This article analyzes the potential of a series of Youth Action Coalition's (YAC) Arts-for-Change (AfC) youth programs for literacy and identity development, as well as for engaging youth in addressing issues of social justice. Drawing primarily on transcripts of interviews, surveys, and participant-observation fieldnotes inventorying changes in youth participants, the article identifies specific learning the participants ascribe to the AfC youth programming, including the development of critical multiliteracies, increased self-confidence and identities as leaders, as well as greater engagement with issues of social justice at the local, national and international level. The authors describe the aspects of curriculum and pedagogy common across the AfC programs and analyze the specific contribution of multimodal arts production to the benefits that participants identify from the AfC programs. This article draws on Cope and Kalantzis (2006) concepts of available designs, designing, and redesigning, to explain how the AfC youth are transformed through their involvement in YAC's Arts-for-Change programming.