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Happy December!

As the year winds down and the holidays heat up, we have some heartwarming, happy, helpful materials to share with you this week:

Happy reading! And if you’re in Georgia, happy voting!

Whimsy and Wonder in Georgia

For the past several months, Unstoppable Voters Fellow Aileen Loy, the Volunteer Coordinator at Fair Count, has been making a big splash by flying enormous whale kites at voter mobilization events across Georgia.

Now, get to know Aileen, how she moved from powerlessness to deep community engagement and service, and how she dares herself to make the biggest mistakes — because that’s where she finds the really big, bold ideas that work wonders.

Watch the new video now

More Takeaways from the Midterm Elections

In 2022, our team worked with over 35 organizations in 26 states on a huge range of pro-voter efforts. We shared a few of our favorite takeaways with you before; here are three more of what we’ve seen really works:

  • Center celebration, hope, and joy: Create cheer lines for first-time voters. Make up witchy, wondrous voting rituals. As one group told us, people were happy to talk to them about voting if there were solutions involved — that made people feel better. Work those good feelings into everything.

  • Make it kid-friendly: Have pro-voter activities to keep kids occupied, so that while they’re making kites, drawing dream worlds, or exploring the belly of a whale, you can talk to those of voting age about the importance of voting. And also — then the kids have made something about voting that they’ll want to hang up at home, which can serve as a continual reminder to their family members to get out to vote.

  • Test, evaluate, refine: In activism, a lot of times folks plan and plan and plan but don’t get on their feet to test things out before the big event. We worked with groups to take ideas from sketch to draft to realization, with lots of edits in between, for maximum impact and success.

Want more tips about how to make stronger, leaner, more æffective creative actions?

Check out our Let’s Step it up! guide

From Actipedia: Dream Kites

In 2012, CultureStrike, a national arts and activism group that evolved into the Center for Cultural Power, teamed up with undocumented youth and artist Miguel Luciano to hold a kite-based symbolic public art project in Washington, DC.

The Puerto Rican-born Luciano worked with a number of undocumented youth to create large-scale kites emblazoned with their life-size self-portraits. The kites were flown over the National Mall and the White House to embody a simple statement: “The desire for freedom and dignity is universal, and the natural human need to migrate can’t be suppressed.”

Learn more about this celebration of rights, dreams, and desires

Gifts Galore: Support the Center this Holiday Season!

An illustration of our Art of Activism book showing a group of people inside a subway car, holding red balloons

As a grassroots nonprofit, we rely on changemakers like you to make all the above possible. And for a limited time, we want to demonstrate our thanks by sending supporters some of our favorite things! From a C4AA Big Canvas Bag of Goodies to personal Museum Kits and Patch Packages, we’ll be sending out inspiring thank you gifts for donations made between November 29 and Dec 31, 2022! Making it an even greater time to give, all gifts received before the end of the year will be matched up to $15,000! Click here to learn more about our gifts and make a donation.

Sure, I’ll Chip In!