josevadi:

think of the movements that started out of the trunk of a car and later filled skyscrapers. 

there are few times you can stare at a building and fully know the slivers of history those four walls housed. simply put, this is where a lot of us learned to write. to perform. to push ourselves. to talk shit. to edit multimedia. to debate heavily and jump on the line dividing argument from rage. to apologize. to be ourselves. some of us are touring the country now. some are in graduate art programs. some have stopped writing and performing entirely. 

i ended up walking passed the old Youth Speaks office on Folsom b/w 17th & 18th Streets yesterday afternoon after collecting audio/video footage from BAVC in Potrero Hill for a new collaboration I’m directing between Youth Speaks and The Center for Investigative Reporting called The Off/Page Project. i introduced the project last november and work on its creation/launch daily, including interviewing some of our young poets about the under reported socioeconomic/political issues most important to them. 

in creating the Off/Page at the age of twenty-eight, my mind drifts back to getting off BART, walking down 16th, and writing poems into the evening on those shitty fold-out chairs in the middle of the Mission, learning about Paulo Freire’s pedagogical models and the poetry of Audre Lorde, amongst as diverse a slice of Bay Area youth as you could imagine. and mind-numbingly amazing mentors. Bamuthi alone blew enough minds to inspire, quite literally, a generation of writers, performers, directors, and educators.

and what if those walls didn’t exist? how many voices would be stuck in the throats of short-tempered, outlet-less youth? being there on Folsom was as much about writing poetry as it was talking shit, debating hip hop, and being really fucking loud. and for all that madness to be not just accepted, but to be housed - living and breathing - in a space where doors never close.