Contact:
Eduardo Robles
Director of Communications
eduardo@caforthearts.org
For Immediate Release
November 19, 2024
CA for the Arts Launches First in the Nation 2024 Grassroots Artists Advocacy Program With a Cohort of Five Bay Area Artists and Culture Bearers
Cohort members will receive $12,000 each to participate in a nine-month curriculum
California for the Arts is proud to announce the five members of the inaugural Grassroots Artists Advocacy Program (GAAP) cohort. GAAP is a cohort-based fellowship program that supports diverse San Francisco and Oakland artists and culture bearers to directly engage in advocacy and policy development with the goal of improving conditions for artists and culture bearers to thrive.
GAAP centers artists in grassroots advocacy efforts and cultivates greater support for arts advocates statewide. This innovative program establishes a partnership between CA for the Arts and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation to test a new philanthropic model empowering artists to participate directly in advocacy. “GAAP operates with the understanding that artists know best what they need to live and sustain their practices in the Bay Area,” said Julie Baker, CEO of CA for the Arts. “Our role is to enable them to successfully engage in advocacy, leveraging their artistic practice to advance effective policy solutions.”
The GAAP Fellows will be supported in developing advocacy plans to enact changes that benefit artists and cultural bearers. Members will learn the foundations of effective advocacy, develop relationships with policymakers, and have the opportunity to advocate at local, state, and federal levels. The cohort will meet regularly as a community of practice, learning from and supporting each other. Participants will also attend the CA Arts & Culture Summit and Arts Advocacy Day in Sacramento, with travel costs and Summit attendance covered. By the end of the fellowship, each artist advocate will have developed an individual advocacy plan that will be shared with CA for the Arts, the cohort, and other advocacy leaders.
GAAP is the first program of its kind in the nation. Arts advocacy has evolved significantly since the early 2000s, now routinely leveraging economic impact studies, neuroscience research on the arts' cognitive benefits, and detailed analytics about audience engagement and community development. This multifaceted approach has proven particularly effective in securing both public and private funding, especially as advocates have become more adept at connecting arts initiatives to broader policy goals like urban revitalization, social equity, and economic resilience. However, artists haven’t been able to always participate in this movement. Only those who can afford to show up can persistently advocate and develop their cultural policy skills. “Historically, artist advocates are most active in reactive moments, such as when arts agencies face drastic funding cuts,” said Ted Russell, Program Consultant Lead of CA for the Arts. “Our approach counteracts this reality, helping the GAAP Fellows advance their advocacy practice alongside their artistic and cultural practice.”
The 2024 cohort represents the diversity and artistic richness of Oakland and San Francisco. Their diversity includes Black, Indigenous, Immigrant, Latinx and LGTBQ+ identities. Often anchored in their respective disciplines, comprising cultural curation and production, dance, film, literature and theater, their advocacy addresses a range of issues addressing equitable systems change, including fighting cultural displacement, deepening investments in BIPOC artists and culture bearers, providing supports for cooperative housing for artists and the spaces of artist collectives, and safeguarding platforms for community voices.
The 2024 GAAP Fellows are:
J. K. Fowler is the current Executive Director of the Bay Area Book Festival, Policy Analyst and Special Programs/Community Outreach with BAMBD, CDC, and Operations Support for APEN and APEN Action. Previously, he founded and ran Nomadic Press, a community rooted publishing house headquartered in Oakland and sat on Oakland's Cultural Affairs Commission, during which time he helped launch the Oakland Poet Laureate Program. He is currently most interested in the intersections of civic bodies, private development, and arts organizations and community benefits agreements that can help to ensure artist and arts organization retention in the cities that they love and support. He feels artists and arts organizations have the right to remain in the cities that they love and support and not be priced out by the influx of new development projects. He is interested in launching an advocacy body that will help communities of artists and arts organizations navigate the extremely confusing processes involved in negotiating community benefits agreements between private developers, civic bodies, and various artists and arts organizations who are sometimes not aligned around what the most effective way forward is.
Sabereh Kashi is a documentary filmmaker, editor, and cultural strategist dedicated to fostering connections between diverse communities through personal storytelling. Her work has been featured on platforms like PBS, BBC, and international networks, and has screened at prominent festivals such as IDFA, Hot Docs, and UNAFF. Her recent short documentary, I’m Oakland, follows an African-American woman's efforts to preserve her home and legacy amidst rapid gentrification. Currently, Kashi is directing The Patient Woman, a feature documentary tracing her search for home between Iran and America. Her work has earned support from the Center for Cultural Innovation, the Berkeley Film Foundation, and NATAS. In 2016, she co-founded Re-Present Media, a nonprofit supporting personal voices of underrepresented communities in non-fiction media. She is looking to advance her work as a cultural strategist and advocate for immigrant and underrepresented voices. Her goal is to bridge cultural understanding between America and the Islamic world and to advocate for systemic changes that empower artists to drive meaningful social impact.
AeJay Antonis Marquis is a multi-hyphenate performance artist, scholar, educator, and activist whose work centers the decolonization of the theatrical canon, the black avant-garde, and queer political performance practice. Their current research seeks to explore Queer, Transgender and Non-Binary remixing, reclamation and reconciliation of varied Christian dogmas through performative explorations in theatre, dance, film, and music videos, and how this practice intersects with racial identity and contribute to Queer Futurist Liberation models. Alongside their practice as a theatre and dance educator for a little over a decade, their work has been seen across the Bay Area performance landscape as a director, choreographer, actor, producer, and dramaturg and will continue to marry scholarship with practice in their doctoral journey and advocacy work. They are currently pursuing their PhD in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. They applied for GAAP to learn new skills to broaden their passions into a policy impacting, fund shifting, and community organizing approach. They were fired up by CA for the Arts’ Arts Advocacy Day 2024, while lobbying state representatives for the arts and feel it will be even more necessary in the years to come.
Hope Mohr (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and a community-based arts lawyer. She works at the intersection of art and social change as a Fellow with the Sustainable Economies Law Center. After a professional dance career, she founded the nonprofit Hope Mohr Dance and its activist presenting program, The Bridge Project, which supported over 100 artists. In 2020, Mohr co-stewarded the organization’s transition to an equity-driven, BIPOC-led model of distributed leadership and a new name: Bridge Live Arts. Her book, "Shifting Cultural Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance," was published in 2020 by the National Center for Choreography. As an artist working across dance, theater, visual art, and writing, Mohr explores feminism, gender, and sexuality. She has been named to the YBCA 100 and also named as one of the "women leaders” in dance by Dance Magazine editor-in-chief Wendy Perron. She is currently a Lucas Artist in Residence at Montalvo Arts Center. To make being an artist in the Bay Area a more sustainable path, she wants to think strategically and on the systems level about how to build artist power and make the issues facing artists more present in movements for social and economic justice.
Natalia Neira is a cultural worker, curator, writer, and strategist dedicated to co-creating a more just and joyful world alongside communities, artists, activists, and allies committed to liberation. She is the founder of the Caracol Collective, which is both a framework and a network that emphasizes healing ourselves to heal society and Mother Earth. A Chilean immigrant of Mapuche, Andean, and Spanish heritage, she focuses her artistic practice on cultural revitalization projects rooted in ancestral knowledge and traditional art forms. Working closely with Indigenous and traditional arts cultural bearers, she creates gatherings that revitalize ancestral wisdom, lifeways, and language for well-being and collective liberation. As the former Executive Director of La Peña Cultural Center, she became attuned to BIPOC artists' needs across the Bay. She co-chaired the Berkeley Cultural Trust’s Equity & Inclusion Committee from 2019 to 2023, leading advocacy efforts that centered racial justice. Currently, Natalia is a Fellow with Creative West’s Greater Bay Area Arts & Culture Coalition, where she advocates for racial and economic equity. She hopes to uplift fellow Latinx, immigrant, diasporic and BIPOC artists and culture keepers who deserve more sustainable investments and recognition for their contributions.
The five GAAP Fellows were selected in a self-nominated, open application process. A CA for the Arts review panel, including Bay Area representatives, reviewed 42 applications and prioritized how they fit together, representing San Francisco and Oakland, and their collective impact potential in terms of policy changes and advocacy.
A two-year grant from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation supports this work.
About California for the Arts
CA for the Arts is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary advocacy service organization focused on building resources and public awareness of the value and impact of arts, culture, and creativity across California.
