CULTURAL POWER BUILDING
ORGANIZATIONAL STRENGTHENING
NETWORK WEAVING & LEARNING
CULTURAL POWER BUILDING
Stories and narratives hold power. They inspire us, speak to our hearts, heal us, unlock our collective imagination, and shape how we see and experience the world. For too long now - narratives have been used to promote worldviews of domination and extraction that have devastated our BIPOC communities. Cultural Power Building centers the leadership of Artist Disruptors and Culture Bearers by providing direct support through a robust paid fellowship program and intentional cultural practice awards to support their creative work and social change initiatives at the intersections of social justice, arts, and culture.
CONSTELLATIONS FELLOWSHIP
The Constellations fellowship is an 18-month experience that provides 10 Artist Disruptors and Culture Bearers with a full-time annual salary plus generous benefits from the Center for Cultural Power, to partner with a cultural organization and create place-based projects and cultural practices that build narrative change in their communities.
ARTIST DISRUPTOR &
CULTURAL BEARER AWARDS
These participatory awards aim to resource Artist Disruptors & Traditional and Tradition-based Culture Bearers in support of their creative work at the intersection of art, culture and social justice, under the following categories:
Artist Disruptor Awards
Intergenerational Knowledge Transmission Awards
Language Awards
Cultural Knowledge and Practice Awards
Collaboration Awards
ORGANIZATIONAL STRENGTHENING
By providing multi-year general operating grants to BIPOC-led cultural strategy organizations at the grassroots level, Constellations strengthens and sustains a stable and supportive network. This strategy focuses on inspiring funders to intentionally map their general operating support and dispersal of funds to address historical and colonial funding disparity, and increasing regular streams of investments for the field.
GENERAL OPERATING SUPPORT GRANTS
Our grantmaking is committed to funding BIPOC-led cultural strategy organizations at the grassroots level through general operating support that is multi-year and unrestricted, and which aims to remove traditional barriers in grantmaking not only by reducing the burden that fundraising creates for organizations, but also by increasing transparency and relationship-building as part of a simplified and streamlined grants application and reporting processes.
Our grantmaking is grounded on transparency, mutual accountability and collaboration, all visible in a learning and evaluation process that include the organizations’ input and feedback, as well as their participation in a growing social and cultural justice network, and in our response to non-monetary support requests to bolster organizational leadership and health/sustainability.
Constellations provides the scaffolding for our network of Artist Disruptors, Culture Bearers, and cultural strategy organizations to collaborate, share best practices, learn, and grow the emerging narrative strategy field. By providing an interdisciplinary space for Artist Disruptors, Culture Bearers and narrative strategists to experiment with Constellation’s narrative system and build community across regions, we reinforce the importance of cross-cultural connectivity for positive social justice and transformation.
NETWORK WEAVING & LEARNING
NARRATIVE DESIGN LAB
The Narrative Design Lab will be a 12-month long cohort of 19 Artist Disruptors, Culture Bearers, and Narrative Strategists who will be provided with the opportunity to test and experiment on Constellations’ narrative system.
NETWORK ENGAGEMENT
The individuals and organizations that make up the Constellations Network are the initiative’s most valuable resource. Network Engagement will help build the trust, relationships, skills, strategies, and collective resources that are needed to strengthen our cultural strategy ecosystem into the future. This includes annual virtual all-network convenings and a funder learning circle.
IMPACT & EVALUATION
Throughout this initiative, we are conducting participatory sense-making and storytelling to measure and share Constellations’ impact on the field. This will help us understand the experience of network members and the impact of Constellations resource redistribution and programming to strengthen BIPOC narrative and cultural strategy across our priority regions.