Despite recent research on the importance of multimodality and translanguaging for 21st century knowledge generation, too often language education policies promote reductive classroom practices that fail to incorporate the experiential and multilingual repertoires of EFL and ESL learners. In this presentation I report on our civic and artistic participatory program for youth and pre-service teachers in the southeast of the United States. In explaining the theoretical parameters of our work, I discuss Halliday's (1978) Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Paris and Alim's (2017) approach to Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP). Halliday's model of language celebrates the ecological nature of multilingual meaning making that shifts to accommodate variation in social register and cultural context. Aligned with this approach, CSP not only strives to bring in the ideas, desires, and needs of multilingual youth, it demands that they become the center piece in everything that we do. Our CS SFL curriculum design involves inclusion of a wide range of multimodal resources that are purposively sequenced on a continuum (Gibbons, 2006; Harman & Burke, 2020). The approach supports our bilingual youth and educators in cumulatively coupling multiple modes (Martin, 2010) such as mapping, drawing, rapping and verbal argumentation to communicate their visions of a more equitable school and society. Guiding questions that support my inquiry in this paper are the following: What tenets of SFL support our curriculum design and how do participants in our program respond to the design?