AFRICAN STAGES ASSOCIATION

The African Stages Association (ASABC) was established mainly to serve the needs of African and other at-risk and immigrant youths to confidently fit into the larger Canadian community. ASA-BC is an umbrella organization created to help educate, empower and inspire harmony in the Canadian Mosaic society through the African traditional heritage of storytelling, music, and drama. educational tool that has a rightful place in the homes, the classroom and community centres.

MISSION STATEMENT:
To use performance arts, including celebratory poetry and storytelling, festive spoken word, dance and drama, and music as vehicles for educating, enlightening, and empowering, our members, including the youth. It is also to promote intercultural understanding and friendship among all Canadians in order create and maintain healthy and safe communities within a multicultural BC and Canada
MANDATE:
(A) Artistic: To use the art of celebratory poetry and storytelling to empower the youths and inspire them to deal positively with the different challenges that they face in their day-to-day lives.
(B) Educational: To use festive spoken word as artistic device for outreach and education of the mainstream on methods of dealing with anti - social issues like bullying, discrimination, stereotyping, thereby promoting multiculturalism and mutual respect in the community.
(C) Social: Using the performing arts to contribute to youth leadership skills, healthy co-existence of diverse people and capacity building of artists and marginalized people in the community.

OBJECTIVES:
:
• Celebrate differences and intergenerational diversity, build spoken word skills and self-empowerment
• Use spoken word to entertain as well as elicit moral values that bind people together in a healthy and safe community
• Make poetry and storytelling basic points for some learning skills like listening, speaking, analyzing etc.
• Plant seeds of intergenerational respect
• Establish on-going spoken word forums as part o