53: Garden Battles and River Rituals: How Felicia Young Heals Communities with Art and Activism

Felicia Young uses arts-based strategies and tools to spur community action. She has helped save hundreds of New York's community gardens, clean up a sacred river in India, stymie one of America’s most powerful politicians, bring attention to local solutions to the climate crises, and most importantly bring people together to make real change. BIOFelicia Young is a social action artist and the Founder/Executive Director of Earth Celebrations, a non-profit organization since 1991 engaging communities to generate ecological and social change through the arts. For the past 30 years she has applied the the arts to build community, collaboration and environmental action on climate change, water quality, river restoration, waste management, and the preservation of species, habitats, nature, gardens, parks, and a healthy urban environment. She has pioneered cultural strategies utilizing collaborative arts to build broad-based coalitions and diverse sector partnerships with local organizations, academic institutions, government agencies, schools and community residents to work together, develop solutions and mobilize action to achieve common goals and ecological, policy and social change.Her social action art projects include a 15-year grass-roots effort and annual theatrical pageant that led to the preservation of hundreds of community gardens in New York City and a project to engage community on restoration efforts of the Hudson River and impacts of climate change. She then applied these cultural strategies to build an international collaborative effort to restore the Vaigai River in Madurai South India, in a severe crisis due to pollution and the drying effects of climate change. Felicia's current Ecological City: Cultural & Climate Solutions Action Project engages community on climate solution initiatives throughout the community gardens, neighborhood and waterfront on the Lower East Side of New York City, and their importance to city and global climate challenges.As a native 3rd generation New Yorker, she has deep roots in the City of New York, as well as much inspiration from the festivals, ceremonies, and mythic dramas from her mother’s native land of India.Felicia Young has also developed a course " Art, Ecology and Community" for Princeton University. She has BA in Art History from Skidmore College and a MA degree in Performance Studies from New York University. Notable MentionsMetropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met",[a] is the largest art museum in the Western Hemisphere. Its permanent collection contains over two million works,[1] divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the 

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