By Cate Fox, Ambitio US Director
Each Fall, our staff looks forward to attending, reconnecting, and learning alongside colleagues from around the country at the Grantmakers in the Arts conference. This year the theme was “Revisiting Pasts to Build the Future,” and it took place in Puerto Rico. The Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) was asked to present four sessions and help curate a pre-conference track focused on individual artists. It was a terrific opportunity to highlight some of the amazing people in our network.
Ambitio US presented a session called “I Was Told There Would Be No Math: An Artist-Led Conversation about the Inextricable Links Among Economics, Culture, and Place.” We invited two grantees, Nkuli Shongwe from Nexus Community Partners and Anasa Troutman from Historic Clayborn Temple and the BIG We Foundation, to share stories about their journeys into economic reimagining. While the three of us had a great time planning the session, we were unsure if anyone would attend. After all, we included economics in our title!
When we got to the room, we realized that we underestimated its popularity. People streamed in. We had a full house by the time we started, with some folks sitting on the floor. Anasa led the room in a meditation, inviting us to conceptualize the world as we want it to be. With the energy of what is possible, Nkuli began our session with reflections from her life and her work with the North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship in the Twin Cities. Community wealth, she reminded us, is not just a question of individual financial well-being but a holistic measure of wellness for community members. Are our members healthy? Connected? Are all people (young and elders) engaged in the life of the community? Do they have the freedom to express themselves and their identities? These cooperatives are beautiful expressions of people-centered systems, and economic benefit is just one of their many facets.
Anasa then shared how her career as an artist quickly transformed into cultural strategy work. And, it turns out that it is not a big leap from cultural strategy work to economic system reimagining, which is what she is doing at both Historic Clayborn Temple in Memphis and with the BIG We. A conference blogger attended the session and captured these thoughts . While it was not a path she planned on taking, nor has it been easy, her willingness to experiment and trailblaze to ensure African-American history and culture can survive and thrive comes at a critical time for Memphis.
People see arts funding as a way to support music, visual arts, dance, arts education, and theater, which is accurate. But arts funding can (and arguably should) take an economic systems-change approach, too. Nkuli, Anasa, and many of our grantees are creating communities with community wealth-building and social systems that embed creativity and self-expression. The electricity and interest from the room full of arts funders communicated to us that people are interested in this connection and, hopefully, through their funding, they can also make it more visible to the public.
This article was originally published on Medium. Read it on Medium →