Philadelphia’s Lily Yeh to receive international peace award

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Lily Yeh, the founder of the Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia, will be awarded the Goi Peace Prize, an international award based in Tokyo, Japan. She will receive the award in November.

In a Facebook post, the Goi Peace Foundation announced it is honoring Yeh for her “contributions to realizing a just and sustainable future by empowering people to transform their despair into hope through the power of art.”

“I couldn’t believe it. Did they make a mistake?” Yeh said in an interview with WHYY News. “I just make art and I got the peace award.”

The foundation gives its annual award to someone who has advanced peace and harmony in the world. Past recipients have included Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates, primatologist Jane Goodall and author Deepak Chopra.

Yeh is the first artist to receive the award since it began in 2000.

“We think about transforming the world, we think of high tech, we think of high finance, we think of engineers, science, technology. But I say art,’’ Yeh said. “It’s been 40 years proving that the power of art is immense. An artist can be the center of a social movement in transforming brokenness into hope.”

Yeh’s global work started in Philly

Yeh started the Village of Arts and Humanities in 1986, making outdoor sculpture and mosaics in a vacant lot off of Germantown Avenue in North Philly. Then a tenured professor at the University of the Arts, she pulled in nearby residents to help, many of them living with addiction and without homes.

“My inner voice said, ‘If you don’t rise to the occasion, the best of you will die and the rest will not amount to anything,’” she said. “I overcame my fear and I stepped in. Then a totally different world opened.”

Yeh left UArts and grew the Village into a community arts organization that still operates today. She stepped down in 2004 to focus her attention on international projects through her organization Barefoot Artists.

Yeh leads community-based art projects places she describes as “broken,” such as the Dandelion School of Migrant Children in Beijing, China, supporting impoverished families of migrant workers; the Korogocho slums of Nairobi, Kenya; and the site of a mass grave of Tutsis killed during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

“We just go in and we listen,” Yeh said. “We find the hidden resources and we awaken the creativity in other people. You elevate people.”

The Goi award comes with a cash prize of 1 million yen, or just over $6,000. Yeh said she has made arrangements to distribute the money to people identified in the foundation’s Youth Peace Ambassadors program.

Yeh said receiving the award is a testament to the power of art.

“Art is not a noun. It’s a verb. It’s action,” she said. “Through creating beauty you embrace everything: the pain, the suffering, the dark, the broken, the talent, the imagination. Your pain, in story, can be elevated to become theater and performance. That’s what art is.”