About this Service

August 24-29th, 2026

Calling creatives, genre-crossers, people for whom the title “artist” rings the bell of recognition. How deep is your creative well? And could you use some company?

As artists we know that our gifts as dreamers, creators, visionaries, healers, clowns, conveners and provocateurs are urgently needed. Paradoxically, we also know that urgent times require slowing down. Nonlinearity. Making room for the unexpected. Tending that nervous system.

You are invited to the 2026 Arts for Social Change Jam. With an emphasis on belonging and moving at the speed of trust, we’ll play, witness, dream, create, and rest.

That is the intention and the dream of the 2026 Arts for Social Change Jam. We are here as fellow artist-activists, committed to a vibrantly just future and enjoying our lives along the way – and we can’t do it without your particular brand of magic. Come and fill your cup.

About this Lister

Your facilitator team is comprised of professional songwriters and musicians, dancers, clowns, illustrators, and arts therapists.

All of us have creative practices that strain against compartmentalization. All of us have 10+ years actively facilitating creative support groups. We represent a diversity of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and discipline.

Austin Willacy

Austin Willacy (he/him) is a community organizer who uses music as a tool for peacebuilding with a focus on environmental, racial, and gender justice. He is an award-winning singer/songwriter with 4 CDs and 3 EPs to his name and a veteran member of The House Jacks, a pioneering a cappella group with whom he has produced 10 full-length albums and completed multiple world tours.

Austin was awarded the 2023-2024 EnPax Arts Fellowship and shared his work at the Third International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding in The Hague. Austin has won 5 Positive Music Awards for his songwriting and has performed with icons such as Bonnie Raitt and the Doobie Brothers as well as Jem, Vienna Teng, Rachael Yamagata and Amos Lee.
Austin organizes and facilitates Jams for YES! YES! Jams are events that help individual changemakers deepen their root system, and grow in consciousness and self-care, so they can become more healthy and effective, and restore balance and well-being. He is a veteran member of the North America Jam and one of the co-founders of the Black Diaspora Jam, the Men Raised as Men Jam, and the Arts for Social Change Jams in the US, Turkey, and India.

Austin is the co-Artistic Director of the Thrive Choir, an Oakland-based group that was born to sing a vision of connection, healing, and justice into being. For the past 26 years, Austin has directed ‘Til Dawn, Youth in Arts’ award-winning teen a cappella group that empowers youth to find their voices in many ways. Inspired by his youth work, the Apple Store in San Francisco hired him to do an Apple Music Lab on Finding Your Creative Voice and Songwriting Basics on the iPad.

Chetna Mehta

Chetna Mehta (she/they) is a granddaughter of Indian and South African diasporas. As a multidisciplinary artist, facilitator, and creativity doula, she weaves somatic healing, decolonial/ecological frameworks, and expressive arts as liberatory practice. She is the founder of Mosaiceye Collective, creating resources, programs, and spaces where women and non-binary changemakers can fiercely soften into trust, play, transformation, and expansive collaboration. Chetna is the author and illustrator of The I Am Devoted Playbook, Cultivating Abundance Mentality Coloring Book and the new Cultivating Compassion in Times of Fascism Coloring Book.

Nandita Batheja

Nandita (she/they) is a facilitator, somatics practitioner, and artist who works across sectors, advocating for liberation and creative being. She feels honored to collaborate with organizations and local communities to support collective healing and conflict transformation. Nandita is also newly a co-director (with LiZhen!) of the School of Unusual Life Learning, which teaches the somatics of living, aging and dying to better support our collective through these tumultuous times. Apart from her organizational life, Nandita loves leading InterPlay, an improvisational creative arts practice that unlocks the wisdom of the body.

Annie-Rose London

My name is Annie-Rose London (they/she pronouns) and I create raucous experiences of joy and collaboration to counteract systems of oppressive mind control. I’m a multi-faith spiritual director, activist, and performer. My practice consists of several lively branches. Sometimes I’m wearing my organizational consultant hat – serving over 400 organizations as a strategist and facilitator. Sometimes it’s the Jewish leader hat – I’m co-founder of the queer, Diasporist School of Shehechiyanu. And often it’s the community clown hat – facilitating improvisation workshops and concocting interdisciplinary burlesque performance. Always I’m guided by my ancestral lineages, dedication to liberatory praxis, and reverence for life.

Background and Expertise

For over 10 years we’ve held nurturing containers where artists can decompartmentalize and exist beyond our bios. Yes World!, the organizational home of the Arts Jam, has created anti-oppressive transformative spaces for over 35 years.