Spring 2018 Grantees
We are excited to welcome the current cohort of grantee partners into the Pop Culture Collaborative community. These grantee partners are imagining, creating, and collaborating to change our culture and we are proud to work with them as we seek to build a just and pluralist society. Scroll down and click ‘Read More’ to learn more about each grantee and their funded work.
To support more in-depth connection to the Collaborative community, current grantee partners can be viewed and sorted across five grantmaking categories and by additional strategy tags. Click the boxes below and the strategy tags within each grantee description to see how grantees connect to each other and the pop culture for social change field.
All current and past grantee partners can be also be viewed and sorted by grantee cohort, grantmaking category and strategy tags. We hope this opportunity makes for a rich discovery experience.
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As a strategic initiative of the recently launched Time’s Up, 5050by2020 is galvanizing influencers and artists to interrogate structural systems, challenge leadership, and infuse social justice values into the content they create.
Founded by Oscar-nominated director, writer, and activist Ava DuVernay, ARRAY Alliance amplifies stories of underrepresented communities by providing women filmmakers and people of color with the resources they need to ensure their diverse perspectives have a platform, while also cultivating audiences among communities starved of inclusive images on screen.
Since 2011, CultureStrike has established itself as a leading force in the growing arts for social change field. Led by women of color and a 7-person team including undocumented, immigrant, and LGBTQ artists, and guided by the vision of its co-founder, visual artist Favianna Rodriguez, the organization has created groundbreaking artistic interventions and cultural strategy in the migrant, climate, and racial justice movements with a network of over 200 artist activists. CultureStrike launched the “Migration Is Beautiful” butterfly iconography that has spread around the world, becoming a unifying symbol of the immigrant rights movement.
futurePerfect lab is a culture change lab founded in 2012 as the research and design home of Heidi Boisvert, PhD, a creative technologist (both artist and scientist) who has conceptualized, designed, developed, and disseminated a wide range of groundbreaking interactive, augmented reality and transmedia games and storytelling experiences for social change.
Co-founded by America Ferrera, Wilmer Valderrama, and Ryan Piers Williams, Harness seeks to amplify the work of social justice leaders to create a profound culture shift where historically marginalized communities define their own narratives, as well as equip people with the knowledge and tools to take action to support of the rights of every human being.
IllumiNative (launching in Fall 2018), conceived by a visionary group of Native artists, filmmakers, pop culture advocates, and thought leaders, is intended to illuminate the vibrancy of authentic Native experience.
The Midwest Culture Lab is a project of the Alliance for Youth Organizing, a national network of grassroots organizing groups. The Midwest Culture Lab is anchored by two of the Alliance’s affiliates in the Midwest (Chicago Votes, Ohio Student Association) and a narrative-based statewide organization in Michigan (We The People). For more information, visit the website.
Founded by migrant workers brought to the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the National Guestworker Alliance organizes across the United States to win collective dignity and fairness in labor and migration policies. Through its new Resilience Corps, NGA will work to popularize a new, culturally recognized hero‚Äîthe “Resilience Worker.”
The Pillars Fund invests in opportunities to elevate and amplify the leadership, narratives, and talents of American Muslims in civil society, the media, and public discourse.
Storyline Partners collaborates with the entertainment industry, particularly TV writers rooms, to seed new narratives and support inclusive and nuanced storytelling that represents the authenticity and depth of communities who need a stronger voice in pop culture. Storyline Partners provides content creators with with credible rapid-response resources about communities of color, people of color, Muslims, immigrants and refugees from prominent advocacy and social impact media groups.
The League, an experimental narrative change agency, will explore rapid response strategies and structures that help social change movements and entertainment leaders use popular culture to capitalize on these catalyzing moments and in doing so, accelerate change for the better.
Unleashing Giants is a company dedicated to the empowerment of others. Its purpose is to inspire and nurture new voices – and old. They present human stories that break racial and economic boundaries, creating a mouthpiece for those who are not traditionally heard. ¬
Wise Entertainment is an independent studio that develops, creates, and produces content that lives at the intersection of entertainment, social justice, and civic imagination. We tell stories for/by women and other underserved audiences in the U.S. and Brazil. The proof of concept of Wise’s innovative approach is the 6-time Emmy-nominated Hulu drama East Los High, the first high school drama in U.S. television history with an all English-speaking Latino cast.