Building Power Through Culture
The Thriving Cultures Mid-Strategy Review Report
Prepared by RISE Research & Evaluation
Dr. Tenah Hunt, Senior Research Associate
Julie Kendig, M.A., Director of Inquiry
Foreword
By Robert Smith III
Senior Program Officer, Thriving Cultures, Surdna Foundation
This is a story about the beating heart of social change—the artists, storytellers, and cultural workers who make people feel why a different world is necessary and within reach and who form the connective tissue of communities and social movements. It’s about philanthropy’s role as a partner and long-term investor in the project of imagining and building a racially just future, and what we’ve learned along the way.
My part in this story begins when I arrived at the Surdna Foundation in March 2019, fresh off a leadership role at a small museum in the Midwest. At the museum, I did everything from getting coffee for community engagement meetings to fundraising from major foundations. That experience, helping build an institution with limited resources and large ambitions, has guided me throughout my seven years as a program officer for the Thriving Cultures program at Surdna. In this role, the resources and relationships we steward support more than fifty grantee partners. Day in and day out, often with little material reward, our grantees do extraordinary work to build cultural institutions that make communities vibrant and dynamic.
I joined the foundation alongside Director F. Javier Torres-Campos and Program Associate Sinéad López, charged with implementing the Radical Imagination for Racial Justice strategy. It was a bold vision for resourcing artists, cultural workers, and organizers who helped us envision, test, and build a just future for all—from transitional housing prototypes for formerly incarcerated people to new platforms for intersectional storytelling. When Sarian Sankoh succeeded Sinéad as Senior Program Associate and Javier left the foundation, Sarian and I carried that work forward, putting the vision into practice across the program.
Not everything worked out as planned. We listened to grantee feedback, learned from colleagues across the philanthropic, cultural, and social movement ecosystems, and pivoted amid the COVID pandemic, a new administration in Washington, D.C., and fleeting support for art, culture, and explicit racial justice efforts. The result has been an evolving implementation approach that honors the north star of the Radical Imagination for Racial Justice strategy while making room for experimentation amid changing conditions.
The current conditions are daunting: the dismantling of democratic infrastructure, threats to social justice movements, attacks on trans people, increasing unaffordability of daily life, and significant stress on the economic models of the arts and culture ecosystem, among others. To gird myself, I look back, and I look forward. I look back and gather hope from my enslaved ancestors, who endured, organized, and passed on culture despite bleak circumstances, and from Indigenous ancestors, who passed down the practice of working for the seventh generation.
I look forward to seeing the seeds planted by this strategy—artists, organizations, relationships, collaborations, moments of joy—blossom into infrastructure for justice. I look forward to witnessing our contribution to replacing today’s failing systems with something more just. Together.
The report that follows is a reflection on five years of our Radical Imagination for Racial Justice strategy. It documents grantee experiences, reviews our evolving philanthropic practice, and makes recommendations for our future work.
Sarian and I want to thank Dr. Tenah Hunt, Julie Kendig, M.A., and Lorain Rihan, of RISE Research and Evaluation for the depth and care they brought to this research; the grantee partners who gave their time, insight, and trust to make this report possible; and Ash-Lee Woodard-Henderson for always reminding us of our role as funders in the liberation of all people. Their voices are the heart of what follows.
Radical Imagination for Racial Justice
This mid-strategy review surfaced a collection of lessons, drawn from overarching takeaways across a multitude of data sources, explained in depth later in this report. Together, they point to the following thesis on radical imagination for racial justice:
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It is possible even in a long dark.
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It requires care to birth the new and hospice the old.
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It is everything for everyone when rooted in love.
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It needs every means, every angle, every level, every approach.
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It is inevitable when we stay committed to each other.