Constellations
An Interview on Radical Investment for Transformative Narrative Power
Erin Williams, Tara Dorabji, and Janelle Treibitz, Constellations Culture Change Initiative
“Constellations invests in narrative strategy because cultural transformation can’t happen without it. Our capsule initiative is a much needed infusion of resources and support to the field with the aim of developing a strategic narrative blueprint to further strengthen our cultural ecosystem long-term.”
What’s Ahead?
When invited to contribute a piece on narrative power building to this series, three co-creators of the Constellations Culture Change Fund and Initiative responded with an interview-style conversation that amplifies place-based narrative strategies, participatory narrative development, and investing in BIPOC artists and culture bearers. In their generous conversation, the authors offer both a horizon and a blueprint. These long-term, ecosystem needs require strategic, right-now actions that cultural funders are invited to learn about and organize around, together.
What is the Constellations Culture Change Fund and Initiative? Tell us a bit about this initiative.
Photo of Gomela 03. GOMELA, a Bantu word, means “TO GO BACK TO/TO RETURN.”
Gomela is an experience of collective memories passed down from generation to generation, a tapestry woven by a group of multi-disciplinary artists who represent the diversity of African Americans who call New Orleans home.
Photo by: Mariana Sheppard. Courtesy of Damia Khanboubi of Junebug Productions.
The Constellations Culture Change Fund & Initiative (Constellations) builds collective power among BIPOC Artist Disruptors, Culture Bearers, and cultural strategy organizations working at the intersections of art, culture, and social justice to accelerate a shift in worldview away from domination towards liberation, collaboration, care, and interdependence.
Never have we seen a time more primed for radical imagination than right now. As we continue to grapple with a global pandemic, economic and climate crises, and global uprisings for Black Liberation and Land Back, we need Artist Disruptors and Culture Bearers to help us imagine and manifest an equitable, anti-racist future. To have an impact, they need long-term resources, community, and the space to experiment.
With an initial $13M start-up phase and implementation that runs through 2024, Constellations is creating replicable models to better understand how to resource cultural change and is well positioned to uncover key learnings and generate future catalytic investments needed for short and long-term transformation.
We are investing in three primary strategies:
Culture Power Building: we are providing direct support to BIPOC Artist Disruptors (artists engaged in organizing and social justice) and Culture Bearers (keepers and teachers of Indigenous, ancestral and/or traditional cultures and ways of knowing). Through a robust paid fellowship and cultural practice awards, this strategy centers the power of Artist Disruptors and Culture Bearers as social change leaders.
Organizational Strengthening: we are providing two-year general operating support grants to grassroots, BIPOC-led cultural strategy organizations. We will disperse funds to address historical and colonial funding disparities and work to increase regular streams of investments for the field. This strategy is designed to inspire funders to intentionally map and increase their general operating support to BIPOC-led cultural strategy organizations at the grassroots level.
Network Weaving and Learning: we are providing spaces for our network of culture makers and organizations to collaborate, share best practices, build community across regions, learn together, and grow the emerging narrative and cultural strategy field.
Our initiative and funding strategies reflect our belief in nurturing narrative ecosystems; we understand these ecosystems to be networks of values-aligned BIPOC culture makers who have the skills, resources, and support to create and disseminate narratives that inspire and accelerate shifts in worldview from domination to liberation, collaboration, care, and interdependence.
We also believe in the power and importance of place-based culture. Our field’s ability to build collective, sustainable cultural power relies on the long-standing relationships held by practitioners who have deep ties and trust within their communities. It is these relationships that spur the greatest transformations of hearts and minds and inspire the deepest commitments to working toward structural change.
We believe in the power of communities to author their own narratives from their own locations and perspectives—and recognize that in order for narrative change to be rooted in community, it must be funded in community.
Photo from ConfluenceFlow2021. Courtesy of Jennie Ward of Ananya Dance Theatre.
It is in recognition of the importance of narrative power building rooted in community that has led Constellations to fund within specific regions, supporting work with deep community ties. Because communities must create, champion and align narratives for our movements to be successful, we are funding areas of the country where BIPOC Artist Disruptors, Culture Bearers, and cultural strategy organizations are historically under-resourced, focusing on the Southern Border Region, the South, the Midwest, the non-continental United States, California (Healthy Places Index 25 percentile communities), and Indigenous communities (Sovereign, Tribal, and Indigenous Nations and Territories) intersecting with those regions.
What’s the vision for Constellations as a narrative strategy initiative? Can you share some of the ways narrative work is woven throughout Constellations?
We want to begin here by clarifying how we define the term “narrative.” In the context of narrative strategy, a narrative is a pattern of related stories that represent a central idea or belief, refined over time and reinforced by the stories that animate it.[1] The American Dream is one example of a narrative; it is the belief that with hard work and tenacity, any American has the opportunity to achieve their highest aspirations and goals, and it’s reinforced in endless pop culture storylines.
“Narratives hold great power over our imaginations; they transmit values and a point of view, guiding attitudes, emotions, and behavior in response to the world around us. Great influence is therefore wielded by those who have narrative power—the skills, platforms, relationships, and reach to create and widely disseminate narratives that influence how people think, feel, and act on a given topic or issue.”
Constellations’ founding assumptions are twofold: first, that narrative and cultural change is a prerequisite to achieving the future we desire; and second, that BIPOC Artist Disruptors and Culture Bearers hold narrative power and are the visionaries we need to help us imagine and lead us into that future.
Therefore, Constellations believes that building narrative and cultural power with BIPOC Artist Disruptors and Culture Bearers is key to advancing social transformation. We are engaging narrative in three ways to that end:
Narrative Alignment: In order to be able to work together toward shared narrative goals, we must first be able to name both the goals we have in common and the narratives we most prioritize to advance. Based on interviews and input from partners, Constellations has created a Narrative System—a set of deep narratives that, taken together, compose a worldview that makes the future we want feel logical and inevitable. This provides the foundation for values alignment, the shared goals and narratives that are necessary for coordinated strategy. All of Constellations’ network weaving and cross-pollination initiatives and funding strategies will be designed to advance this Narrative System. (See our narrative system, comprised of our priority deep narratives and values here.)
Narrative Field Building: Everyone has a part to play in spreading and reinforcing narratives. In a robust narrative ecosystem, our collective resources, skills, stories, and audiences give us the ability to create and reinforce narratives that grow from (and point audiences toward) a shared value framework—a worldview. At Constellations, we are engaging a wide cross-section of the narrative and cultural strategy fields, providing opportunities for BIPOC individuals and organizations to share skills and learnings. We are deepening relationships and testing out different models that our field will need in order to strategize, coordinate, and scale narrative dissemination and uptake.
Narrative Experimentation: It's important to keep up with how culture and narratives change and move, and that requires continual experimentation and iteration. Constellations is piloting a Narrative Design Lab to test models of coordinated narrative strategy. BIPOC Artist Disruptors and Culture Bearers from priority regions will be supported to collaboratively advance a shared narrative.
What role does narrative leadership play in Constellations?
Charmaine Minniefield’s “Remembrance as Resistance,” part of Flux Projects’ Juneteenth Celebration. Courtesy of Charmaine Minniefield.
Constellations is focused on two subsets of BIPOC culture-makers as narrative leaders: Artist Disruptors and Culture Bearers.
Artist Disruptors are artists who are rooted in community, who inspire action, and who are working at the intersection of art and social justice. Artist Disruptors are able to powerfully manifest narratives into stories and visuals that speak directly to their audiences and communities. They help us question our assumptions, envision alternative futures, and inspire us to work toward the future we need.
Culture Bearers are embodiments of narrative, connecting our past to our future. “They represent an embedded presence in place, community trust and mutual support.” They are cultural stewards and help us understand traditional ways of knowing and creating as paths to community health and healing. Culture Bearers are artists and carriers of indigenous, ancestral and/or traditional knowledge who weave past, present, and future stewardship of land, culture, community, and spirit. (This definition for Culture Bearers was informed by ArtChangeUs Weaving Forward report.)
We focus on BIPOC voices and narrative and cultural leadership because we are global majority communities, and through historical and lived experiences, including through political awakenings, we have the analysis necessary to envision that another way is possible—and close.[3] Our communities have been systematically and deliberately stripped of power, resources, land, culture, and freedom in the name of supremacy and greed. Yet we are able to leverage our influence and skill set to challenge, transform, and create new narratives—exposing systems of oppression and domination, shining a light on what is possible, and celebrating the wisdom, beauty, and connection of our communities. Moreover, we offer healing and cultural participation that draw communities together and move them forward. In short, we are on the frontlines everyday as movement and community organizers, and we are the leaders best able to provide a radical reimagining of what we want our world to look like.
Narrative and cultural power cannot reach their full potential unless both BIPOC Artist Disruptors and Culture Bearers are centered.
2019 Abuelita’s Remedios - La Cultura Cura Health Fair in East Los Angeles, courtesy of Joel Garcia, Meztli Projects.
It is important to state that culture bearing work is strikingly underfunded and overlooked in the narrative strategy field, as well as in the arts, culture and social justice fields. To learn how to engage with and support Culture Bearers, Constellations partnered with ArtChangeUS. From a series of interviews and a listening session, ArtChangeUS developed a powerful report with recommendations that has resulted in a Constellations commitment to equitably invest in traditional and tradition-based Culture Bearers, with over half of our initiatives directed to culture bearing work. For instance, we’ve created focused awards that reflect the needs and recommendations we heard from Culture Bearers (including Language, Intergenerational Knowledge Transmission, and Cultural Knowledge and Practice Awards).
These days, there’s a lot of conversation in social justice spaces and in philanthropy about narrative change — but artist disruptors are envisioning and actualizing holistic cultural transformations. How do you see the connections between narrative strategies and cultural change strategies?
If narratives are the patterns of stories that shape our understanding, culture is how those stories are both transmitted and interpreted. Narratives shape culture as much as they are themselves an expression of it—it’s an endless feedback loop. Culture drives narrative creation and is the most common and effective vehicle for narratives to be spread and reinforced. We can influence culture through narratives and influence narratives through culture. To work with one requires engaging with the other. Artist Disruptors and Culture Bearers work with the raw materials of cultural meaning-making, and are therefore uniquely situated to move and create culture that is rooted in community and values aligned in order to accelerate a shift in worldview.
“Narratives shape culture as much as they are themselves an expression of it— it’s an endless feedback loop. Culture drives narrative creation and is the most common and effective vehicle for narratives to be spread and reinforced. We can influence culture through narratives and influence narratives through culture.”
To build and wield narrative power, we must therefore include Cultural Justice as one of our most important goals. Cultural Justice has been defined as “the healing and remedying of the erasure, suppression, and marginalization of people’s artistic and cultural practices and expressions. Cultural Justice restores and creates for communities of color ways of living, being, and sense-making, allows all of us to express ourselves and be recognized in our full complex humanity, and moves us all toward a richer, more vibrant multiracial democracy.”3
Likewise in culture change efforts, who holds narrative power cannot be overlooked. It is essential that culture makers in community, as well as directly impacted communities have participatory methods in shaping the narratives that are employed as culture change. Cultural strategy allows mechanisms for narrative change to be rooted in communities in authentic and inspiring ways. Rather than narrative priorities being generated from top-down and centralized mechanisms, cultural strategizing and organizing can ensure that narrative choices reflect the creativity, vision, agency and decision-making power of those most impacted by systemic oppression.
Constellations invests in narrative strategy because we don’t believe cultural transformation can happen without it. Our capsule initiative is a much needed infusion of resources and support to the field with the aim of developing a strategic blueprint to further strengthen our ecosystem long-term.
What do you wish philanthropy and funders would know and act on to advance narrative transformation?
Well, first off, philanthropy is a system born from systematic extraction, exploitation, and genocide, and in the best of all worlds would not even exist. As agitators within philanthropy, we work towards its obsolescence not its sustainability. In recent years, we have seen an influx of gallant efforts to ‘decolonize’ the sector; and there have been many poignant thought pieces written about the challenges, inconsistencies and contradictions we hold while operating within such a system. Vanessa Daniels of Groundswell Fund states “gentrification should no longer be acceptable in philanthropy;”[4] and comrades Degan Ali and Cynthia Eyakuse share, “the problem is the arrogance the system has, where it thinks everything should be centered around it. It’s not only a money problem. It’s also a narrative problem, a perception problem, and a language problem."[5] There have also been radical reimaginings of what the system could actually do; for example, in addition to redistributing resources, it could transfer ownership. This idea comes from The Center for Cultural Power’s president, Favianna Rodriguez, and IllumiNative’s executive director, Crystal Echo Hawk: “In light of the country’s growing reparations movements, such revenue generation raises a question: what if, instead of giving away cash, donors transferred ownership of their assets to frontline communities?”[6]
It's imperative that folks working with the system of philanthropy, reflect, participate, learn and change their mindset and practices through transformative initiatives, such as Decolonizing Wealth and Trust-based Philanthropy. It means taking a hard look at where your money comes from, your role and how you push to dismantle inequity. For white folks in foundations, it also may mean stepping out of the role altogether so that world majority people can lead. Here are some additional recommendations we have for funders:
Support narrative and cultural strategy led by BIPOC individuals and organizations and learn more about how narrative power is actually a precursor — and even a missing link — for the social, political and economic transformation you outline in your funding strategies. Human rights, social justice, and advocacy funders should be funding Artist Disruptors and Culture Bearers to move the needle on all areas including but not limited to strengthening and protecting democracies and climate, racial, economic, and reproductive justice.
Shift power. Priorities and decisions for funding should be made by people on the receiving end of systematic and structural inequality and inequity. There are various experiments with philanthropic power-shifting models and participatory grantmaking that already exist. Resource Generation has created Social Justice Philanthropy Principles and a collaboration of three networks created Human Rights Grantmaking Principles.
Give multi-year general operating grants to BIPOC-led organizations and movements as the de facto first step. Do your homework and do not expect an education from activists. Radically listen, talk less, move back, and act when movement leaders collectively organize to speak truth to power when it comes to philanthropy.
Reimagine philanthropy. There has been a gradual narrative shift with human rights philanthropy itself moving from a charity model, to protecting, to empowering, to supporting, to allyship, and perhaps now to co-conspiring. We believe we can radically imagine something even further along this continuum. Folks in philanthropy need to shine a light on philanthropy’s origin story and reframe its focus on repair. In addition, they should use their power and influence to advocate for the equitable redistribution of resources, state-level reparations to communities whose wealth has been stolen, and changes to the US tax code that redistribute tax burden to high net-worth individuals.
Reach out to us! We’d love to have a conversation with any funder who is looking to support and invest in BIPOC narrative and cultural power. Our goal is also to partner with funders to host briefings and dialogues.
Finally, we want to leave you with a reading list of some of the pieces that have shaped our thinking over the years:
Celestial Navigation: How to Fund Culture Change in the U.S by the Constellations Founding Design Team
Weaving Forward by ArtChangeUS
Making Waves: A Guide to Cultural Strategy by The Culture Group
We’re here to clear the air on what trust-based philanthropy is and what it isn’t by Carrie Avery, Pia Infante, Philip Li, and Brenda Solorzano
Philanthropists Bench Women of Color, the M.V.P.s of Social Change by Vanessa Daniel
Freeing Ourselves from Colonial, White Savior Models of Philanthropy by Nicolette Naylor and Nina Blackwell
NOTES
[1] Narrative Initiative report, Towards a New Gravity. 55.
[2] We use 'we' intentionally and carefully here, as the Constellations Culture Change Staff and Board are almost entirely BIPOC-led and -run. Our co-author and ally, Janelle Treibitz, is of European descent and does not include herself in these statements.
[3] Chang, Jeff & Nayantara Sen. Race Forward’s Narrative, Arts, and Culture trainings.
[4] Daniel, Vanessa. Philanthropists Bench Women of Color, the M.V.P.s of Social Change. New York Times. November 2019.
[5] Adair, Kylie & Vinod Rajasekaran. In Depth Conversation: Two Global Development Experts Critically Examine the Movement Toward Decolonizing Aid. Future of Good. February 2022.
[6] Echo Hawk, Crystal and Favianna Rodriguez. "Community-Driven Philanthropy: Giving Away Assets, Not Grants," Nonprofit Quarterly. November 2022.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Erin Williams (she/her/elle) is the Chief Field Building Officer at The Center for Cultural Power and leads the Constellations Culture Change Fund & Initiative. Previously at Global Fund for Women and the International Women’s Health Coalition, Erin led global strategies to resource activists and gender justice movements advancing LGBTQI, sex workers’ and adolescent girls’ rights, abortion access, and feminist technology. As a mentor and coach, Erin has supported her philanthropic colleagues in various processes to deepen their collective institutional value alignment on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.
As a Black, mixed-race radical listener, trust-based grantmaker, and change manager, Erin has lived and worked in Canada, Belgium, Botswana, Jamaica, and the U.S. She has direct intervention experience in emergency shelters, as a pregnancy options counselor and a youth sexuality educator. She weaves her love of singing, dancing, theater, and somatic practice into her life and work, and is currently developing a girl-centered musical entitled “Because We’re Girls” with Tada! Youth Theater.
Erin holds a Master of Social Work from Carleton University and a graduate certificate in Principles and Practices of Organization Development from Columbia University. She speaks English and French, is motivated by cultivating deep relationships and trust, and tries her best to live up to these words by Kay Ryan, “Intention doesn’t sweeten. It should be picked young and eaten.”
Tara Dorabji (she/her) is a writer, mother, filmmaker, and co-founder & vice president at The Center for Cultural Power, a home for artists and activists. She is part of the Constellations Culture Change Fund & Initiatives founding design team and a co-author of Building Narratives of Joy. Her work focuses on themes of militarization, family relationships and generational love. Her debut novel, Fire, is Simon and Schuster’s 2022 Books Like Us Award winner. Publications include Al Jazeera, The Chicago Quarterly, Huizache, and acclaimed anthologies including: Good Girls Marry Doctors & All the Women in My Family Sing. She received a 2019 & 2021 Arts Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission for her writing and documentaries on Kashmir, one of the world’s most militarized zones. Her award-winning film, Here Still, was screened at over a dozen film festivals throughout Asia and the USA, including the Jaipur International Film Festival. Awards include Asia’s Best Independent Documentary Film at the All Asia Independent Film Festival 2020 & Best Short Documentary at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival. She serves on the Advisory Board for Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation.
Janelle Treibitz is a narrative and cultural strategist with two decades of experience and a background in campaign organizing. She currently works with social justice and cultural organizations across different movements to integrate narrative and cultural strategies into their work. Her work is grounded in the belief that cultural and narrative transformation are deeply intertwined and that both are necessary for a more just and joyful future to emerge. For the Constellations Initiative and Culture Change Fund, she worked with their team to develop their narrative strategies and their implementation plan. She is currently supporting the curriculum development for their Narrative Design Lab.
Previously, she was the Research Lead for Race Forward’s Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy, working with their team and cohorts to develop research studies, narrative strategy frameworks, and movement-oriented tools that advance a pro-immigrant worldview. She also worked as the Network Strategist for Culture Surge, coordinating partnerships with movement groups and artists to inspire civic engagement around the 2020 Presidential election. And for several years she coordinated the Creative Change network of artists, activists, and influencers for The Opportunity Agenda, and organized their annual flagship Creative Change Retreat.
She has authored various narrative guides and tools, including the Center for Cultural Power’s No Going Back: a COVID-19 Activation Guide for Artists & Activists, and Border Futures: A Guide to Impact Storytelling (co-authored with Kat Evasco), the Butterfly Lab’s Narrative Design Toolkit (co-authored with sára abdullah, Nayantara Sen, and Kana Hammon), and The Opportunity Agenda’s Working with Cultural Influencers: 10 Tips to Spark Change.
