Center for Cultural Power

The Center for Cultural Power creates a thriving ecosystem for artists and culture makers to shift worldviews away from domination and extraction toward collaboration and interdependence.

As a women-of-color, artist-led organization, The Center for Cultural Power works to build the power of artists by activating and empowering them to tell powerful stories on issues like migration, climate, racial and gender justice. They also work closely with movement groups to incorporate cultural strategy into their work and create the stories we need for a more just and equitable world.

Learn more about The Center for Cultural Power’s Disruptors Fellowship, supporting artist disruptors of color who also identify as trans, nonbinary, disabled, undocumented, and/or formerly undocumented to break into the TV screenwriting scene:

The Compton Foundation has been funding storytelling for over a decade, and in the past few years, we have seen a huge increase in interest within the progressive movement’s conversation about “narrative shift” and “culture change.” The Center for Cultural Power understands that artists and culture workers are essential to advancing values-aligned narrative shifts. They build artist power and leadership, honoring artists’ creativity, autonomy, and inherent value; and ensuring that nonprofits’ rush to figure out how to “do” cultural organizing does not create extractive relationships with artists but is, instead, a real collaboration.

This emphasis is perhaps best shown through the Constellations project, which brought together more than 80 artists and culture workers for a convening—to dream what it would take to strengthen the field of cultural strategy. This project included a report on how philanthropy could best support the field in equitable ways, centering artists of color as social justice leaders. 

Recent grant history