Lily Yeh, Village of Arts and Humanities

"[M]y work cuts through racial, class, geographic, and ethnic separations to directly connect to the hearts, minds, and emotions of people."
- Lily Yeh, Founder and Executive Director, Village of Arts and Humanities

Read the transcript from February 27, 2004 Leadership Talks Archive

Join Leadership Talks on Friday, February 27, 2004 at 1 pm EST for a live, online interview with 2003 Leadership for a Changing World awardee Lily Yeh, Founder and Executive Director of the Village of Arts & Humanities in Philadelphia, PA. The Village is a multi-faceted, community-based organization that uses the arts and the art of leadership to help people transform their communities.

The Village of Arts and Humanities was founded by Yeh in 1989. At its heart, the Village is a cluster of parks, community gardens, educational facilities, art workshops, and offices. Today, the Village annually serves 10,000 low-income people. Yeh, members of her staff, and people in her community have used sweat-equity and leveraged community resources to refurbish abandoned homes and construct new ones. They have also created after-school programs, a youth theater, a crafts center, and 14 parks, which have rarely been vandalized.

Through her organization, Yeh partners with many public schools to provide education through the arts in the city's classroom, and environmental and art projects in its schoolyards. Along the way, her work attracted the notice of the Philadelphia Eagles Youth Partnership Program, the philanthropic arm of Philadelphia’s professional football team. The team eventually collaborated with the Village to construct a playground for neighborhood children.

Yeh believes that leadership is an art and that art, in turn, is a form of leadership. Her style, she says, is inclusive, participatory, and collaborative. "When I stepped into this project, I was lacking in every way," she recalls. "Yet this weakness became my most powerful tool in realizing the project." In fact, her weakness was the thing that made her realize she needed help. She says that help arrived in the form of people joining the project, which in turn let Yeh realize her goals. The participatory process that unfolded provided her with a way to repair the community’s frayed social fabric and help its citizens reconnect. This is what Yeh means when she calls art a form of leadership.

For more information

Lily Yeh Leadership for a Changing World profile

The Village of Arts & Humanities