YEAR HIGHIGHTS
The rules of capital are shifting—but the inequities baked into our economic systems are perpetuating themselves. Artists and culture-bearers have always worked outside the boundaries of “traditional” employment, while carrying the cultural labor that makes local and marginalized communities possible. Explore AmbitioUS’ vision, mission, and strategies for building a more equitable, sustainable, and just economy—through catalytic capital stacks, community-rooted investment models, and the practices that help people and organizations move from extraction to regeneration.
Creativity Connects
Center for Cultural Innovation publishes the Creativity Connects: Trends and Conditions Affecting U.S. Artists, report to inform systems-change approaches.
Future Arts Forward Convening
The Future Arts Forward Convening builds on the report by bringing artists, arts workers, arts educators, creative entrepreneurs, independent designers, and creative thinkers together to reimagine what is possible beyond an extension of the status quo.
AmbitioUS launches.
$644K
In grants and investments
The Center for Cultural Innovation launches AmbitioUS as a time-limited program with a planned sunset of 2028. The name “AmbitioUS” reflects CCI’s desire to address significant issues with commensurately bold actions and to work in de-siloed common cause with those who share values and objectives.
AmbitioUS is a pooled fund, and CCI deploys these funds using a capital agnostic approach. In other words, AmbitioUS provides grants, investments, loans and recoverable grants, guarantees, crowdfunding capital, and subsidization of costs of expertise in order to best meet beneficiaries where they are, provide them with financial leverage, reflect their unique financial stack, and incubate approaches that help institutional funders innovate how they support nonprofit, hybrid, unconventional, and for-profit enterprises, the diversity of which are all needed to enact real change.
AmbitioUS launches with initial support from Barr Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Field Foundation of Illinois, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, McKnight Foundation, and Surdna Foundation.
2019 Highlights include:
- Underwriting legal support for cooperative structuring
- Research on the international landscape of platform cooperatives and research on building a new structure for freelance labor protection
- Support for two important convenings (CoCap and Zebras Unite’s 2019 DazzleCamp)
- An integrated capital investment (purchase of a seven year investment note and a grant toward a loan loss reserve fund) for Boston Ujima’s investment fund
- AmbitioUS hosts inaugural convening for grantees, investees, allies, funders, and staff in Oakland alongside the CoCap 2019: Nourishing Community Wealth convening.
Bridging at a critical time.
$1M+
In grants and investments
YEAR HIGHIGHTS
Financial InnovationPolicy ResearchGrant & Loan Fund
- Completed our first financial equity deal via a SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) with a financial technology company called MOXI
- Funded policy research on the implications of California Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) which prevents companies from using contracted labor as a way to avoid paying workers’ employee-conferred benefits and protections
- Offered fellowships to two important field contributors at critical moments of transition in their careers
- Announced an open call for Grant & Loan Fund for Early Stage Arts, Creative, and Cultural Cooperatives introducing us to a broad field of emerging entities. The program encouraged applications from cooperative enterprises by artists that were at their earliest stages, either with formation (i.e., there was a commitment to starting the cooperative or the cooperative was newly incorporated) or growth (i.e., still a young cooperative with an opportunity to realize new growth with additional capital).
$1.59M
In grants and investments
Realizing the power of community ownership.
Early decisions to intentionally focus on community-owned economic systems change as designed by those most harmed by current systems, invited a different, more holistic conversation about the role of arts, culture, and creative expression. It also provided insight into how funders could support arts and creative expression without defaulting to an approach that reinforces a Western European lens.
- Participated first Direct Public Offering investment in East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EB PREC), proving that communities can effectively direct investments for their own collective benefit.
- Upended exclusionary credit practices by providing affordable lending capital (via a forgivable loan) for a Character-Based Lending Fund at Common Future.
- Partnered with an entrepreneur and the Greater Washington Community Foundation to provide “no strings attached” down payment grants to qualified Black and Brown first-time home buying residents in the Washington, D.C. area.The experiment in D.C. served as a proof of concept and it is rolling out this program next in Philadelphia, and it has plans to bring it to other locations.
- Began to use sponsored media, speaking opportunities, and owned media sources to highlight the culturally-rooted economic models in the portfolio.
Image courtesy of Grantmakers in the Arts, 2025 Conference: Painting Their Own Reality at Haz Cooperative Studios. Chicago, IL. Photo by Leeann Wallett, 2025
Image courtesy of Coyote Media, 2025 East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative Rock Breaking Event. Oakland, CA. Photo by Amir Aziz, 2025
$1.03M+
In grants and investments
Expanding the tools.
AmbitioUS deepened its experimentation with new forms of capital and continued building learning infrastructure around community-engaged investment.
AmbitioUS featured in Kresge Foundation’s annual report alongside grantee Anasa Troutman, CEO of Historic Clayborn Temple.
Conducted first site visits since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
YEAR HIGHIGHTS
AmbitioUS deepened its experimentation with new forms of capital and continued building learning infrastructure around community-engaged investment.
Collaborated with Transform Finance on a three part workshop series called, Building a Grassroots Community Engaged Investment Approach to Grantmaking and Investment.
$1.43M
In grants and investments
From capital to narrative to Connecting people and opportunities.
The grant portfolio expanded while research, storytelling, professional development, and field-building became increasingly important.
YEAR HIGHIGHTS
ResearchNarrative ShiftingIntegrated CapitalField Building
Supported two critical research papers, one explored the needs of gig workers as well as potential solutions. The other major research project sought to document cultural communities’ wealth-building practices as a means of cultural preservation and to socialize alternative economic solutions that prioritize community ownership.
Wrote lead article for How Philanthropy Can Show Up for an Arts Solidarity Economy in Non-Profit Quarterly for a series called Remember the Future: Culture and Systems Change.
Used integrated capital investment structures that included operational support and forgivable loans enhancing organizational stability and diversifying capital at a critical moment for two Artist Ownership grantees’.
Provided professional development support for eight people representing five organizations to the inaugural Assembly of Black Possibilities, created and curated by AmbitioUS grantee Boston Ujima.
$1.72M
In grants and investments
Deepening community ownership, learning, and connection.
YEAR HIGHIGHTS
Southern Learning JourneyRelational InfrastructureNarrative ShiftingResearch
Conducted our first learning journey to understand more deeply the roots of our economic system (which is built on stolen land, enslaved labor, and cultural erasure). The ReMEMBER: The FUTURE is at STAKE experience started the trip in Montgomery, Alabama, home of the Equal Justice Initiative which we visited, we spent a day with grantee Ekvn-Yefolecv’s community on their ancestral homelands (rural Alabama), and traveled to Morganton, North Carolina, where we spent a day with grantee The Industrial Commons. Participants also heard presentations from grantees Boston Ujima and neighborbuilt about building systems for economic and cultural sovereignty.
Organized with grantee Solidaire Network to raise $1.8M so that grantee Ekvn-Yefolecv could acquire and rematriate 4,000 acres of land and gain the mineral rights to one of the largest graphite deposits in the country.
Co-hosted with the National Performance Network a convening that brought 35 funders and movement leaders together in Chicago for a day in a half session (called Evil Genius Strategy Sessions) to create stronger relationships, discuss what is working and not working in terms of funding culturally-rooted systems change, and determine if there was priority alignment between funders and movement leaders.
Launched The Soul of Capital podcast, which introduces listeners to alternative economic models and the changemakers leading them.
Boston Ujima, formerly a project of the Center for Economic Democracy, spun off into its own 501c3 entity.
Image courtesy of Center for Cultural Innovation, 2024 Southern Immersive Learning Journey: Ekvn-Yefolecv. Weogufka, AL. Photo by Nyia Hawkins, 2024
$1.3M+
In grants and investments
Exploring enabling conditions
Funding, learning journeys, cross-sector organizing, and community-owned models moved into the broader sector.
YEAR HIGHIGHTS
Convened a second learning journey to better understand the enabling characteristics of two thriving regional cooperative economic systems in Emilia-Romagna (a region in Italy) and Bilbao in the Basque Country in Spain (where Mondragón is located).
Conveyed timely information and organized funder support in light of the devastating arson fire at Historic Clayborn Temple in Memphis, TN. AmbitioUS staff attended a small invite-only funder gathering a month after the fire at the site.
Funded a joint grant between AmbitioUS and Research to Impact Lab to advance the project of Vu Le, a thought-leader in philanthropic practice aimed at shifting funder practices toward increased equity and enabling larger systemic change within the nonprofit industry.
- Invited to present at and be in closer relationship with Entrepreneurship Funders Network, an affinity network for funders of economic and workforce development, and Neighborhood Funders Network, an affinity network organizes philanthropy so that Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities and low income communities can thrive, demonstrating meaningful growth beyond our core base of arts and culture funders. Cross-sectoral philanthropic organizing is a necessary pre-condition for systems change.
- AmbitioUS presented two sessions at Grantmakers in the Arts:
- “ReIMAGINE Scale: Self-Determined Power and Community Power in US” with Leeann Wallett, AmbitioUS Program Officer, Anasa Troutman, Historic Clayborn Temple; and Nkuli Tabata (Shongwe), Nexus Community Partners to understand the roots of community ownership models that have existed for decades as a strategy to build power and transfer capital into communities and participate in hands-on arts activities led by three of the Nexus Community Partners’ Black Cooperative Fellowship alumni.
- “In a Galaxy [Not So], Far Away: Reimagining the Future of Indigenous Legacy Building.” Leeann Wallett, AmbitioUS Program Officer, Stephanie Gutierrez, Seven Fires; and Elyse Dempsey, Roanhorse Consulting, LLC to illustrate the ways Indigenous values and lifeways can be incorporated into wealth-building models.
- In December 2025, EB PREC held a groundbreaking ceremony for Esther’s Orbit Room, the last of the “Harlem of the West Coast” jazz clubs in West Oakland and announced that it had acquired an important corner lot that will feature outdoor green space and affordable housing. AmbitioUS was one of EB PREC’s earliest supporters and continues to resource its work and leadership. It is now a national model regularly cited in major publications documenting successful systems-change approaches.
- Funded a grant to support the development of Blacksky Algorithms, a decentralized social media infrastructure that supports cultural communities through governance-building tools, a social media interface, and peer-to-peer payment systems.
- Published an Urban Institute research paper titled “Community Ownership and Self-Determination”, that AmbitioUS and Research to Impact Lab co-commissioned. This was an exploration of culturally rooted community ownership approaches, including their values, historical context, models, benefits, and challenges. The paper identified these structures as viable pathways to cultural and economic community self-determination, affirming years of AmbitioUS’s own observations and pattern recognition. Further, the leaders described in the paper share mindsets, practices, and values, the sum total of which we are calling “world-building.”
$840K
in grants and investments (and counting)
In process!
Image courtesy of Roanhorse Consulting. Photo of Vanessa Roanhorse, 2024
Image courtesy of Center for Cultural Innovation, 2025 The Gathering convening. Ashfield, MA. Photo by Leeann Wallett, 2025.
In process!
AmbitioUS Sunsets
AmbitioUS sunsets on December 31, 2028.