The Good Foot Arts Collective “NO Excuses” campaign advocates for safety and empowers youth to build an environment of NO tolerance for violence, sexual misconduct, toxic behavior or abuse in BIPOC youth communities and in the Hip Hop, street dance community.
Our target audience are BIPOC youth ages 12-24, young adults and the Hip Hop community. The campaign is led by an advisory panel comprising people from local, national and international BIPOC communities: youth, educators, professional artists, prevention services professionals and The Good Foot board members and interns. The panel collaborates with a Seattle-based graphic designer and illustrator, Chris Kaku, to create logos and character illustrations, which will be used to design two educational Flipbooks and a prevention training curriculum manual that will be resourced online and in print.
We want to contribute our intersectional expertise about Hip Hop and violence prevention to empower Hip Hop leaders and youth communities to effect a dynamic cultural shift and create and support safe spaces free of violence, sexual misconduct, toxic behavior, abuse, predatory motives and grooming.
Thank you to our 2021 Advisory Panelists for the deep development and design of the Training Manual and Flipbook:
Ayiana Hernandez-Kiehn, Kymberli Owens, Ajani Kemp, Jermaine Ly, Kaycee Casio, Asia Yu, PoeOne, Ozay Moore, Laura Rice, Will Goodman, Angelique Davis and Cindy Perrin.
A big shout out to our Board, interns and volunteers for their commitment to this campaign.
↓ Click below to listen ↓
No one can tell the story of our youth more than the youth themselves. We recognize that youth are given few spaces to speak their minds and share through their eyes. Here, we are cultivating an environment where youth can share as they see fit. This youth-led podcast unlocks the inside perspective of BIPOC youth in south Seattle. Journey through their experiences, hardships, and lessons they had to learn as they navigate growing up, finding who they are, and understanding how the community shapes them.
There are many resources for young people but not enough for BIPOC youth that they can relate to. In the NO Excuses Campaign, youth are leading design and development of the educational flipbooks, including content creation for story topics, character-building for illustrations and creating consistent themes that are understandable, presentable, relatable and appealing to their peers. The flipbooks will serve as tools for community education and to advocate for violence prevention for the BIPOC community, with language that is familiar to them and characters that look like them.
Flipbooks will be available online (click below) through our website and social media. We will make the print copies available to community youth organizers and the hip hop community and will campaign for community volunteers to distribute them for free. They will also be included in the scholars’ prevention booklets through our CLAY program.
Training
Manual
Violence prevention work is nothing new to the Hip Hop community. The origins of Hip Hop started in the 1970s as an effort to take gang violence off the streets. The fruit of these labors birthed a community that crossed cultural boundaries, giving voice to marginalized people otherwise silenced by systemic racism and discrimination. The community strove to honor cultures and celebrate humanity. Additionally, during this time and throughout history, women and youth who were and are typically overlooked remained at the forefront of violence prevention. The NO Excuses campaign recognizes the people and the work that have come before it. We want to continue adding to the prevention language and tools the Hip Hop community has been fighting for since the beginning.
Sign-up today for a training with your crew, organization, studio or get on the list for a community workshop training.