Cultural Wealth as Community-Rooted Care: Inside of the Media Arts Academy

This article examines Community Cultural Wealth as an intervention framework within the Media Arts Academy (MAA), a six-week summer youth employment and media production program grounded in critical consciousness and social change. Centered on the Village Value framework, MAA positions youth as vital contributors to an interdependent learning community. The article analyzes the program’s response to behavioral disruptions that threatened collective productivity. Rather than employing exclusionary discipline, the Academy implemented an asset-based intervention grounded in Tara J. Yosso’s (2008) Community Cultural Wealth framework. Leveraging community-based cultural assets restored cohesion, strengthened self-regulation, and enabled full participation in media production. The article demonstrates how Community Cultural Wealth can serve as a restorative, practice-based model for transforming behavioral challenges into opportunities for leadership and collective growth. Community Cultural Wealth served as a viable framework for restorative intervention within youth development and arts-based education contexts. It argues that community-rooted, asset-centered approaches can transform behavioral crises into opportunities for leadership development, self-efficacy, and liberatory practice.