THE AjA PROJECT IS COMMITTED TO LIBERATION.

Together we foster dialogue-centered learning that empowers the voices of our community. Our Teaching Artists lead with vulnerability, providing an honest reflection of the gaps of our own experiences that help to shape the foundation of our hope for the future. We uplift our team by actively working towards the transformation of systemic oppression by evaluating the administrators, policies, procedures and programs that make up the infrastructure of our organization. We are a mirror of the communities we serve.

The AjA PROJECT BELIEVES THAT EQUITY IS THE PATHWAY TOWARDS DIGNITY.

This cannot be separated from our need to seek justice by recognizing the harms that the communities we serve have faced throughout history. We understand the significance of directly engaging in dialogue with our community in order to rebuild it as a support system that validates our struggles, fulfills our needs, and uplifts our desires. We believe that part of this pathway is to understand the documentary arts as a form of advocacy.     

THE AjA PROJECT LEADS BY EXAMPLE.

AjA acknowledges the humanity that exists within each of our students, teachers, and staff members. We center it through our daily practices that prioritize wellbeing and interpersonal growth. We treasure the documentation of our authentic narratives as an antidote for erasure and actively seek new solutions that use participatory photography as a strategy to identify access barriers and question systems of oppression in a process that invites participants to exercise agency over the way their stories are told.  

THE AjA PROJECT IS ABOUT CULTIVATING LEARNING EXPERIENCES DESIGNED FOR OUR SUCCESS. 

We nurture an educational landscape that recognizes the symbiotic nature between teacher and student. Through the facilitation of transparent and collective decision making, we are able to put the heart, mind and soul of our community first, as we continue to work towards our vision of a decentralized organization. 

THE AjA PROJECT IS THE COMMUNITY.

We are all people — including, but not limited to, those who have been subject to the systems that define us by race, ethnicity, culture, tribe, caste, disability, thinking and communication styles, socioeconomic status, age, religion, language, national origin, citizenship status, geographic region, academic access, gender identity, gender expression, and sexuality.  The AjA Project does not perpetuate the patriarchal and colonial power structures that enabled systemic racism in other institutions of power. We seek to break the power dynamics of the server and the served, the teacher and the student, and the artist and the non-artist. We own our stories and we shall tell them ourselves. 

Written collaboratively by The AjA Project team