Catalyst Fund Grantees

The Bridge Way School will test whether by providing a high school recovery education program with student-led garden learning and arts programming, it can increase youth engagement and help them make progress in substance use recovery. Bridge Way is Pennsylvania’s first and only recovery high school and is designated under state recovery high school legislation to educate students who agree to engage in a recovery program while pursuing their diploma. Young people in recovery are not easily granted opportunities to have unsupervised activities in an attempt to keep them safe. However, Bridge Way, with ample support from a community of trusted adults, will offer self-affirming, off campus autonomy with plant and community-care projects. Students will work with a recovery artist-in-residence to curate experiences in the garden and its adjacent nonprofit arts space. This first of a kind, off-campus, creative experience will also test the transferability of an education recovery model to other settings, while serving as a model for other high school communities.

Through their project, FamFrequency will test whether taking youth music producers’ artistic ambitions seriously and equipping them with both creative and business skills can foster sustainable pathways for youth to financially support themselves through art. Most existing arts-focused youth programs focus on leveraging creative practice toward other ends – like academic success and personal development. However, in the era of TikTok and YouTube, many high school student artists are moving away from the high school-to-college-to-salary trajectory and toward independent creative and media-engaged careers. The current lack of professional development and business support for aspiring young artists leaves them vulnerable to exploitation and financial instability as they attempt to enter a complex and competitive industry. FamFrequency Productions aims to channel this energy into entrepreneurial success by capitalizing on and cultivating young people’s dreams of creative careers, with a particular focus on women and BIPOC individuals. They will do so by exposing youth to the varied ways they can put music production skills to work, building their technical and entrepreneurial capacity, and helping broker and facilitate early client relationships, to smooth the way to artistic income.

The Mann Center for the Performing Arts is testing whether by connecting the dots between public high schools, stagehand unions, and performing arts houses, they can create a pipeline to good jobs in the performing arts industry for young people of color — a field that piques many students’ interests — while diversifying union membership. This project represents a new hypothesis for how large arts organizations might relate to their communities – by forging  pathways for community members to access careers in the arts through union apprenticeship. Currently, there is no direct connection in Philadelphia between public school programs and union apprenticeship in the performing arts. To carry out their experiment, the Mann team will transform a pilot program focused on non-performance-based careers in the arts for youth at Overbrook High School to include a postsecondary component and direct on-ramp to the unionized performing arts workforce. By directly connecting participation in that program with union apprenticeship via the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and forging partnerships with other arts institutions to host student apprentices, the Mann will create a new pathway for more equitable access to careers in the arts, which they will spread via partnerships with other performing arts organizations, and via the Mann’s growing national profile in the field.

Via the Philadelphia Agreement, Art-Reach is establishing a set of new, groundbreaking standards for arts access in Philadelphia and facilitating the uptake of these standards in organizations across the cultural sector. The most recent U.S. Census shows that over 16% of Philadelphians identify as disabled—over 250,000 people. Unfortunately, people with disabilities still experience exclusion in many areas of life – including the arts, one of greatest avenues for people to learn, develop, find interests, and experience personal growth. Through this project, Art-Reach is testing whether by (a) conducting a community-driven planning process that centers the lived experience of people with disabilities and (b) leveraging its influence in the cultural sector in Greater Philadelphia to change the programs and policies of its partners; it can create a critical mass of community pressure for change that will revolutionize the accessibility of the arts in Philadelphia to people with disabilities and set an example for the nation at large.

Guilded is the first attempt in the United States to form a cooperative structure at scale to solve the durable challenges of contingent labor in the arts. Creative freelancer income is often volatile, and freelancers are unable to access employer-sponsored benefits and are vulnerable to theft of intellectual property or non-payment of contracts given a lack of human resources protections. These risks and barriers disproportionately impact BIPOC creatives and restrict the kinds of people who can afford to work as artists. Through a concerted recruitment push in Philadelphia, Guilded is testing whether they can attract enough artists to their platform such that it can become self-sustaining and creative freelancers can access the stability and benefits of traditional employment without losing their creative autonomy and control over their work.

Philadelphia Contemporary launched a Lived Culture program (2022-2023) with the goal of creating an entire series of programs devoted to the practice of lived culture – the artistry of living and thriving in the everyday. Funding supported a major boundary-pushing project: Supine Horizons (2022), which focused on rest. This project was unique because it centered and institutionalized everyday creative practices within a contemporary art museum setting, and challenged the traditional way of viewing these practices. PC believes that the Lived Culture curatorial program has the potential to help shift the contemporary art world at large and begin to change the discourse around contemporary art, particularly who it is for and who gets to determine what kinds of art get produced and presented.

The neighborhoods adjacent to the Drexel University campus – Mantua and Powelton Village – are rapidly changing. Part of a federally designated Promise Zone program created by President Obama that identifies them as high-poverty but also high opportunity, they are experiencing growth. This often means that existing residents have a difficult time remaining in their homes, due to rapid gentrification. Students also look to this area for more affordable housing options than in University City. In an attempt to ensure that the residents who live in these communities that surround this anchor institution can benefit from its growth, Drexel University’s Writers Room will develop and pilot an intergenerational co-living housing model. They will leverage their relationships with other neighborhood partners to include the voices of residents and students alike in shaping the pilot. Begun in 2014 at the Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships, Writers Room is a university-community literary arts program that uses creative programming and art for social justice. Their mission is to develop inclusive, intergenerational, co-creative places that foster connection and community. Click here to learn more about the Second Story Collective or watch this recently produced video.

The Philadelphia region is home to hundreds of arts and heritage properties. Challenges faced by organizations holding these assets include ongoing reliance on contributed income and a lack of capacity to manage and maintain their properties. This is financially unsustainable and too often leads to problems with physical stewardship. In response, Social Impact Commons formed the Cultural Equity Realty Trust (CERT) as a community-based, nonprofit development organization with the purpose of developing, activating and sustaining arts and heritage real estate through direct community stewardship and ownership. CERT will develop a portfolio of properties under common management whose diversity in income streams and balance sheet holdings can act as a platform for increased stabilization and efficiency for the arts and heritage community with regard to its real property.

Since the coronavirus has created a barrier between audiences and live theater performances, theater companies across the world are looking for solutions to continue engaging with their audiences. The Wilma is seizing the opportunity to reimagine how they make theater and how they might take the lessons learned during the pandemic and change the field at large. Recognizing that audiences crave live theater while needing to stay at home, they are exploring a hybrid model of theater-making for the next season that marries the digital world with live performance. The Wilma envisions a multifaceted approach that involves altering their physical space on two levels: (i) embedding HD cameras throughout the theater to film productions and livestream them while (ii) changing the audience configuration of the auditorium to provide a safe, socially distanced experience.

This grant was made as part of Barra’s Reimagining Theater for Changing Times initiative for projects that reinvent how performing arts organizations can present work at a time when social distancing has caused many to cancel their 2020 seasons. These companies are considering how to not only safely present to audiences but are also being thoughtful about incorporating social justice issues into their programming and engaging diverse audiences. Selected projects stood out for their willingness to be daring, think creatively, work collaboratively and share their learning broadly about new models that can be used throughout the pandemic and beyond.

Given their deep community connections and variety of existing programs, People’s Light has the capacity and experience to test unique methods for entertaining the community where they are. They will roll out newly developed socially distanced programming, (which may include the Beards truck as a potential approach) providing new experiences to their community partners that are immediate and timely. If successful, these models of community-based delivery will allow them to be more responsive to current events and community needs and to honor the experiences of community members, especially Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC). Others will be able to learn from these experiments, as COVID-19 wears on and into the future.

This grant was made as part of Barra’s Reimagining Theater for Changing Times initiative for projects that reinvent how performing arts organizations can present work at a time when social distancing has caused many to cancel their 2020 seasons. These companies are considering how to not only safely present to audiences but are also being thoughtful about incorporating social justice issues into their programming and engaging diverse audiences. Selected projects stood out for their willingness to be daring, think creatively, work collaboratively and share their learning broadly about new models that can be used throughout the pandemic and beyond.