Austin Willacy

Austin Willacy is a community organizer who uses music as a tool for peacebuilding with a focus on environmental, racial, and gender justice. He is an award-winning singer/songwriter with 4 CDs and 3 EPs to his name and a veteran member of The House Jacks, a pioneering a cappella group with whom he has produced 10 full-length albums and completed multiple world tours.

Austin is all about connections: connecting people across social and political divides, connecting audiences with new forms of music and art, and connecting local inequalities to broader systems of injustice. Through song, dialogue, and play, Austin helps communities ‘connect the dots’ between theory and practice, conflict and peace, ecology and culture. He has served as a facilitator in places like Turkey, India, and Israel and Palestine, using his unique blend of activism and musicianship to inspire relationship-building and collaborative action.
Austin was awarded the 2023-2024 EnPax Arts Fellowship and shared his work at the Third International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding in The Hague.

Austin has won 5 Positive Music Awards for his songwriting and has performed with icons such as Bonnie Raitt and the Doobie Brothers as well as Jem, Vienna Teng, Rachael Yamagata and Amos Lee.
Austin organizes and facilitates Jams for YES! YES! Jams are events that help individual changemakers deepen their root system, and grow in consciousness and self-care, so they can become more healthy and effective, and restore balance and well-being. He is a veteran member of the North America Jam and one of the co-founders of the Black Diaspora Jam, the Men Raised as Men Jam, and the Arts for Social Change Jams in the US, Turkey, and India.
Austin is the co-Artistic Director of the Thrive Choir, an Oakland-based group that was born to sing a vision of connection, healing, and justice into being.  For the past 26 years, Austin has directed ‘Til Dawn, Youth in Arts’ award-winning teen a cappella group that empowers youth to find their voices in many ways. Inspired by his youth work, the Apple Store in San Francisco hired him to do an Apple Music Lab on Finding Your Creative Voice and Songwriting Basics on the iPad.