Simple, Loud & Colorful

A Workshop Template to Mobilize Artists in Support of Local Community Activist and Advocacy Organizations.

Artists are a force multiplier for social change – but many arts organizations struggle with how to activate that power. Simple, Loud & Colorful is a proven, plug-and-play workshop that equips presenters and arts champions to mobilize artists in strategic, ethical partnership with local advocacy groups, creating actions that break through, get attention, and win.

If your organization believes culture shapes democracy, this is how you show it.

Why Simple, Loud & Colorful is needed in this moment

Creative skills are powerful tools for social change. In our current polycrisis, which threatens the creative sector along with our communities, country, and world at large, arts professionals and practitioners have unique capacities and could play a vital role. However, all too often, artists lack the guidance, support, and connections to utilize their skills with intention, strategy, and in close collaboration with the movements they serve.

Simple, Loud & Colorful changes that. It is a sharing and training session for arts professionals, creative practitioners, and their supporters. Through real-world examples, insights from local experts, and constructive discussion, the gathering helps participants understand how to use their talents to support social justice organizations and advance movement work in concrete, effective ways.

Attendees learn how to collaborate with local organizations effectively and ethically, use public performance and creative practice, and amplify the most pressing needs of communities on the ground. Participants also join a growing national network of artistic activists sharing strategies, ideas, and practical tools for engaging in social justice advocacy in their own cities and towns.

About the Organizers

Simple, Loud & Colorful was created by staff and volunteers at The People vs. Project 2025, Center for Artistic Activism, and Theatre Communications Group. It builds off of The People vs. Project 2025’s great success supporting local grassroots organizing chapters. They found that, based on their performing arts experiences, they could greatly help those groups’ events: by creating simple and strong visuals, loud and clear messages, and colorful and striking actions that got more people to engage, more press to pay attention, and more impact in their communities.

The People vs. Project 2025 brought in the Center for Artistic Activism, which has trained thousands of people all over the world in how to bring strategic creativity to social justice work. Theatre Communications Group also joined, bringing their expertise supporting scores of theater professionals, students, and audiences across a range of arts and activism issues.

Together, we ran the event in January 2026 in NYC, to great success. Watch our recording here:

Key Partners

The event was a collaboration across arts, activism, and artistic activism groups. As the goal was to support artists collaborating with advocacy organizations, we knew we wanted to include people from advocacy organizations who could speak to the best ways arts professionals can support movement work. We also wanted to hear from artists who had a strong background successfully and ethically collaborating with advocacy organizations.

For our event, we brought in a member of a local Indivisible chapter and featured two artists working in close collaboration with additional local social justice groups.

Our Offering

We want more arts professionals and practitioners to gain the skills and connection to support local advocacy organizations. We believe that by coming together, we can provide essential aid to social justice groups. Together, we can – and will – win.

To support more Simple, Loud & Colorful trainings, we are offering the following template to help you run your own version of the event in your community. We also want to support you in realizing your event – details about that are below.

Agenda Template

Time Frame	Content
0:00 - 0:05	Event hosts or sponsors welcome everyone into the space and share the reason for coming together. Essentially: “We care about creativity, and we care about democracy.”
0:05 - 0:10	Overview about current threats facing artists and creative communities because of the Trump Administration and Project 2025., Plus sharing Americans for the Arts / Arts Action Fund demands.
0:10 - 0:12	Facilitator lays out the plan for the day. If time will be tight, it could be useful to acknowledge that at the top: “We’re going to do a lot of things today, in a short period of time. Our hope is to provide you with multiple ideas and approaches for combining arts and activism to make real change in this moment, and for each of you to leave here with a concrete action to take.”
0:12 - 0:22	Small group sharing. Because the people in the room will likely be wonderful, impressive, and experienced at either art, activism, or both, it’s great to start by giving a chance for people to share about themselves and get to know at least a few others in the room. People split up into groups of three (with people they didn’t already know) and went through these prompts: Name, pronouns, where you’re from, what you do How you’ve combined art and activism in the past, if you have What’s worked and what hasn’t What you don’t know and want to
0:22 - 0:25	Everyone comes back together. Facilitator takes a few very short comments from participants about something they noticed that came up repeatedly in their group, or something they heard someone else say that they want more people to know.
0:25 - 0:45	2-3 examples of successful actions where artists have supported advocacy organizations or other activist endeavors and realized concrete wins. This is a great opportunity for representative(s) from your local partner group to share about one of their more creative or artist-led actions. Note that it’s very important that these example actions were tied to very clear social justice outcomes (e.g., mobilizing a certain number of voters, defeating a specific bill, fixing real local infrastructure problems) and were not simply a creative act about a social justice issue.
0:45 - 0:55	Opportunity to hear from the audience about their reaction to the examples.
0:55 - 1:20	Panel featuring the advocacy organization partner and artists working with local social justice groups. This was a rapid-fire panel lasting 20 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of audience Q&A. Panelists answered these questions: What has been most successful for artists and advocacy organizations working together? What have you seen been least successful? What tips do you have for people in arts fields for getting involved? What opportunities do you see coming up for involvement?
1:20 - 1:45	Breakout groups. We broke up by field (our groups were: presenters & managers, artist service organizations, artists, activists & advocacy groups), and panelists and facilitators led the breakout group that best matched their experience. The groups had these prompts: What skills do you bring from your arts (or other) background that are applicable to advocacy work? How do you want to use these skills in the coming year? What or whom might you want to work with? What do you want to see happen? What do you need to be able to get involved in the ways you identified? What are barriers to your involvement? What are things that would help?
1:45 - 1:55	Groups come back together and share out key takeaways from each breakout. They also all share at least one concrete thing they’ll be doing next to continue and support the work.
1:55 - 2:00	Closing messages, reiterate Americans for the Arts Demands collective next steps and plans, and spaces to go to continue the conversation more informally/off site. (A great set of resources is available at c4aa.org. Also activist tool kits for artists and cultural workers are available HERE.) We will also include a closing survey to learn how the event landed with folks – we highly recommend a way to gather feedback to inform future efforts.

Tiers of Support
We invite you to take this framework and use it as you wish. We are also able to offer support as you do:

Advising
We can provide expert guidance to help you plan the most far-reaching and impactful event. We can answer questions and give advice about content to include, examples to feature, local practitioners to invite, and more.

Cost: Free! We want to help you run the best event without any barriers on our end. Reach out to the Center for Artistic Activism’s Programs Director Rachel Gita Karp at [email protected] to talk.

Facilitating Online
If you’d like the Center for Artistic Activism to help you lead an online session, we are happy to provide that service. (The session really benefits from being in person, but of course doing things online can be much easier.) We can meet with you to help plan the session, adapting the above agenda to best suit your needs, and bring our extensive facilitation experience to your community.

Cost: $500. This includes facilitating the session and supporting with 2 hours of planning meetings

Facilitating In Person
If you’d like expert facilitation for your in-person event, we are also very happy to provide that.

Cost: $1,000. This includes facilitating the session, 2 hours of planning meetings, and helping with set-up and breakdown. All travel fees (transportation, lodging, per diem) must be covered in addition to the fee. All logistics must be determined and run by the organizers.