Each year, advocacy organizations and agencies spend millions on developing prevention campaigns that include billboards, posters, print advertisements, brochures and commercial public service announcements, lacking savvy, relevance, cultural competence and are ultimately ineffective.

At the same time, several artists and poets are creating dramatic work coinciding with many of these organizations’ missions that only make social statements rather than social change, while earning very little revenue to continue their socially-conscious expression.

Virtual Venues, a unique feature of the Khepera Center website, is established to facilitate relationships and collaborations between the advocacy world: non-profits and government agencies, and the creative world: visual artists and poets. 

For a nominal fee, the Khepera Center for Expression & Social Change helps by providing a new innovative forum to showcase these kinds of works and soliciting organizations and agencies to view, subsequently connecting artists and poets with those whose missions and agendas are consistent and budgets are sufficient. 

Imagine a painting of a motherless Black child suffering from HIV/AIDS being the dramatic image on a national prevention brochure warning of the growing epidemic among African American women and urging them to take preventive efforts or the spoken word poem about illiteracy being used as the narration for a broadcast public service announcement encouraging the more than 42 million adult Americans who can’t read to seek help, ultimately empowering themselves as well as altering their family’s economic circumstances.