Project Description
The American Festival Project (AFP) is the facilitator of creative community collaborations that aim to break down the barriers that separate people from one another and their cultures. Since 1981, the AFP has engaged performing artists and others who share a belief that cultural exchange can provide a context in which diverse peoples can begin to understand and respect one another. Exchange is fostered through locally based cultural activities designed to address locally defined themes and issues. AFP works with community-based groups and artists throughout the United States, guiding a process that empowers local people and employs the arts and culture as a vehicle for social change. The AFP is a program of Appalshop, an arts, media, and education center in Whitesburg, Kentucky.

The Environmental Justice Project is a recent American Festival Project. The purpose of the Environmental Justice Project was to confront environmental racism along a 90-mile stretch of the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge that has been dubbed "Cancer Alley." The stretch hosts more than 130 major petrochemical plants, grain elevators, medical waste incinerators, solid waste landfills, and other industrial operations. Residents of this region—predominantly low-income African Americans—face high rates of cancer, miscarriages, birth defects, and other health problems. The multi-year project, planned by Junebug Productions (an African-American, community-based theater ensemble in New Orleans), involved partnerships between community-based theater groups and community-based organizing groups, including a Baptist church, the New Orleans Youth Action Corps, and the Gulf Coast Tenants Association, among others. The collaborations culminated in 1998 with a festival of new theater works in and around New Orleans, as well as performances, visual arts exhibits, community education projects, and a special training institute for artists, administrators, and community activists.

Civic Engagement/Dialogue Activities
The Environmental Justice Project focused significantly on long-term relationship-building between the collaborating arts and non-arts organizations. Project participants worked together in planning meetings, storytelling sessions, and theater workshops, as well as organizing public cultural events. This process stimulated intensive dialogue on the issue. Local community groups provided stories and critical feedback to the theater groups, and the theater groups created and performed the new works.

The AFP works with communities to build cultural literacy and agency and to develop permanent resources within its partner communities. In general, each AFP project is conceptualized according to the needs and desires of the community in which it takes place. The initiation, planning, and implementation of an AFP happens through community process. Over the years, AFP's approach has evolved as it has observed what most effectively achieves community goals. For example, AFP has shifted from investing project leadership in local arts-presenting organizations and universities to identifying and directing resources to community groups. This helps to ensure that the community's agenda remains foremost in shaping the direction of the project. In addition, AFP has observed that the story circle method it often used tended to attract like-minded people to discuss community issues. It increasingly seeks to expand both dialogue and arts and culture formats in order to bring together people whose opinions on an issue might be at odds.

Information Sources
Interview, Michael Hunt, executive director, American Festival Project; Schwarzman, Mat. "Drawing the Line at Place: The Environmental Justice Project." High Performance. Saxapahaw, N.C.: Art in the Public Interest, summer 1996; Cohen-Cruz, Jan. "The American Festival Project: Performing Difference, Discovering Common Ground," But Is It Art, edited by Nina Felshin. Seattle: Bay Press, 1995.