Our Work in the
Arts Sector

Join us in reimagining creative sector advocacy and organizing practices in a cooperative liberatory network. Your support can help us uplift BIPOC voices and promote equity in the arts.

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Statement of Purpose: 

BLAAC exists to create a strong network of liberatory practitioners across the US in arts and culture advocacy spaces.  Participants are actively engaged in legislative change, campaign work, community organizing, and other forms of advocacy that advances and centers BIPOC creatives and issues around the country.  BLAAC is a space for idea sharing, collective action on issues of common concern, campaign development, and mutual support.  

 

Values:

Inclusion, joy, liberation, and rest 

 

Organizing Philosophy: 

• Center BIPOC voices in advocacy and policy leadership spaces

 

• Maintain a 75% BIPOC/GM to 25% White Allies composition. BLAAC does not operate as a BIPOC-only space, but may occasionally employ BIPOC only meetings for certain bodies of work

 

• Share leadership: practice rotating facilitation, collective decision making, use ad hoc groups that shape and present ideas for deliberation

 

• Counter dominant principles and cultural norms: BLAAC is a learning community that is constantly evolving 

 

• Create a new cooperative and liberatory approach to national arts policy infrastructure

 

• Strengthen coordination and collaboration efforts across the sector between those who have been doing this work for years and those who are newer to the movement

 

• Develop a new structure for organizing and collective action in federal arts and cultural policy - build a movement for policy change benefitting and led by BIPOC artists and creatives across the US

 

• Distribute organizing, advocacy, and policy development power across a broad network of stakeholders

 

• Expand engagement and learning opportunities with our federal public officials from annual and transactional experiences to sustained, ongoing relationship-building

 

• Ensure white allies are supporting from behind (providing labor, lending resources)

 

• Reframe and invest in individual creatives role at policy table 

 

• Commit to compensation for time given to the project, which initially was made possible by foundation support and was issued with an increased amount going to BIPOC self identified coalition members

 

Where we are headed

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Coalition Building: BLAAC continues to build the coalition as a network of support and community of practice for BIPOC/Global Majority individual participants (artists) and collectives/organizations and their allies acting in local, state, regional or national advocacy and policy work. The next phase of work will be grounded in political education, intergenerational learning and mentorship activities, social support and belonging.

Capacity Development Programming: BLAAC will shape and develop programming strands, such as an Advocacy Practice Exchange, Policy Ideas Lab, and BIPOC Artist Advocate Initiative, to increase the capacity of the coalition as a whole and the wider network with which it engages.

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