Location: Brooklyn, NY
Region: United States
Founding: 2021
Founders/leadership: Marina Lopez; Sruti Suryanarayanan; Caroline Woolard; Nati Linares; Ebony Gustave; Robin Bean Crane, co-organizers

Art.coop is a central hub, providing artists with financial resources, innovative ideas, and practical tools to strengthen their communities. Art.coop is reshaping the future of art, placing community governance at its core. It provides a haven for artists seeking alternatives to the traditional system, promoting the formation of networks based on solidarity within the arts sector. The critical role of culture in redistributing power and wealth is widely recognized, with artists building meaningful connections and holding each other accountable. Arts and social justice funders appreciate the importance of integrating equitable practices into cultural work, making Art.Coop a key collaborator in these efforts.

The art world, which reflects broader economic inequalities, often marginalizes artists from poor, working-class, queer, disabled, trans, and BIPOC backgrounds through exploitative practices. Art.Coop advocates for building solidarity networks as a crucial step towards change.

Dedicated to fostering a community of artists committed to redefining the art world, Art.coop is at the forefront of an artist-led movement for change, with a vision of collective liberation. A key achievement was the seven week Study-into-Action program, which engaged 105 cultural innovators and seven facilitators, incorporating feedback from a broad spectrum of contributors. This feedback was vital in shaping Art.coop’s strategic direction.

The Move the Money initiative underscores Art.Coop’s commitment to the solidarity economy, providing resources and events for grantmakers focused on economic justice in the arts. A highlight of this commitment is the launch of a pilot podcast season exploring the Solidarity Economy through the perspectives of artists and cultural workers actively contributing to it in their communities. This podcast offers a platform for sharing insights and inspiring collective action

Location: Bay Area, CA
Region: California
Founding: 2020
Founders/leadership: Lawrence Ellis, board president; Tania Abdul, board secretary; Javier LaFianza, board member

Breathe understands that comprehensive, accelerated change requires the pressure of a mass movement with historically marginalized people at the center. Breathe exists to support and increase the numbers of people working for racial equity, justice, and resilience, prioritizing BIPOC and young people. 

In the summer of 2020, a group of people with a wide range of experience began a synergistic process to arrive at Breathe’s unique formula for change. Everyone serving on the team is a lifelong activist, devoted to building a just, equitable, resilient world. Breathe’s current leadership includes: a concert/event producer, a teacher/community builder, an AGILE business coach/multinational venture designer, a tenants’ rights lawyer, a nonprofit executive director, the CFO of a global advertising firm, an actor/coach, and a web designer/immersive experience producer.

Breathe believes that intersectional solitary is the only way forward. An anti-racism organization at its core, Breathe utilizes media, events, interactive technology, the arts, and activist development to amplify, unify, and support impacted communities’ work for racial, environmental, and climate justice. Breathe is a network and platform that draws supporters with compelling media by and about community leaders and artists to educate and motivate audiences to act. Breathe’s web network for learning, action, and community-building provides a sense of solidarity and empowerment, with tools for recruitment and ongoing engagement. These catalytic events and action campaigns build relationships based on shared knowledge, effort, and resources, and offer constituents support networks, leadership and organizer training, and production and accelerator assistance for development and funding.

Read more about Breathe’s podcast, Sandblasted at the Shipyard, on the Move Blog.

Location: Oakland, CA
Founding: 2020
Founders/leadership: Taj James, co-founder & curator; Sihle Dinani, co-founder & advisor; Rachel Burrows, co-founder & operational anchor 

Full Spectrum Capital Labs (FSL) is ​​an incubator-accelerator that brings people, ideas, and capital together to grow regenerative economies powered by impactful solutions. Vibrant solutions need capacity building and partnerships to thrive. Gaps in the capital ecosystem mean opportunities for impact are missed every day. FSL fills the gaps between communities and capital by listening to communities and offering capital strategies to achieve their vision. FSL believes the more nature and community we have, the less money we need. The challenge we face is not scarcity and its deepening relationship and flow — it’s creating the beloved community that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned. In relationship and flow, there is fundamental abundance. Through this lens, FSL connects investors to solutions with powerful impact. 

Full Spectrum Labs listens to the ideas and interests of community and capital stewards all across the capital ecosystem, helping them develop an investment vision that aligns with community values. Community Stewards include; Birth Center Equity — Black and Indigenous midwives who imagine a birth center in every community; Return to the Heart Foundation which supports Indigenous women by investing in undercapitalized women-led initiatives on reservations and cities; Justice Capital — formerly incarcerated community leaders proving that divesting from prison systems and investing in worker and community-owned enterprises transform communities. As Black organizers in Memphis know: when communities own land and buildings, they cannot be displaced. Through relationships and collaborations between community and capital, stewards can navigate and strategize with the full potential of every capital tool and achieve the highest impact. 

Location: Bay Area, CA
Region: California
Founding: 2017
Founders/leadership: Carla Perez, founder 

Healing Clinic Collective (HCC) encourages re-engagement to a sacred way of relating to ourselves as whole people. With a network of over 130 healers and wellness practitioners, HCC’s goal is to connect people in need of holistic healing to natural and traditional healers and wellness practitioners for ongoing care. HCC aims to restore reverence and relationship to ancestral forms of healing and wellness that come from world views rooted in cultural understandings and expressions of love, interconnectedness, and a regenerative relationship to both people and the earth. 

Traditional prayer ceremonies are a foundational part of how HCC seeks and implements guidance for their ongoing work and is part of their organizing process for community-based healing clinics. HCC considers prayer an important part of their work: prayers are conducted in accordance to old world instructions of how to exchange loving energy with the power of the elements, ancestors and other spirit helpers. Prayers may be up to several hours long and can be for anything from the most dire global needs to specific desires for our work on the ground in the Bay Area.

Healing Clinic Collective offers consultations to individuals, organizations, and community-based groups who want to organize a healing clinic for their community with a focus on loving, traditional healing sessions to people from especially traumatized populations in the Bay Area. The organization works to raise awareness, including in working class communities, about the broad world of natural and ancestral healing modalities that are holistic and multi-layered. This may be for a school community, church community, neighborhood residents, or for organizations. 

Location: Oakland, CA; Brooklyn, NY 
Region: National
Founding: 2009 
Founders/leadership: Terry Marshall, founder/creative director; Aisha Shillingford, artistic director; Kira Joy Williams, creative project manager

Intelligent Mischief is a creative studio and design lab whose purpose is to unleash Black imagination to shape a future based on liberation, resilience, regeneration, and interdependence. Their vision is of a global, autonomous, interconnected archipelago of Black liberated zones or beloved communities that practice sacred governance at a scale necessary to transform systems. By boosting innovation and imagination, Intelligent Mischief aims to realign action logic and experiment with new forms of culture and civil society, creating atmospheres of change.

Intelligent Mischief invites creative collaboration with groups and coalitions seeking ways to align their mission, strategy, and policies with a vision of beautiful futures for all Black people. Their work is centered at the intersection of art, design, and popular culture to create spaces — such as publications, multi-platform worldbuilding and story experiences, hackathons and art installations — where Black folks can imagine and co-create beautiful futures. Their Creative Studio has nurtured many projects, including a massive multi-platform immersive story world called NationX.

Read more about the relationship between funders and movement leaders including Intelligent Mischief’s Terry Marshall on the Move Blog.

Read more about Intelligent Mischief’s Aisha Shillingford and Terry Marshall’s participation in a Transformative Movement building event on the Move Blog.

Watch MSC’s 73 Questions-style interview with Aisha Shillingford, Intellient Mischief’s artistic director, on the Move Blog.

Read what Aisha Shillingford, Intellient Mischief’s artistic director, had to say about about the passing of ibrahim abdul-matin on the Move Blog.

Location: Oakland, CA
Region: National
Founding: 2017
Founders/leadership: Alexis Flanagan, co-director; Doris Dupuy, co-director

Resonance is an ever-expanding network of Black, Indigenous, immigrant, women, femme, trans, and two-spirit people and their co-conspirators who are building a world beyond violence — a world rooted in mutual care, where all people live in dignity, and all beings can thrive. 

Resonance’s worldbuilding draws on the lineage of radical feminist, BIPOC movement leaders who have, alongside communities, developed powerful ways to oppose and resolve violence. Today, Resonance practitioners are taking the next step toward transformation, by uprooting the complex and interrelated causes of violence, and supplanting them with ways of being in our families and communities, cultural norms, and systems of governance that reflect our values. 

Resonance participants are healers, leaders, artists, survivors, and storytellers creating visionary spaces to access creativity and radical imagination, and practice what it means to thrive.

Resonance Network participants believe that liberation is a practice, and are building the world we know is possible, by: 

• Activating Radical Imagination: co-creating community-rooted action spaces that interrupt the current dominant worldview, and cultivate mutual care in ourselves, communities, and collective systems.

• Claiming Collective Governance: practicing — in our families, tribes, teams, and communities — a set of principles that affirm our sacred responsibility to care for one another and the earth.

• Building Reach and Resonance: building authentic relationships, a shared vision, and collaborative action with individuals and communities who share a commitment to building a liberatory future.

Resonance Network first took root in 2013 with the first cohort of movement leaders to take part in Move to End Violence, a ten year program of the NoVo Foundation. Their shared vision of a world beyond violence made it clear they would need to work beyond the constraints of mainstream anti-violence approaches, taking the longer, more emergent path toward transforming violence and cultivating thriving individuals and communities. 

Resonance Network’s founding members also recognized that transforming the roots of violence meant centering the people whose communities were most impacted by interpersonal and institutional violence. This intention remains a guiding force today.

From its founding, Resonance made the intentional choice to configure ourselves as a network. Unlike traditional organizations, networks hold the capacity to adapt, evolve, and scale in response to changing contexts and current events. This dynamic form not only mirrors the way change happens in natural networks like mycelium or a coral reef — it also makes broad transformation possible.

Today, MSC works in collaboration with Resonance’s core team and Navigators Circle as the network continues to evolve and grow. Made up of network participants, the Navigators Circle uses network principles of co-design, consent, and collaborative practice to support the Resonance team in choice-making about infrastructure and strategy. Through consent-based decision-making, Resonance practices the governance it hopes to see in the world: centering compassion, deep relationship, and collective thriving. 

Location: Oakland, CA
Region: Califonia
Founding: 2020
Founders/leadership: Saryne Miller, project director 

In the spring of 2020, a coalition of transitional-aged youth (TAY) and adults who serve them, including stakeholders who work for Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), the city of Oakland, Alameda County, Peralta Colleges, faith-based organizations, and community-based organizations, won a campaign for a Career Technical Education (CTE) Hub at 1025 2nd Avenue in Oakland California. Included in the Measure Y Bond project list, CTE Hub at 1025 2nd Avenue, also known as TAYHub, secured funding from OUSD facilities bond, the city of Oakland, and through private support. With fiscal sponsorship from MSC, TAYHub is establishing a planning process to serve youths who need alternative pathways to post-secondary success.

The location is integral to the TAYHub vision. Situated in the heart of Oakland, close to public transportation, and across the street from Laney College, Dewey Academy, and La Escuelita Education Center, the location is not only safe, healthy, and accessible, but it builds on the important history of the land — honoring the legacy of Marcus Foster, the first Black superintendent of Oakland Unified School District.

TAYHub will provide in-depth support, wrap around services (health, wellness, social, emotional, etc.), a technical education center with hands-on job training on real life equipment in several trades, a space for athletic programs, a student-run cafe, and additional services and support for OUSD students and family.

Location: Sacramento, CA
Region: California
Founding: 2020
Founders/leadership: An Nguyen, program manager, liaison; Josephine Young

The President’s Youth Council (PYC) is a body of youth ambassadors from across California that serves in partnership with the CEO of the California Endowment to ultimately shape the Endowment’s investments and culture. Dr. Robert K. Ross formed PYC in a genuine effort to integrate youth input and decision making into the Endowment. PYC members work as thought partners in redefining wellness for young Californians and provide a youth perspective in advancing health equity and health justice campaigns while strengthening youth voice and leadership across communities, statewide and nationally. 

PYC envisions a world where young people of color are at the center of an intergenerational movement to create a healthy, just, and equitable California. These ambassadors provide community perspective by centering youth voices and cultivating narrative and systems change through storytelling while supporting health equity for underserved communities across the state. PYC members earn a yearly stipend, further their skills, and gain access to networking and mentoring opportunities. They also participate in youth development opportunities that strengthen their leadership skills and help them be more effective advocates for their communities.

Location: Oakland, CA 
Region: California 
Founding: 2021

Thrive is a community, network, and movement building Beloved Community for these times. We gather people at the intersections of meaning, belonging, music, the arts, and social change.

Thrive’s mission is to create a world where all people belong and thrive and where beloved community has been realized: love and justice have prevailed; people from all walks of life are valued, respected, and treated with dignity; and all people feel safe, cared for, and connected. Thrive shares resources openly within their network, peacefully resolves conflict, lives in balance with nature, and embodies lives of meaning, joy and wellbeing.

Thrive started in Oakland, CA six years ago as Thrive East Bay. As their community and reach has expanded, they have grown into the Thrive Network, working locally and translocally to build Beloved Community.

Thrive is guided by four core principles: 1. Thriving Lives supports each member in the network in overcoming personal challenges and injustice and creating healthy lives filled with purpose, joy, and expression. 2. Love In Action guides members toward compassion, gratitude, empathy, and community amongst diverse groups of people. 3. Shared Learning & Practice seeks to deepen the understanding of the world through conversation and critical inquiry while growing together through transformative practices and action. And 4. Systemic Change unites to build equitable systems where all network members can flourish as individuals, as communities, and as a planet.

Location: Gulf Coast, TX
Region: Texas
Founding: 2020
Founders/leadership: Charles Clark III, executive director

Trill Digital is an innovative digital project that has rapidly expanded its presence in the digital art space. With a strong focus on increasing media literacy, Trill Digital utilizes various media, such as podcasts and exhibitions, to engage the community and educate students through workshops in South Texas.

Trill Digital aims to inspire individuals by integrating arts and techno-culture, while also shedding light on environmental issues that impact the creative process. This raises awareness and promotes sustainable practices.

One notable achievement of Trill Digital is the production of UGK Day, an event that fosters connections and inspires the community to pursue artistic endeavors. This event also draws attention to the need for a city-facilitated cultural arts and tourism program for local artists, musicians, and creatives. Additionally, Trill Digital has the potential to produce events that incorporate music, environmental initiatives, and STEAM goals within school districts. Through these initiatives, Trill Digital provides a supportive system for self-expression, connecting individuals to wraparound public health services, and sharing resources with local historically Black churches.

Trill Digital is dedicated to highlighting local talent and fostering creativity and media literacy in the Port Arthur community, as well as sister galleries along the Gulf Coast. Through art programming and support for local artists and musicians, Trill Digital brings diverse art experiences to rural communities, with an emphasis on showcasing multi-ethnic and multi-disciplinary artists.