All Power To The Developing!

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!, ...

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 t...

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 ...

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 possibilitie...

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. 

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 novel...

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, expl...

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...

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 he...

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 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 A...

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 a...

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 Fagm...

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 dign...

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 imagi...

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 an...

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 orga...

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...

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. ...