Commonwealth Word provides communities with expert teaching artists who lead workshops and facilitate language-based art projects that use forms such as music and film in conjunction with creative writing.

For school classrooms, these projects promote creative thinking and cross-curricular literacy to fulfill the particular needs of each participating community, including meeting Common Core standards. In these student workshops, CW provides young people the instruction, inspiration, and support they need to explore the nascent artists within in ways that create concrete proof of the emotional, intellectual, and academic benefits of arts education. A thriving, democratic culture needs a citizenry of creative, critical, and independent thinkers, and such a citizenry does not come from a system that prioritizes standardized testing and primarily focuses on STEM subjects.

In service to the broader American community, CW’s workshops and language-based, interdisciplinary art projects provide outlets for individual and collaborative creative expression. Public, participatory art is a public good. It exercises creative and critical thinking, promotes self-reflection and empathy, and actively encourages citizens to think of themselves as shapers—not simple consumers—of culture. Creative expression and cultural contributions should not be reserved only for the wealthy and the corporate. They are human rights.