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Ten transformative local arts projects come alive in this comics-illustrated training manual for youth leaders and teachers. This energetic guidebook demonstrates the enormous power of art in grassroots social change. It presents proven models of community-based arts programs, plus techniques, discussion questions, and plentiful resources.This improved second edition includes updated resources and guidelines, along with a new comic art introduction by illustrator Keith Knight.

The Los Angeles-based cartoonist and Graphic storyteller is the creator of three popular comic strips, The Knight Life, The K Chronicles, and (th)ink, and is part of a new generation of artists raised on hip-hop who infuse their work with urgency, edge, humor, satire, politics, and race.

His work has appeared in various publications worldwide, includingthe the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Mad Magazine, Salon.com, ESPN the Magazine, L.A. Weekly, The Funny Times, and World War 3 Illustrated. Knight's work as a media literacy educator with at-risk youth has been nationally recognized. Knight is also an award-winning cartoonist, rapper, and hip-hop musician.

Three of his comix were the basis of an award-winning live-action short film, Jetzt Kommt Ein Karton, in Germany, and his original comic strip art has appeared in museums and galleries worldwide. He has published several books, including The Knight Life: "Chivalry Ain't Dead" (2010), The Complete K Chronicles (2008), and Are We Feeling Safer Yet? A (Th) Ink Anthology(2007).

Knight's comic The K Chronicles won the 2007 Harvey Award for Best Syndicated Comic Strip and the 2007 Glyph Award for Best Comic Strip. In 2010, he received the Comic Con Inkpot Award for Career Achievement in Comics. Utne Reader named Knight one of ten "cartoonists to watch" in a special issue.

Schwarzman has been a practitioner, instructor, student, and writer in the field of community-based arts since 1985. He is founder of the Crossroads Project for Art, Learning and Community and directs the Creative Forces Youth Educational Theater Corps, which employs public high school students as peer educators and leaders in the rebuilding of New Orleans's educational support system. He holds a Ph.D in Transformative Learning, founded Urban Arts in Oakland, California, and chaired the Arts & Social Change Program at New College of California. Schwarzman also studied theater with John O'Neal, John Malpede, Fred Curchack, Corey Fischer, and others, and has been a member of ensembles in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New Orleans.

He has also helped establish arts education programs for teens, college students, and adults across the country; and has mentored youth leaders across the country in community-based arts education. He holds a doctorate in learning and change in human systems from the California Institute for Integral Studies and a PhD in transformative learning. Beginner's Guide to Community-Based Arts is his first book. He lives in the best place on earth (New Orleans) with the best woman (Mimi Zarsky) and canine (Lundi Gras). Schwarzman directs the Crossroads Center at Xavier University, which trains youth leaders nationwide in community-based arts activism.

Ellen Forney has been a professional cartoonist/ illustrator since 1992. She teaches comics at Seattle's Cornish College of the Arts, paints large-scale acrylic work for solo and group shows, and is an avid swimmer and yoga practitioner. Forney's most recent book, I Love Led Zeppelin, is her third and biggest comic-book project to date. The drawings and stories between the covers span thirteen years of her work as a cartoonist and originally were published in the Stranger, the L.A. Weekly, and BUST magazine. Forney grew up in Philadelphia and currently lives in Seattle.

From 1986 to 2004, Lily Yeh served as the cofounder, executive director, and lead artist of The Village of Arts and Humanities, a nonprofit organization with the mission to build community through art, learning, land transformation, and economic development located in North Philadephia. Under her leadership of eighteen years, the summer park building project developed into an organization with twenty full-time and part-time employees, hundreds of volunteers, and a $1.3 million budget. The Village became a multi-faceted community building organization with activities such as after-school and weekend programs, greening land transformation, housing renovation, theater, and economic development initiatives. The center works on local, national, and international projects, and is a leading model of community revitalizations throughout the country. Today, the Village of Arts and Humanities serves thousands of low-income people every year.

Yeh's vision has rippled out far beyond North Philadelphia's borders. She inspires and collaborates with prison inmates to create beauty and art, and does the same with thousands of adults and children who live in some of the world's most broken communities. She has collaborated with residents of the Korogocho slum near Nairobi to transform a barren churchyard with murals and sculptures and traveled to Ghana, Ecuador, the Ivory Coast, and the Republic of Georgia to work on similar projects. Her most recent endeavor is the Rwanda Healing Project, in which she worked with hundreds of children and families to transform their bleak village into a place of beauty and joy.

Born in China, Yeh immigrated to the United States in the early 1960s to attend the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Fine Arts. A successful painter and professor at Philadelphia's University of the Arts, Yeh traveled to Beijing in 1989 to show her work at the Central Institute of Fine Art. There, she witnessed the tragic events of Tianamen Square. Over the 1980s, Yeh gradually realized that being an artist "is not just about making art... It is about delivering the vision one is given... and about doing the right thing without sparing oneself." She continues pursuing her vision through her new organization, Barefoot Artists, Inc., which teaches residents and artists how to replicate the Village model in devastated communities around the world.

(Thanks to Americans Who Tell the Truth for parts of Lily's biography)