Table of Contents
News & Events
Songs of Resistance and Hope by Jane Wilburn Sapp
Encouraging voting on Instagram | Facebook
In the vodcast, Jane Sapp offers specific songs to support the current demands for racial justice and explores how songs can energize the movement. #votedeis
Report on Socia Media Campaign for Voting - new!
Report on Social Media Campaign for Voting in Georgia - new!
Vodcast - Songs of Resistance and Hope:
A video podcast by Jane Wilburn Sapp, singer, songwriter, cultural activist and educator
Songbook: Let’s Make a Better World: Stories and Songs by Jane Sapp

And listen to the related podcast series.
VIDEO: Reconciliation Ceremony in Atlanta featuring Jane Sapp
Sept 2019
Image credit: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Video by Ryon Horne/AJC
Boston Children's Chorus: Found in Translation
March 12, 2016
Jane Wilburn Sapp in Residence
April 13 - 25, 2015
Int'l Visiting Research Scholar Public Talk
Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies
May 6, 2014
View a video from
"Composing Our Lives
Together" song-writing
workshop with Jane Sapp
"Seeking Lives of Purpose"
'DEIS Impact Event Series
with Jane Sapp, Don West
February 1-10, 2014
Spirituality and the Quest for Justice in the African American Musical Tradition
January 29, 2014
Blog post: Five Misconceptions about the Field of Community Cultural Development
Reflection from a national meeting
Meeting about new independent study/ internship opportunity:
Cultural Work and Social Transformation
January 15
View videos from “I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table:” Resilience, Cultural Work and Development in the African-American Community
November 2013
The Podcast
Songs of Resistance and Hope:
A video podcast by Jane Wilburn Sapp, singer, songwriter, cultural activist and educator
"For the part of you that's afraid to hope...But ready"
In the eight episodes of Songs of Resistance and Hope, Jane Sapp offers specific songs to the current movement for racial justice. They were produced by Armine Avetisyan and the Brandeis Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts, in partnership with ReCAST, Inc. Piano scores, stories, Jane’s theories of social change, and more songs can be found in her book Let’s Make a Better World: Stories and Songs by Jane Sapp, available through her website janesapp.org.Jane Sapp believes that songs communicate ideas in ways that can move people to act on their visions for the world. Songs can plant seeds in our collective memory and energize the movements for social justice. They have the ability to give voice to a moral conscience and a moral imagination.
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Episode 2: Someone Sang for Me “Whether we admit it or not, we do have a collective memory around the various struggles of justice and civil rights in this country, and when we hear this song it brings all of it back to us ... if you remember it, you gotta do something.” |
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Episode 3: I Want to Lift My Sister Up “When we see police brutality, they’re not just killing George Floyd, but that brutality is killing us all...If you can’t find a way to lift all of us up, we all go down.” |
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Episode 4: There's a River Flowing in My Soul “Let [my life] matter. Let it live. Let it breathe. Let it thrive. Let it contribute. Let it soar. Get out the way because my life matters and there's a river flowing in my soul and because of that, I know I’m somebody”. |
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Episode 5: We Have Come Too Far “[I was] thinking about how far we had come both as women and as black women... I just don’t feel like we can go back to where we were before”. |
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Episode 6: Let's Make a Better World “We’re whole people. We’re not just the police brutality people. We’re not just the health disparity people, we're not just the voting suppression people. We’re whole people. Those things that we can do and that we can fight for is what contributes to whole people, to whole communities.” |
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Episode 7: We Are an African People "The birth of humanity began in Africa, all of us are really African people” |
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Episode 8: Ain't You Got a Right “Four hundred years of struggle in this country and the only thing people were asking for was “ain't we got a right, just like you?” It’s the fundamental question of justice.” |