Here we are in the middle of our 10th year, and we feel like we’re on the cusp of either greatness or failure, to be perfectly honest. Now, make no mistake - we have wonderful partners, projects, and funders right now, and we’re not disappearing anytime super soon. In the past 6 months we’ve been to Ghana, Macedonia, England, and Mexico at the request of artists and activists wanting help with fighting corruption, helping women, girls, transgendered and other marginalized groups secure health care, combating environmental exploitation, creating new systems for youth employment and informal economies, working for more just policies around incarceration, and helping older people with dementia among other issues. People are wanting our input more than ever, and we aren’t backing away.

But we’re facing serious challenges, and we’re not sure what the next three years will bring. Grant-making is changing, as we’re sure many of you know. We have applied for over a dozen grants over the past 8 months and have only received 1 of them. Despite our goal of diversifying our funding, the vast majority of our support comes from a generous grant from one source that is due to expire -- with renewal highly unlikely -- at the end of 2020. While big organizations like the ACLU and Planned Parenthood are thriving, many small non-profits are feeling a real crunch right now. Being experimental and boldly activist-focused as well as arts-oriented, global, and research-based is what makes us great – but it also makes it difficult for some foundations to slot us into the categories that feel either safe enough or specific enough (depending on the funder) for their current mission.We thought the Trump administration’s threats to what we hold dear might help increase funding for solutions, but in fact, this kind of threat makes many people more risk-averse. 

HOWEVER! We are lucky enough to be working on amazing projects with people doing incredible work in their communities to protect freedom and fight for equity. We do have contract work with incredible organizations like Action Aid, Atlantic Institute, and A Blade of Grass, all of whom are working on human rights for those most marginalized. We believe that helping those most marginalized can be one of the best ways to help everyone and to create a truly just society. We DO have incredible funders like Open Society Foundations, Sherrerd Trust and Garcia Family Fund. 

Here are a few of the projects we feel lucky enough to be working on:

• We are helping a group of artists, the Macedonia Creative Action Team (MCAT) to help people who are marginalized from traditional power structures to find methods, through art and culture, of speaking out about infrastructure and environmental issues that plague their communities within a corrupt political system.  These artists are using street art, performance, video, fashion and social media among other mediums.

• Similarly, we are working with artists in West Africa, from Guinea, Ghana and Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Congo to create their own artistic activism academy. These artists want to connect young people with politics, and give them a voice, in places where many feel disenfranchised from politics, using spoken word, hip hop, theater and music among other mediums. Since we have an artistic activism curriculum we’ve honed over many years, they’ve asked for our guidance in creating their own curriculum, specific to their own strengths and circumstances. e love how they’re creating a training program that’s so specifically West African.
• We just returned from Oxford, England where we met with the Atlantic Fellows: activists, researchers and policy-makers from South Africa, the Philippines, Ireland, Chicago, San Francisco, and many more places who are truly world-changers. We feel lucky that we had the opportunity to introduce them to ways to bring creativity and culture into their work to make it more effective.

We’re focused on helping artistic activist practitioners - artists and activists with some experience under their belts - do their work better, spread it around, and understand their impact. When we first started, we were helping people get started with artistic activism, and we’re ecstatic that the field has grown so much that we can now help it level up and get stronger, more global, higher quality and more resilient. 

With our RESEARCH AND EVALUATION, we’re asking the hard questions about intent and audience, and helping practitioners with refining and reflecting within the process, not just evaluating after the fact. 

• We’re working with A Blade of Grass to help two of their fellowship recipients who are working on incarceration and criminal justice devise and execute a plan for assessing the impact of their artistic activist projects

• We were in Mexico recently with the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics to begin a collaborative process of evaluating a project by Mexican cartoonists aimed at drug normalization. 

• Guerilla Science asked us to be research partners on their fantastic creative science engagement work.

• We’re in the first round of testing for our open source, web-based  Æffect Mobile App, which helps artistic activists clarify, strengthen, and assess the impact of their socially engaged work.

We’ve been cultivating our community with events and conversations.

• In May we held two events in New York City, designed to spark conversation about artistic activism. We were gratified that so many people want to continue to meet to share ideas. More of these to come!

• Through our newsletter and alumni forum, lots of interesting discussions have been happening, like around shaming and humor.

• We’ve had an amazing time with our Artist in Residence, Zihan LI Iris, who has been making our interactive sensor-based Double Door project into a refined, easy-to-use creative activism tool that we can shared and adapted by activists and artists for actions everywhere!

• In our latest of our podcast series Pop Culture Savage Expeditions, we rented a brand new Chevy Suburban to find out what we can learn from this surprisingly popular, rugged/luxury truck/station wagon, with automated safety features. How can the Suburban teach us to be better activists? You can listen here.

• We’re working with a designer on our book, How to Win, so we can take it to publishers this fall.

• We’re banging out a new website that will be simpler and better than any one we’ve ever had.

AND, we would love your insights on a few things:

1. We are interested in doing more work in the U.S., and clearly there are many things that could use some good creative campaign work. Of all the issues and populations we could be working with right now, what/who do you think is the most important?

2. For those of you who do non-profit work, do you have thoughts on moving small donors to medium size donors?

3. We’re going to be hosting some online meet ups with supporters, alumni, etc. We use gotomeeting, but we wonder if any of you have heard about better platforms or creative ways to think about online meet ups in general.

4. Do you want to partner on a project? Is there something we could collaborate on a funding proposal around?

Thank you, thank you in advance for your thoughts.