See YA/YA in print in "Beginner’s Guide to Community Based Arts"

Beginner’s Guide to Community Based Arts (New Village Press, 2005) is a comics-illustrated training manual that visits ten communities across the country that are revitalizing themselves through art.

Writer Mat Schwarzman and nationally syndicated cartoonist Keith Knight take the reader on an entertaining and informative journey to see how art can effect social change, ending in New Orleans with a local arts-based youth development group: YA/YA! The final chapter is about and by YA/YA, with illustrations and narrative by youth artist Courtney Collins.

The book has evolved into the Crossroads Project, a national initiative to infuse community-based arts into public schools. Recently, Crossroads Project received funds from the Ford Foundation to help develop, manage, and document demonstration projects in the New Orleans public school system.