Æffect App for Creative Action

Civic activism amongst student populations is at an all time high. Faced with critical, intersecting issues including gun violence, systemic racism, and climate catastrophe, young people want to take action. Yet good intentions, while essential, don’t necessarily yield effective results. For civic action to have an impact, first it needs to move people emotionally, and then it needs to capitalize on those emotions to move people into action. It needs to have both emotional affect and impactful effect -- or, as we call  the combination of affect and effect: æffect. Too often, civic engagement – particularly among younger advocates – fails on one or both of these fronts. Actions either take the form of pure emotional expression or recycled forms of civic engagement from the past, in both cases not taking into consideration current goals, concrete objectives, desired impact on audiences, ethical considerations, and how to evaluate the impact of the civic action in order to reflect, learn, iterate – and succeed.

Our solution includes an interactive, web-based creative civic activism app and curriculum that together guide students and their instructors to create, implement, and measure affective and effective civic action. Used within a tailored college curriculum that teaches students about principles and case studies of “æffective” artistic activism,  the app enables learners to bridge civic knowledge with impactful action by building their skills for organizing and implementing plans for creative  and innovative interventions in the civic sphere. The app and accompanying curriculum use a query-based pedagogical methodology we have developed at the Center for Artistic Activism that guides students through a self-reflective process of critical thinking and participatory, hands-on learning.  

At the Center for Artistic Activism we've been using our Æeffect App prototype with voting rights advocates and others working for social justice for more than five years.  What we’ve seen is more focused, more creative, and more æffective advocacy projects. In order to expand this app to new populations, we need to adapt our prototype significantly: make it more user-friendly, more information-rich with historical and contemporary case studies, more sharable through social media and, critically: create an accompanying curriculum to build the knowledge necessary to be an æffective civic actor.  Our goal is to help students create æffective civic action projects as part of their university education, and – perhaps more importantly – carry these skills and practices beyond the classroom as independent learners and changemakers throughout their lives.

The Æffect App for Creative Action will directly benefit individuals and communities who otherwise often lack access to real-world civic engagement opportunities, with a particular emphasis on college students and their teachers. We have identified key needs among these communities, including inspiration, specific tools for creating change, and a community of like-minded innovators. The Æffect App aims to address these by providing users with case studies that inspire them to think creatively about advocacy efforts, as well as concrete tools they can use to make real change. The app will also foster a community of peers and experts, creating a communal learning environment where users learn from each other and receive ongoing support and motivation. Moreover, our app will enable users to access improved civic action learning in various contexts, with educator support for classroom-based approaches, and community-building opportunities for out-of-school, community-based approaches. It will help learners acquire key civic skills and knowledge, including assessing the credibility of information, engaging across differences, understanding one's agency, and engaging with issues of power, privilege, and injustice. 

Overall, our app will empower learners to bridge civic knowledge with taking action by understanding real-world problems, building networks, organizing collective action plans, and exploring civic engagement careers. By providing these features, our solution will directly and meaningfully improve the lives of underserved communities, especially youth, by supporting their civic engagement, increasing their agency, and helping them to take effective action toward positive social change.

The Center for Artistic Activism has supported thousands of social justice advocates all over the world. We are creative advocacy professionals who have worked with a range of communities, and we know what it takes to be impactful while being attuned to local contexts. We are experts in user experience and we recognize what it takes to create an engaging app and curriculum. We are educators and we understand what other educators need to put civic education into practice. Since 2020, we have focused on supporting civic skills and participation, especially supporting communities that are facing the highest barriers to exercising their freedom to vote in the US. 

We’ve helped over 1,000 people develop more creative and impactful civic engagement projects, by helping them identify their goals for their communities, develop specific objectives for supporting their civic engagement, clarify whom they’re trying to reach and why, implement innovative ideas, and then assess their self-determined success and continue to iterate on them. We’ve focused especially on reaching and supporting youth and the youth vote, working closely with students – and their teachers and champions – in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Ohio, and Kansas.

By working with so many people in such a concentrated period of time, we’ve seen the common challenges that communities are facing when trying to take effective action in support of exercising their fundamental freedoms – and how these challenges are not being addressed in more formal educational settings. The Æffect App is based specifically on this experience with and in support of these communities. Our audiences have told us they need:

• Inspiration: Many people say that their work was transformed after collaborating with us, because we provide insight on innovative advocacy efforts. We include case studies we’ve worked on within the Æffect App to support this inspiration. 

• Specific Tools: Inspiration is wonderful, but people need tools to cause real change. The Æffect App provides those tools, and over the past 5 years it’s been used, for free, to great impact around the world. 

• A Community of Like-Minded Innovators: A passionate group of peers can help us overcome challenges and see new paths. The Æffect App will allow for this community sharing, bringing together people across our networks so they can learn from each other and from other experts.

Over the past year we have supported exceptionally æffective civic engagement projects at the University of Wisconsin-Miluwakee, St. Norbert College (near Green Bay, WI), the Ohio State University, Arizona State University, New York University, and we have worked with students at colleges across Kansas and high schools in Philadelphia and New York.  Feedback we’ve gotten from students includes: 

“Really cool and super engaging”

“It showed me how to think outside of the box and think twice before deeming something impossible.”

“It opened my mind to creative ways to activate people’s heads, hearts, and hands to make positive change in the world.”

“Truly you all have helped us and this campaign more than you know, and we appreciate it so much.”

We are applying to Solve in order to partner with design and programming resources that can help us extend and adapt our existing prototype of the Æffect App. We need to greatly improve the user experience - make it easier to navigate, shareable with others, visually engaging,  and better suited to the community of students and instructors it will serve. We also hope to tap into resources that will help us monitor and evaluate the impact of the App and accompanying curriculum.

Our solution is innovative in multiple ways. By introducing creativity as a key component in civic action, we are addressing the often neglected but critical affective dimension of effective social change. The App also honors and elevates the individual user’s creative and cultural expertise as being key to causing æffective change in their communities.  

Assessment is also frequently done by outsiders to a project and done only at the very end in order to determine “success.” The Æffect App is built around an assessment methodology developed at the Center for Artistic Activism that makes evaluation part of the learning and doing process form the start of a civic action project and follows it through all the way to the iteration of the next one. Furthermore, our query-based model of learning engagement puts the creator at the center of their own planning and assessment, providing both ownership and self-training.

This work will intersect with a bigger Creative Civic Engagement on Campus (CCEC) program that we’re leading, which is planned on the following timeline: 

• Expand on existing partnerships with universities, instructors, and students working in civic engagement

• Adapt the Æffect App prototype to the target community and further develop curriculum with academic partners (current)

• Faculty Fellowships (Fall 2023 - Spring 2024), including curriculum, training and assessment for professors and adjuncts.

• App and curriculum testing and refinements, outreach, training and resources for professors (Spring 2024)

• Rollout: App and curriculum and outreach for hundreds of students and dozens of institutions (Fall 2024 - Spring 2025)

• Resource Library with curriculum variations, readings, exercises, and lessons.

• Assessment: Analysis and distribution of results, including lessons learned. Speaking at conferences, and publishing papers. (Spring 2025-Fall 2025)

For the next five years we plan to:

• Revise app and curriculum based on pilot project

• Expand to additionalother universities, ideally reaching at least 25 states

• Make both app and curriculum available to general public as Creative Commons 

• Generate scholarly article based upon the pilot

At the basic level we will measure progress in terms of:

• Identifying needs of target through collaborative research with instructors and students

• Adaptation of the App to our target community’s needs

• Creation of accompanying curriculum for use in classrooms

• Successful use in a college classroom setting 

• Generation of more creative and impactful student civic action projects in the classroom setting, with implementation at the campus level

• Increased number of collaborative civic engagement projects with communities and students.

More broadly, we are looking to impact a generation of civic advocates to imagine and execute creative forms of civic engagement that engage their audiences on an affective level, and through rigorous planning and assessment maximizing material effect.

We believe that change must happen at a cultural as well as  material level. People need to think and feel that change is possible – and then act on those thoughts and feelings – to make concrete changes. We also believe that change happens when people most impacted by that change are central to the making of that change, drawing upon their own knowledge, skills, and passions. Yet change does not happen only because of strong passions and good intentions – it takes planning and reflection and learning. Change also happens when you can help young people learn to become æffective changemakers so that they can make change over the course of their whole lives.

The Æffect App and accompanying curriculum empowers and guides young changemakers. Its query-based model draws upon, develops and sharpens their own expertise and experiences. By building upon creativity it helps users make projects that speak to hearts and minds, resulting in culture shifts. By emphasizing concrete objectives it ensures this cultural shift is directed to material change. 

Since we are interested in both the change in young people's practices and the change their projects will have, we will be studying both cultural shift and material effect, internally amongst students and teachers using the App and curriculum, and externally amongst the population they hope to impact through their civic action.

Our solution is app-based. Part of the beauty of the Æffect App prototype is its simplicity. It is built on top of Twine, an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories, which makes the app easy to open up and modify in order to fit the needs of the population we will be working with. These needs will be assessed through preliminary interviews and observations with both instructors and students of our target communities.

Our team is 74% women, 43% BIPOC. Our commitment to inclusion across race, gender, age, religion, sexuality, identity, and experience is a core part of who we are, our founding ideals, and the world we’re striving for.  We are a small organization with a diverse Board of Directors and Board of Advisors that serves diverse populations. We have a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiative at the Center for Artistic Activism in order to devote time and resources to developing goals and plans to ensure our internal culture and our external mission are as anti-racist as possible. While racial justice has been part of our mission and practice since our beginnings, we embrace a continual re-evaluation of internal and external practices in order to ensure we follow through on our commitments. A few of the actions that we take include: We lift up Black, Indigenous, and People of Color voices and leadership as mentors in our work. We call on internal and external experts to support conversations on antiracism, both as individuals and organizationally. We seek out Black and Indigenous-led organizations as partners and collaborators. We commit to prioritizing diversity in our hiring and recruitment processes.

The Center for Artistic Activism is a nonprofit 501c3 organization. As a mission-driven organization, we work to provide training, research and resources to organizations and individuals to increase their social impact through creativity. Our key audiences are: staff at advocacy organizations and arts organizations interested in social impact, funders of those organizations, and individual artists and activists looking to increase the impact of their advocacy work. C4AA provides services, in the form of trainings and consultation, and information in the form of research, publications, training materials, guidebooks, videos and other information crafted for our audiences. People come to us when they find that their traditional advocacy methods aren’t working the way they’d like, or when they’re struggling to connect with the stories and cultures of the communities they would like to serve. Our research, training and materials have helped thousands of people around the world to improve the impact of their activism work, and helped them as individuals increase their motivation and joy in the work.

Our nonprofit organization brings in revenue through donations, grants and selling services, in particular research services, strategy and assessment advising and training workshops. Our revenue has increased over 300% since 2018, with growth across all revenue types. We plan that this project will continue to be funded through a combination of revenue types, including from unrestricted donations from individual funders and family foundations, grants through foundations, and through fees-for-services work for advocacy organizations that want a custom version of this app for their assessment purposes.

Our work training and teaching on civic engagement and creative activism has received over $1.5M between 2020 and now, from foundations, individual donors, and fees-for-services work.  Our work specifically on the app has been supported through donations from individuals, including from our vast pool of over 2000 alumni, and through family foundations.