Photo Gallery

Central America holds some of the richest biodiversity on the planet, and the people living closest to its forests, rivers, and coastlines have the most say in whether those places survive. In 2000, the New England Biolabs Foundation launched us as ArtCorps, a program to protect this biodiversity by starting with the communities who care for it. We sent artists to live and work in these communities, using murals, theater, and other art forms to get people talking about the land around them and why it's worth protecting. We became an independent nonprofit in 2006, and over the years that followed, more than 60 ArtCorps artists worked alongside communities in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, painting murals, staging plays, and marching with women for their rights.

The art worked, but the artists eventually went home, and we wanted the change to stay. So we began training local leaders to use these creative methods themselves. That shift, first tested at a workshop in Belize in 2013, now reaches grassroots environmental leaders across Latin America and West Africa.

Two years later, the work carried us to East Africa and the East African Girls' Leadership Summit (EAGLS), where we met girls fighting to stay in school against child marriage, harmful gender norms, and the growing pressures of climate change. When the pandemic closed their schools in 2020, we launched Sauti ya Dada, Kiswahili for "The Girls' Voice," so they wouldn't face that isolation alone. Today, girls in Sauti ya Dada clubs in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania stay in school at a rate of 99%, and many go on to lead advocacy projects in their own communities.

As ArtCorps grew into Creative Action Institute, we came to see gender equity and climate justice as one struggle. Today, our programs work where the two meet, helping girls stay in school as droughts and heat put new pressure on their families, and making sure women have a voice in decisions about the land their communities depend on. The photographs in this exhibition span more than two decades of that work. You'll find early ArtCorps murals, leaders in training, and girls standing in front of their communities to say what needs to change. It feels fitting to bring these images back to New England Biolabs, where our story began. We hope you enjoy them.

We started working in Guatemala in 2006 as ArtCorps, a new nonprofit spun off from the New England Biolabs Foundation. Our early work there supported community development organizations working on health, gender, environmental conservation, and livelihoods. Together with FUNDENOR AQ'AB'AL, we marked International Women's Day in 2011 with a portrait project led by artist Isabel Carrió. Isabel photographed 100 Indigenous women from the community, and hung the portraits in Purulhá's central park, bringing attention to Indigenous women in a public space. At the end, each woman took her portrait home.

Photo Details: Purulhá, Guatemala, 2011. Photo by Isabel Carrió.

Omoa, Honduras, 2024.

Between 2012 and 2015, with support from Oak Foundation and the New England Biolabs Foundation, we piloted a new model with organizations around the Gulf of Honduras. That model, focused on leadership development, creative facilitation, and systems thinking, became our Creative Environmental Leadership Program (CELP).
One of those partners, IDAMHO, brought together youth from Guatemala and Honduras to tackle pollution in their shared Motagua River, which carries waste into their coastal communities and the ocean. In this project, they wrote pen pal letters about the pollution they saw at home and brainstormed solutions together. Then each group painted a mural teaching their community about waste disposal and marine health.

Ghana, 2021. Digital art by Nicolas Wayo and Isabel Carrió.

Through our collaboration with the New England Biolabs Foundation, we expanded the Creative Environmental Leadership Program to NEBF grantees in West Africa. Shortly after, COVID hit, and we had to move our programming online. This image is from one of those early virtual projects. In online sessions, grantees brainstormed ideas for a public mural about the pollution affecting their communities, from polluted water and plastic in the ocean to the effects of climate change on traditional foods. Isabel Carrió turned their ideas into this sketch for the mural.

Aquia Community, Peru, 2024. Photo taken by youth participants.

In 2024, we partnered with ECOAN on a Creative Advocacy Practicum (CAP) in Aquia, a community in Peru's high Andes. CAPs are community projects that use art to start conversations and action on a local issue.
Here, the issue was the endangered queuña forests. Indigenous conservation practices have protected these forests for generations, but that knowledge is fading as younger people lose touch with their ancestral culture. Local youth learned forest protection practices from elders, then created an art project to share what they learned with their community.

Kigali, Rwanda, 2024.

Sauti ya Dada (SYD), Swahili for "The Girls' Voice," is our leadership and advocacy program for adolescent girls in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania. In SYD clubs, girls meet every month with local women mentors to learn about leadership, sexual and reproductive health, climate justice, and advocacy. Then they put those skills to work through Creative Advocacy Practicums (CAPs), community projects they design and lead.
For many girls, staying in school depends on their parents' support. Asking for it isn't easy, and families sometimes push back at first. That's why SYD girls plan a full-day event where they present their art to their community and open up a discussion.

Kigali, Rwanda, 2024.

In this project, girls drew on what they'd learned in their SYD club, where the curriculum covers sexual and reproductive health alongside leadership and advocacy skills. They identified teen pregnancy as the biggest contributor to school dropout. With support from a local artist, they led a workshop to reflect on how these issues affect their community. Then they painted a mural showing the root causes of teen pregnancy and how it affects girls.
To open the mural, the girls invited their families and community members to an event they planned themselves. They performed a traditional dance, then walked guests through the mural and the issues behind it.

Bugesera, Rwanda, 2025.

Our creative methods and our expertise in gender and climate education have drawn support from organizations like Room to Read, the Aga Khan Foundation, USAID, FCDO, and VVOB, who fund us to develop climate education curriculum, toolkits, and teacher trainings with a gender lens.
For this Creative Advocacy Practicum (CAP), girls at Bwiza Youth Bridge's partner school interviewed 45 teachers, local leaders, students, and parents about what keeps girls out of school. They learned that longer, hotter dry seasons were making it hard for girls to focus, and their grades were suffering. In response, they planted trees in every class, painted this mural about the importance of education, and performed poetry about how climate change affects their schooling. At the community event, parents publicly committed to supporting their daughters' learning and working with teachers when girls struggle. Afterward, the girls formed study groups to prepare for exams together.

Peru, 2025.

Through our Creative Environmental Leadership Program, we train grassroots environmental leaders in Latin America and West Africa to bring their communities together around protecting the places they depend on. Often, that work starts with knowledge communities already have, passed down over generations.
In this Creative Advocacy Practicum (CAP), students and teachers in the Awajún community of Shushug worked with reserve park rangers to collect ancestral stories about caring for the land. They published the stories in an educational book that pairs traditional knowledge with conservation science. The project closed with a community celebration that drew 80 people, far more than the organizers expected.

Comunidad Nativa Santa Rosa de Pichanaz, Amazon, Peru, 2025.

Leaders in our Creative Environmental Leadership Program go through a series of four trainings together, learning to run conversations where everyone in a community has a say in the solution, including people who usually aren't asked.
That's how this Creative Advocacy Practicum (CAP) in the Yanesha community of Santa Rosa de Pichanaz took shape. For the Yanesha, caring for the forest and keeping their culture alive go hand in hand, but knowledge of the Yeñoño language, traditional cooking, medicinal plants, and fishing and farming was fading. Primary school children wrote letters to their grandparents naming the skills they wanted to learn, from fishing with a tarrafa net to making masato, a traditional cassava drink. Four elders then practiced those skills on film. The documentary premiered at a celebration of about 120 people, where eleven elders were honored with diplomas written in Yeñoño. Yanesha Communal Reserve leaders now hope to hold the event every year.

Loreto, Peru, 2024. By Pia Desulovich.

In our environmental work, we pay close attention to who gets a say in decisions about the land. Women often know the forests and rivers their communities rely on intimately, but gender norms can keep them out of leadership and decision-making.
With a population of about 600, the Maijuna are one of the smallest Indigenous groups in the Peruvian Amazon. In 2015, they helped establish the 391,000-hectare Maijuna-Kichwa Regional Conservation Area, which a proposed highway now threatens to cut through. Their language, Máíhìkì, is close to disappearing. With One Planet, we led workshops on leadership, conservation, and the gender roles holding the community back. Forty-four women completed leadership training, and participants painted a public mural about their connection to the land. Afterward, a respected woman in the community began teaching Máíhìkì at the local school, and men formed a group that meets regularly to talk openly about gender in their community.