We arrive with grief and protest, rooted in the firm belief that all people deserve safety, dignity, respect, and sovereignty. We resist Islamophobia, antisemitism, and violence against all people and their livelihoods. We firmly oppose genocide everywhere. Our practices in the classroom and operations reflect this commitment, and our internal supports and resources for teachers and students abundantly predate this proclamation.

As educators of conscience, we curate spaces for young people to grapple with the realities of the world we live in, and the dreams for the world they want and deserve to live in through artmaking. We encourage civic engagement in service of a more just present and future. We call on educators to heed student demands to learn about Palestine. We are committed to affirming our students’ voices, denouncing the censorship of their calls for an end to ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank, and creating opportunities for them to hone their critical thinking, media literacy, and empathy skills so they can discern world events for themselves.

We believe in the power of young people to envision and shape liberatory futures, and cannot ignore the violent loss of so many children that were an irreplaceable part of that future, and now won’t be in it to reconstruct it for the better.

As arts and culture workers in the United States, our taxes are channeled into artillery being used in a genocide against Palestinian civilians, artists, and press at schools, hospitals, and their homes, and as such we accept our particular responsibility to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and we urge all leaders to do the same. We also call for an end to the siege on Gaza to allow unimpeded access to food, fuel, medicine, and other necessities for life to move freely between Gaza and the outside world.

As part of the non-profit sector with precarious funding we understand the risk of living into our values and opposing genocide, even though doing so is aligned with our work and mission. We will continue to take action against genocide and commit to collaborating with other youth-serving organizations to expand and sustain our impact. We have faith that our community understands the critical moment we are living in, and that they too want to see an end to the heartbreaking suffering and destruction.

– Performing Arts Workshop’s Anti Racism Committee