About Street Works

Street Works is a group of artists and neighbors helping our communities creatively connect, collaborate, and take action on the issues that matter in their lives. We organize street festivals, mutual aid efforts, and cultural research that serve justice and grow into long-term neighborhood projects.

We believe artists have a role in strengthening democracy, not just by telling stories, but by co-designing ways for communities to build power, care for each other, and transform broken systems. The street is both a canvas and a symbol of what shared ownership and joyful public life can look like when people have space to shape it.

Image: 2024 Street Work Earth. Próxima Tierra. By Kaleidospace. Photo by Brentton Wilson.

Why

The communities we work with are too often shut out of civic life by policies, systems, and lifelong messages that say we don’t belong, because of race, income, birthplace, and more. These messages — combined with systems that keep us overworked, tangled in bureaucracy, and struggling to get by — drain the willpower we need to fight for a place in civic life.

Before action, we need hope and experiences of belonging that expand what feels possible. Street Works grew from the belief that joyful experiences of democracy can spark participation, and that artists are uniquely equipped to design those pathways.

But to do that, artists committed to justice need to make a living. Many of us are tired of resisting cultural systems that extract from our creativity while devaluing our labor and culture. From stolen treasures in museums, to how wealth shapes visibility and pay, to how community-rooted work is overlooked by funders, the arts too often reinforce inequality.

These systems undermine the imagination that democracy requires. That’s why we fight for our communities, and for a cultural ecosystem that does too.

Projects

  • Festivals

    Arts events in public spaces — like multi-block festivals, block parties, or picnics — to support collaboration between organizations & neighbors of all ages.

  • Queens mutual aid

    Co-organizing mutual aid efforts in Queens, like clothing drives, to foster a creative aid, rooted in joy. Email mutualaidqueens@makejusticenormal.org to get involved.

  • Production co-op

    Co-organizing with peers on what it takes to pool resources for public space action. Email collective@makejusticenormal.org to get involved.

  • Research

    Studying how power and money shape who gets seen, paid, and preserved in the arts, and co-creating alternative models rooted in justice, care, and collective ownership.

Focuses

We are committed to fostering joyful community-led work. Our communities often raise these topics.

  • Climate & Earth

    Space for climate decision making on the street, youth as our visionary leaders, and accessible science rooted in our ancestral wisdoms.

  • Health & Healing

    Space for wellness, knowing it’s hard to act, care for others, or unfold our full imagination if our bodies and minds are hurting.

  • Civic Participation

    Space for knowing and practicing our rights, from civil liberties and freedom of speech, to voting and community decisions.

  • Wealth

    Space for how we can earn fairly, fight for economic justice, and plan for our futures, in a time when money decides too much.

About Make Justice Normal (MJN)

MJN’s Model

Street Works is a project in partnership with Make Justice Normal (MJN), a collective founded in 2021 to develop and implement justice-centered organizing models — like equitable budgeting, democratic decision-making, and circular leadership structures.  

As a non-hierarchical collective, MJN members create independent ventures with MJN members or others, and apply its standards for just organizing.

Street Works is one of those ventures. Like a school of fish or a murmuration of starlings, each venture acts with autonomy, but we remain in relationship, learning from, advising, and supporting one another in our common commitments to values.

MJN’s Values

Street Works follows MJN’s values of justice, loving care, and solidarity as the essence of making justice normal. We test the policies, governance models, and procedures emerging from its research.

  • Justice: Justice is rooted in the idea that all people are inherently of equal value. Complex systems obfuscate how unjust things really are.

  • Loving Care: Before we were workers, we were children, family, neighbors, and friends. We’re people-first and practice space for full selves.

  • Solidarity: Striving for shared abundance & ownership enables us to foster collective, not just individual, benefit.