This year marks 10 years since we launched Creative Community Fellows.
It’s been a decade since our pilot back in 2014 when we brought together a cohort of people leveraging arts and culture as a vehicle for change in their communities. Now, 10 years later, we run multiple concurrent cohorts in the U.S. and U.K. each year. We offer Fellows deeply meaningful learning opportunities, funding, retreats, group coaching, and a powerful community of practice and support as they engage in their important work.
To celebrate 10 years of this program, we commissioned Erik Moe – a writer and Fellow from our very first cohort – to share the story of this program through the incredible people that have participated in it. Erik wrote this piece prior to the November ‘24 U.S. election, and while the theme he chose was resonant then, it’s even more so now as we think about the work of change in challenging times.
In 2014, NAS invited twenty-five “leaders working at the intersection of culture and community” into the inaugural cohort of Creative Community Fellows (CCF). I was lucky to be one of them. Cultivating luck was in fact one of the fundamental lessons we would learn in our time together. I was lucky again to be asked to reflect on the program for its tenth anniversary. Lucky, because in so doing, I’ve had the chance to reconnect with fellows from our inaugural group, and to meet some incredible artists, organizers, and creative entrepreneurs from recent cohorts. Lucky, because in each conversation I have had the chance to revisit foundational lessons from the CCF experience, and to remind myself of the strength we have in our community.
My project ten years ago felt very abstract in comparison to my peers’ work. Most of my cohort seemed to be doing tangible work within established nonprofits, performing in front of audiences, or installing significant works of public art. I felt like I didn’t belong, though everyone I met was warm and welcoming. Before long, NAS led a session on impostor syndrome — another key lesson taught at CCF. It seemed that just about everyone felt like they didn’t belong, not just in CCF, but in any stage of their career. But we did belong. If my very abstract idea of working on culture in community was different from everyone else’s, that difference was part of the experiment that NAS chose to undertake as it created CCF ten years ago.
Still. My proposal was very abstract. To this day, I struggle to explain what it was or is, but here goes: It involved walking, conversation, historical research, and storytelling. It focused on the future while being rooted in understanding injustices of the past — particularly the ways that racism has shaped our built environment and continues to shape our lives in the present. In the end, it became a formula for writing utopian stories about our neighborhoods in the year 2215. Ideally, these stories would inspire and inform actions we take in the present to benefit people who are around long after we’re gone. Apart from my somewhat arbitrary fixation on the year 2215, this is not a new idea. It is akin to the seventh-generation principle of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) tribes, the idea that every decision should result in a sustainable environment and sustainable relationships seven generations into the future. By extension, this principle means that our lives are inextricably linked to choices made over the past seven generations, choices which were often rooted in racism and fear.
Today we are ten years in, or 5% of my original project’s 200-year timeline. How are we doing? Have we progressed 5% closer to utopia? These past ten years have not been easy ones for many of us. Just one year after the fellowship with the election results of November 2016, it seemed to me that things had taken an irreversibly dark turn. I wondered if I had made a mistake in returning to the arts after seven years working for labor justice and political causes? Might I have had more of an impact knocking on doors in swing states than dreaming up utopias as a wandering writer? The rest of the decade offered more reasons to spiral: police violence across the country and in my home town of Minneapolis, evidence of irreversible climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, war and genocides. Of course, these dark turns were new only in their specifics. Abuse of power, racist officials, environmental destruction, plagues and war have been constant throughout human history. These years brought them closer to my privileged bubble, but for many communities — especially Black and Brown communities — these realities have been front of mind all along.
And yet artists continued to work. NAS continued to welcome new cohorts into CCF, each with some seed of optimism they hoped would grow, some theory of change that would improve their community, and the world, in some significant way. As I spoke with fellows in recent weeks, it was this seed of optimism — the belief that art brings about positive change — that I focused on as the common thread across a decade of inspired work from CCF fellows.
Kristina Newman-Scott, 2014 Fellow
Executive Director of New York Public Radio’s Greene Space & NAS Board Chair
These conversations began with a phone call with Kristina Newman-Scott, who now serves as executive director of the New York Public Radio’s Greene Space, and is the Board Chair of NAS. Kristina was in my inaugural CCF cohort, so reconnecting offered a chance to remind ourselves of the fellows we’ve stayed in touch with and memories of CCF’s first in-person gathering, at Creative Community House in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Kristina came into CCF with a vision for integrating the arts into the fabric of Hartford, Connecticut. The lessons of CCF gave her new tools and a vernacular to expand her work to even more impactful programs. CCF, “shifted how I approach the work, and opened up my mind,” she says. “Without that, I don’t think I would have gone on to be the first woman, first person of color, to lead culture for the State of Connecticut.” Shortly after our fellowship year, Kristina became that state’s Director of Culture, overseeing more than $80 million in cultural and creative economy investments.
I was heartened to hear of the career lessons over the past decade that Kristina traced back to involvement in CCF that inaugural year. For example, the importance of having a personal brain trust has led her to consult with fellows from our cohort on big life and career decisions. The knowledge that luck is a real factor in so much of what we accomplish, and that it can be cultivated through your network is a lesson that stuck with us both. She also reminded me of a lesson at the in-person retreat that taught us how important it is to ask for help sometimes, that often it is essential to ask for help even though our pride might tell us to struggle alone. Kristina’s career was proof that there was power in each of them. She summed up the philosophy of her work with three frameworks that guide her: “rigorous curiosity, intentional collision, and collective wisdom.”
Ellice Patterson, 2021 Fellow
Executive Director of Abilities Dance
My next conversation jumped forward in time to 2021’s Creative Community Fellows: New England cohort. Ellice Patterson of Abilities Dance uses art and dance to promote disability justice in Boston and beyond. Ellice was encouraged by the openness she found in the CCF program. “Being in a space of possibilities and imagination” where there was “space to have conversations,” and where questions of access were met with care was encouraging. She shared that NAS ensured spaces had microphones and captions, and had strong COVID testing parameters, all factors that allowed Ellice to participate fully and without fear for her health, or that of her community.
Like Kristina, Ellice mentioned the strength of connections within her cohort as an enduring lesson. Though fellows were all at different stages in their projects — some beginning, some fiscally-sponsored, others established as nonprofits just as Abilities Dance had already been — acknowledging that “we’re all doing different things at different times and in different contexts” led to meaningful exchange. The regional nature of her cohort in New England has encouraged maintaining connection in the years since and has led to constructive conversations on how to overcome challenges specific to the city and region.
When I described the utopian visioning project I worked on during my time in CCF, Ellice’s thoughts turned to a friend, the Palestinian artist Yaffa, with whom she learned to emphasize the importance of the here-and-now over distant utopias. There are “certain actions that make your community stronger now, that clear a path for a bigger change.”
Ellice’s time with CCF has supported her leadership journey as she’s grown her organization these last few years. Embodying Abilities Dance’s vision to “disrupt antiquated ableist beliefs and disseminate the value of inclusion through dance.” are the here-and-now actions she is working for today.
Dominic Moore Dunson, 2016 Fellow
I spoke to choreographer and educator Dominic Moore over Zoom while I was on a work trip to D.C., the place where my original CCF project took shape (I now live in Los Angeles). Walking through my old neighborhoods had me feeling especially open to introspection.
Back in 2016, Dominic entered CCF while developing The Black Card Project, which started as live-action dance theatre exploring ideas around Black identity, perseverance, and belonging. Too often, he found, concepts relating to education, experience, and culture were defined narrowly as Black or non-Black, ignoring many examples outside of this binary, including Dominic’s own lived experience. The project found its form beyond dance and performance in the realization that “conversations are choreography,” because they “get people moving and laughing, and get us to let it flow.”
In his expansive career since joining his cohort, Dominic has returned to certain lessons from CCF. For example, learning that “the point of a pitch session isn’t to get to ‘yes’ then and there, but rather to open up a longer conversation, to provoke curiosity.”
While speaking with Dominic, I thought back to my own work and the lessons I’d learned (and forgotten) from un-choreographed conversations years ago in the D.C. neighborhoods outside my hotel window. I packed my bag and walked as a tourist to my old metro station in Columbia Heights wondering what lessons I’d carry back with me from D.C., and from these conversations. What might I do differently in L.A., now that these ideas about community and movement and curiosity are front of mind?
Nicolas de la Fuente, 2015 Fellow
Senior Community Impact Officer, Environmental Initiatives at the Arizona Community Foundation & Founder of Neuro Strategies
I spoke with Nicolas de la Fuente over Zoom. It was late afternoon, after I’d worked a full day at my remote day job cleaning up university websites. Nicolas’ projects have been infinitely more concrete than my digital tasks. His original CCF project involved community organizing to build urban gardens and rethink sustainable agriculture systems in Phoenix.
In talking to Nicolas, I heard how valuable it is to get out of your comfort zone and learn from people whose contexts and roles might be very different from one’s own. As a fellow who primarily identified as a community organizer when he came to CCF, Nicolas found it refreshing to learn alongside fellows who identified primarily as artists. CCF opened his eyes to arts’ possibilities. Additionally, the opportunity to speak with national funders expanded his sense of what was possible locally. It was important to look beyond the systems that had been in place in Phoenix. It was far better to propose ideas that would achieve significant change, rather than to limit himself to ideas that seemed practical under existing frameworks.
I found it difficult to take my conversation with Nicolas in the direction of distant futures. Most of my visioning work a decade ago pointed towards what Nicolas had already been working on: sustainability and inclusion. Eliminating pollution, adding green space, healing the scars of segregation, and acting against present-day racism were obvious changes to write into the utopian future of any city I had explored. This was late August and Phoenix was deep in an unending streak of 100-degree days. I had just listened to an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible about that city’s deadly heat as it intersects with poverty. Imagining a sustainable future amid the next 200 years of climate change in a growing desert metropolis was daunting. Again, Nicolas’s grounding in the practical here-and-now seemed wise.
Gabrielle Molina, 2019 Fellow
Founder & Board Chair at Teaching Artists International & Executive Director at Project Music
Next, I spoke with Gabrielle Molina about her work connecting musicians with social justice programs around the world. She spoke of the value of youth orchestra programs, and specifically the Venezuelan El Sistema model of universal access to musical instruments and lessons. That model has been credited with helping young people from all backgrounds find positive outlets through music, developing global citizens, and raising music up as a tool for social impact.
Gabrielle recalled that her CCF fellowship was “something that was really needed in [her] life, not only professionally, but personally.” New to New England at the time, the fellowship allowed her to build a network of allies in the region who were building their own programs, and with whom she could work through challenges as she earned grants and developed pilot programs.
When asked to imagine the 200-year reverberations of her work, Gabrielle envisioned, “arts and music prioritized over so many of the other things that we tend to prioritize.” She added, “it’s so interesting to me that so many of the important things in life — weddings and funerals — have to do with art, but it is always on the chopping block.” She expressed hope that in the future everyone will see themselves as an artist. After our call, I realized that only one of the utopias I’d dreamt up ten years ago had a soundtrack. The rest were silent. This was a mistake. I went for a walk in the L.A. foothills and imagined musicians all around me, in every house, schoolyard and park.
Taykhoom Biviji, 2019 Fellow
When I got ahold of Taykhoom Biviji by phone, I could hear the sounds of the Chicago streetscape surrounding his voice. Taykhoom has worked on issues of pedestrian safety and environmental justice since coming to Chicago nearly a decade ago, so the sounds of wind and traffic helped ground me in his work.
Taykhoom had metrics front of mind on the efficacy of each initiative he’d worked on: the increase in tree canopy percentage for a historically Black neighborhood, an increase in students walking to school, a decrease in speeding and accidents. As an arts administrator he takes joy in understanding the vision of an artist and helping achieve results through grants, budgets, legal and administrative support. Looking back on his CCF experience, Taykhoom recalls the openness of faculty and fellows in his cohort. Peers “willingness to share and spend time understanding” stood out as a unique strength of the program.
“History is long,” he said when I asked him about the future. “The future is going to be long too.” Taykhoom then turned to the immediacy of the crisis in Gaza, and shared a story from his past in Mumbai. Amid increased tension between Muslim and Hindu residents, he worked on a project to dispel misconceptions about a Muslim neighborhood, inviting the broader community to come together to learn about one another. The same lessons apply in deeply segregated Chicago and around the world. “People do not understand the reality. The way I look at justice, it requires asking who has control over your narrative.”
Jean Mineo, 2018 Fellow
Executive Director of Bellforge Arts Center
Jean Mineo is focused on building the Bellforge Arts Center in Medfield, Massachusetts on the site of the historic Medfield State Hospital. Since beginning the CCF fellowship in 2018, she’s made meaningful progress, including securing a 99-year lease on two buildings at the heart of the campus, and helping to activate them with arts programming.
Jean recalls her experience in the CCF fellowship as “a game changer for her project and for her personal development as an arts administrator.” To be welcomed alongside artists into a community of support was a new experience. It is rare for artists and arts administrators to participate alongside each other as they do in CCF. “I don’t know if we’d be as successful today if I hadn’t done the foundational work to build these networks,” she said.
We discussed the overlapping layers of networks that her project, and the fellowship thrive on: relationships with neighbors in underserved communities in Boston’s MetroWest region, relationships with artists who participate in programming at the Center, relationships with arts leaders and Creative Community Fellows working on projects in New England and around the globe. Each connection in the network helps sustain her work, but the network’s growth also sustains everyone else who is connected.
The long history of the hospital site in Medford (built in 1896), and the Center’s 99-year lease were a natural lead-in to the question of a long-term vision for the project beyond our lifetimes. I asked Jean what she imagined for the future of Bellforge. Jean described community wellbeing through art: “Art literally helps you live longer. There is so much potential to tell the history of the community and reconnect with the river and the land.” A video of the landscape on the Bellforge website looped on my screen next to our Zoom window as she spoke. I could feel the place coming alive, could see the future residents of the area thriving amid nature and art, and I promised to visit the site sometime, perhaps when NAS has it’s homecoming convening in Massachusetts in 2025.
Hannah Fox, 2014 Fellow
Executive Director of The Bowes Museum and Co-Director of Creative Community Fellows UK
After talking to so many fellows, I was looking forward to reconnecting with Hannah Fox, another member of my cohort in the first year of CCF. Hannah has remained closely involved as a mentor and facilitator for many of the CCF cohorts over the past decade, and helped NAS expand the program to the U.K. We spoke over Zoom early in the morning Pacific Time, mid-afternoon in the UK.
Hannah’s career over the past decade has led her from the successful establishment of the Museum of Making at the Derby Silk Mill to her current role as Executive Director of The Bowes Museum in northern England. She said that CCF’s “tools and frameworks really helped me work through big knotty projects,” and described how relationships from CCF became “professional friendships,” a blurred category of two things she’d previously kept separated. Those professional friendships included giving career advice to one another and encouragement to invest in personal growth.
This was one of the biggest takeaways from speaking with so many alumni of the CCF program. While a CCF application may be centered on a project and its theory of change, the fellowship is ultimately centered on the individual, equipping each fellow with skills that will help wherever their career and life takes them.
Hayk Makhmuryan, 2014 Fellow
Art Worker, Community Organizer & Senior Doodler at Doodles Without Borders
Finally, I met up in person with Hayk Makhmuryan on a 105-degree day at a coffeeshop in Little Tokyo, here in Los Angeles. After so many phone calls and Zooms, getting on a train and meeting up in person felt like a meaningful step towards renewing my commitment to this network of professional friendships. My mind was filled with inspiration from each of the previous calls. Now here was a chance to build community close to home.
Hayk was in the first CCF cohort with Kristina, Hannah and me. He has worked on housing justice and arts access in Los Angeles’ Skid Row community for more than a decade, changing organizations and roles more than once, but remaining committed to helping unhoused people. The housing crisis in L.A. has only gotten worse in that time. I told Hayk about my fear that progress was elusive, that these ten years had been dark times on so many fronts. I asked him what keeps him going, describing a sense of optimism that I see at the heart of his work, at the heart of every CCF project, and any project that aims to build community through art and culture.
The word optimism didn’t resonate for Hayk. It has a Pollyannaish and undisciplined connotation. Instead, we talked about the importance of a “theory of change” (something CCF helps Fellows articulate) and a rational understanding of how the work will improve conditions in meaningful and measurable ways. Hayk spoke of the nonlinear nature of change. “Progress can be slow. It can even slide backwards. But it can also make a big jump forward all at once,” he said.
When I asked Hayk about the distant 200-year future of his work, of Skid Row, of Los Angeles, he spoke of “islands of the future that I’d like to see in the present.” If change is nonlinear, it can arrive in some places before others. There is no reason the future we’re working for needs to wait another 190 years.
We are so grateful to Erik for sharing this story, to the alumni interviewed, and to all the people who’ve made the last 10 years possible: Fellows, staff, mentors, faculty, alumni, partners, and funders (and the alumni who’ve become faculty, mentors, and funders!). This program has been shaped and changed by each of the wonderful people who’ve been a part of it.
Whether Fellows are still working on the projects they brought into the program or have moved on to new dreams and challenges, it’s clear that the lessons and connections they’ve made have stayed with them. We’re honored to be a part of that journey.
Here’s to 10 years and the more than 300 current and previous Creative Community Fellows like those featured above driving inspiring change for the future!
Creative Community Fellows through the years
