play and performance out around the world through Zoom, they organized the Brincadas, which have taken play into the schools and streets of São Paulo.  In this episode, a group of Brincadas share how play gave them a way to br...

On the 30th Anniversary of the Taos Institute, co-founder Kenneth Gergen shares the birth of social constructionism, its challenge to the assumptions of modernism, and the impact it has had both in and beyond the academy.  During this wide-ranging conversation with host Desire Wandan, Gergen discusses the practices, such as appreciative inquiry and narrative therapy, that social constructionism has helped to inspire, along with its decades-long interface and mutual influence with social therapeutics.  In this time of intense mistrust and partisanship, he looks to relationality as a way forward, pointing out, “We don’t have to agree on everything in order to...

Francine Kilemann and Marcia Donadel are bringing their experience with site-specific, immersive theatre to elementary school education in Brazil.  Through Plato Cultural they lead students and teachers in creating fictional worlds in which the children become “SOS Agents” from the future tasked with helping to save the environment. The months-long performance is one in which nothing is taught in the traditional sense of the word.  Instead, the students learn through the experience of performing.  “Once we enter this fictional world,” says Kilemann, “we can ask ‘What if?’ and a range of possibilities emerge that we wouldn’t have if we had limited ourselves...

Nuyorican M.C., poet, and hip-hop educator Intikana shares his development as an artist, activist, and educator. He traces his journey through the economic poverty and cultural richness of the Bronx, the challenges of commercial co-optation, and bringing his revolutionary hip-hop educational techniques to young people in kindergartens, foster homes, and youth prisons.  In this wide-ranging conversation with host Desire Wandan, Initkana also discusses with deep insight the cultural and historical roots of hip-hop as an embodiment of “oppressed people trying to liberate themselves through art.”

https://www.instagram.com/intikana/?hl=en

https://www.youtube...

The ASSIM (Like This) Institute in Florianopolis, Brazil is dedicated to bringing therapy free or at affordable rates to those who need it the most—the poor, the oppressed and the marginalized.  Not only does ASSIM bring therapy to the people, it also provides poor people with free therapeutic training  that allows them to lead groups in their own communities.  ASSIM’s therapists and clients engage in collaborative and dialogic conversations that build on the client’s knowledge and works from the assumption that people have the resources and wisdom to transform their lives. 

ASSIM founder Bru...

In this time of political, ecological and emotional crisis, Developing Across Borders has emerged as a Zoom-enabled support network for activists and others around the world.  This month "All Power to the Developing" would like to draw your attention to "Border Crossers Build Their Culture."   This episode is even more relevant now than when it was first released on January 15, 2021.   It features East Side Institute director Lois Holzman  in conversation with Developing Across Borders participants Lea Cikos, Mariamalia Cob, Juan David Garzon, Steven Hart, and Morgane Masterman. Hailing from five different countries, they share how their weekly social therapeutic conversations h...

Darryl Heller, lifelong progressive political activist, shares his journey from grassroots organizing in Boston and New York to becoming a labor historian, a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at  Indiana University, and director of the South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center.  “I don’t think we can realize our full humanity if we're not developing,” he tells host Desire Wandan.  “People’s" power is possible only if we keep developing.”  

https://iusbpreface.net/2022/02/23/its-my-dream-job-darryl-heller-on-the-civil-rights-heritage-center/

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Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute. The Institute is a center for soc...

Join host Desire Wandan in a conversation with Rivka Eckert—theatre maker, activist, and educator—about her creative work with homeless youth and police officers in Arizona and with prisoners, correctional officers, and community members in the prisons of upstate New York. Eckert, a professor in the Theatre and Dance Department at the State University of New York at Potsdam, believes that community-based theatre-making has an important role to play in “helping us get free together.”  

www.rivkarocchio.com

Instagram @rivkaeckert

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Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the Eas...

Steven Licardi spent most of his childhood and adolescence, in his words, “in-and-out of psych wards.”  He emerged from our oppressive and brutal “mental health” system with his flame of creativity burning brightly. He now shares that creativity with his clients as a social worker, social therapist and innovative poet and artist.

In this fascinating, delightfully surprising and moving conversation with host Desire Wandan, Licardi shares his commitment to helping people “play in their wounds” and use “performance to go beyond the social roles” imposed on them.  “Healing doesn't happen alone,” he says. “Healing is a process we choose to engage in with oth...

Playworlds are a performatory approach to early childhood education that brings children and teachers together to create an imaginary world where they can all develop emotionally, cognitively, and socially.  Dr. Beth Ferholt of Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York is one of the world’s leading practitioners and theorists of the Playworld approach. Here she comes together with Dr. Carrie Lobman, Professor of Learning and Teaching at Rutgers University and Leader, Education, and Research for the East Side Institute to explore this radically playful path to early childhood development.

Places to...