GENESIS AT THE CROSSROADS INC
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Mission Statement
OUR MISSION: Genesis at the Crossroads mission is to build peaceful communities at the intersection of social justice, education, and the arts to foster healing. OUR VISION: A world where cross-cultural artistic expression and collaboration serve as a catalyst for interethnic dialogue and innovation, global understanding, healing, and world peace. Education and social impact business initiatives sustain and further those bridges while nurturing global leadership. Together, we foster a just world for all, honoring our collective humanity. We are a 501 (c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
About This Cause
GENESIS AT THE CROSSROADS' CHARTER OUR VALUES: We believe that everyone has a voice in world peace, and that in order for true peace to be achieved, every voice needs a safe place for expression and communal comprehension. We believe that the arts transcend cultural differences and barriers to understanding. We believe that the arts offer immediate and enduring access to our shared humanity, providing opportunities to heal deep divides. We believe that effective arts-integrated education can equip young people with communication, critical thinking, and conflict resolution skills. We believe that creative self-expression is vital to the intellectual and emotional growth of all people. We believe in both the creation of opportunities and infrastructures for the development of new work, and the presentation and preservation of existing artistic product. We believe that active participation in philanthropy is not only essential to being a well-rounded citizen locally, but also critical to positive forward momentum in the peace process globally. We believe in the cultivation of equitable social impact business development to ensure sustainable local and global community transformation. (With the community, by the community for the community.) GENESIS AT THE CROSSROADS & OUR LEGACY: THE GENESIS PEACE HUB At the intersection of social justice, education, and the arts, Genesis at the Crossroads works to build peaceful communities that foster healing. Our non-profit organization fully recognizes that healing our fractured world is indeed a precondition for building peace anywhere and everywhere, locally, and globally. We engage our audiences, participants, and artists with the arts, deepen that work through experiential education, and put it into community within a social justice framework. With 24 years of history since our founding in 1999, our cross-cultural collaborative performances and artistic presentations, educational, and humanitarian work creatively engage community members of all ages in a context of shared purpose. In this way, they become deeply involved with us for the betterment of their own surrounding communities. Genesis at the Crossroads’ peacebuilding programs, models, places, and spaces work together in an integrated fashion honoring diversity as our greatest asset. With a track record of over 175 programs to date, we have begun to institutionalize our model with our legacy piece, the Genesis Peace Hub. As a physical convener, it is mindfully designed to serve as an incubator, catalyst, and accelerator for creating peaceful communities nationally, and around the world. Sounds of Healing is the first program out of the Genesis Peace Hub. The Genesis Peace Hub’s virtual and in-person programs will add to our existing array of vibrant arts and cultural initiatives and educational offerings. This includes a Social Entrepreneurship Center to grow businesses aimed at re-imagining transformative solutions to remedy social justice issues -- an economic engine for social good. The Genesis Peace Hub will also feature a teaching farm to innovate in the agricultural space as we source the needs of the Peace Hub itself and areas surrounding it. Its Sports and Social Change program, to be added in Phase 1B, will engage youth in active programs to augment leadership and teamwork alongside physical health and well-being. Our university partners will help Genesis study creativity and leadership on the Peace Hub to effect massive change at the policy level to support equitable funding that has the capacity to expand and scale this kind of work. In the face of COVID’s staggering impact and our work in 2021 helping to evacuate people from Afghanistan, including our 2016 Genesis Academy Summer Institute graduate and others, what has emerged is the need for a re-imagined Genesis Peace Hub writ large. Though we have begun with the US (Chicago), our current strategic plan includes opening a collaborating array of sites comprising the whole Genesis Peace Hub on three other continents within three to five years to fulfill this expanded vision. (Europe - Normandy, France and Berlin, Germany; Africa - Mauritius and Ghana; Oceania - New Zealand to follow.) As issues reverberate around the world, we have opportunities to learn so much from one another and combine our collective strength for global good. GENESIS AT THE CROSSROADS’ HISTORY PERFORMANCE: THE BIRTH OF HAMSA-FEST, SAFFRON CARAVAN & THE ARTS Created in 1999, Genesis at the Crossroads made history by creating Chicago’s first cross-cultural Middle Eastern-North African (ME-NA) performing arts program in 2000, 2001 and 2003 followed by Chicago’s and the US’ first cross-cultural ME-NA outdoor festival in 2004, 2005 and 2007. In 2004 & 2005 Genesis took our cross-cultural Moroccan, Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian Gesher-Jisr Building Bridges performances, respectively to The Kennedy Center in DC, NYC, and LA. The latter performance was showcased at the United Nation’s 60th Anniversary. Founded in 2007, Saffron Caravan, our professional world music ensemble exemplifies Genesis work of arts diplomacy by uniting artists from Iran, Afghanistan, Cuba, Morocco, India, the Middle East, Europe, Brazil, Venezuela, and the US for cross-cultural collaborative performances, music education, and roundtables on music and peacebuilding. Their 2011 multi-city tour of Israel/Palestine included five performances and over 1500 student-hours of music education, including the Bedouin youth in the Negev. (The nucleus of a Junior Saffron Caravan Ensemble was created in 2011.) Continuing our international Universal Love tour in Bosnia, Saffron Caravan performed and held music education classes in Bosnia in 2015, the 20th anniversary year of the genocide in the former Yugoslavia and across the US, (Chicago & DC) ending as the Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, Art of Peace global conference’s opening performance (included roundtables). In 2017-19 their extended artist-in-residencies impacted over 1000 youth including at-risk Chicago Public School (CPS) and refugee youth. The 2018 world premiere of Journeys showcased interdisciplinary work with refugee youth dancers. In 2019, they performed in conjunction with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ Forum on Global Cities at Chicago’s historic Mayne Stage; the program at Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History was featured as part of WBEZ Worldview’s 25th Anniversary. (Chicago’s local NPR station.) Begun in 2020 as the first program out of the Genesis Peace Hub, Sounds of Healing, our musical experience focused on arts, trauma, and healing was re-tooled from our 2006 Art of Healing program. A collaboration between Saffron Caravan and Genesis Academy Summer Institute youth graduates talented in music, this program focuses on dialogue for and about healing people, our communities and the physical planet. Delivered in 2020 on a virtual platform due to COVID; the World Premiere was live, in-person at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium in 2022. Live programs for hundreds of at-risk youth from Chicago's SW side continue in 2023-25 with a companion lyrics competition and interactive, live roundtables to deepen this work. Sounds of Healing performed for the US Congress on Capitol Hill in DC in June 2023 and continues to Africa, Germany, and France. HUMANITARIAN/SOCIAL IMPACT Arm Them with Instruments, Genesis’ humanitarian initiative brings gently used instruments to children living through conflict and pairs them with professional musicians for subsidized music education. A large quantity of instruments is being directed to Chicago’s at-risk & refugee youth. Genesis forged community partnerships with local & international schools/conservatories in Morocco, The Middle East & the US. One Peace at Time Children’s Peace Quilt Workshops/Exhibitions enabled 400+ Chicago-area/ 150+ LA children to design quilts with their images for world peace for Iraqi children abroad. (Extended exhibitions at Chicago Children’s Museum, LA’s Museum of Tolerance.) Our Iraqi Plastics Art Gallery Exhibition created/configured as a social impact silent auction to benefit the cooperative of Baghdadi visual artists. EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVES: Genesis’ Love the Questions, inquiry-based salons examine the intersection of human rights/development and the role of the arts to help shape and inform a humanistic society. An annual one focuses on women’s leadership to shape the 21st century. Genesis has over 20 years of Art of Peace arts-education programs exploring personal & cultural identity through narration, script writing, and performance and a Chicago Children’s Humanities Festival commission promoting cross-cultural understanding. Components of this work were also delivered to university/MBA programs. Pre-COVID, Genesis worked on developing an academically rigorous boarding high school, The Genesis Academy for Global Leadership nested in the middle of a campus peace hub to capacity build young peacebuilders. Begun in 2015, the Genesis Academy Summer Institute continues to educate students from conflict and post-conflict regions in Heroes and Human Rights, Music and Peacebuilding, Environmental Sustainability, and Peace Journalism. In four years, Genesis quintupled its applicant pool for this annual program, and is currently drawing next-generation talent from 40 countries as well as refugee and Native communities, (Sioux, Omaha & Oneida). This program enabled us to expand the Genesis ecosystem to over 65 community partnerships now linked to our Peace Hub. In this way, the Genesis Peace Hub functions like a tech hub, only for peacebuilding. Though COVID rendered the boarding school untenable, The Genesis Peace Hub offers ample opportunities for our educational, vocational, and leadership training initiatives. Genesis' Task Force on Violence & Public Heath engages an thought leaders in mental health, restorative justice, media, arts to create a strategic roadmap and action it out of the Genesis Peace Hub. Genesis' ED teaches university-level courses on peacebuilding and placemaking.