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Youth Organizing and Culture Change Fund

Cultural Workers, Youth Organizers

Creative Strategies to Advance Community Power

Empowering Youth-Led Movements for Social Change

Mission Statement

Youth Organizing and Culture Change Fund (YOCCF) empowers youth leaders at the helm of social and cultural change with the tools and support to achieve personal and collective transformation to advance racial and social justice in their communities.

We recognize that the most profound positive changes in our society are rooted in the legacy of community organizing and cultural production working together towards the same goals. Therefore, we partner with community and cultural leaders, artists, funders and narrative changemakers and provide relationships and resources to advance their vision for change while building and scaling their power together.

Fund History

Established in 2022, YOCCF and our national community of youth, organizers, artists, creatives, educators, and funders have built a proven model of youth organizing that advances both social change and builds durable cultural power.

There have been many who have shared their genius and labor in the creation and execution of the Fund including Cristina Jimenez, who conducted the initial landscape analysis, and serves on the Steering Committee providing strategic guidance, and Robyne Walker Murphy, nationally-recognized arts and social justice leader and administrator who managed YOCCF through the initial infrastructure development phases. Our movement has just begun.

Our Principles

The principles that guide our work and selection criteria.

Power of Youth Organizing

Young people, with their courageous leadership, have exposed injustice, built community power, and captured the public’s imagination about the change that is possible when communities organize.

Cultural Arts Strategy

Execution of strategies based on cultural production and artistic practices afford individuals the opportunity to redefine ourselves in relation to each other, norms, and institutions, therefore redesigning values, systems, and dynamics that shape everyday life.

Youth-Led Innovation and
Intersectionality

Young people are inherently intersectional, innovative, and open to experimentation. Youth need spaces to learn about and test intersectional, creative, and diverse approaches to achieve scale and build power available to them by creatively centering approaches like culture, art, and story.

Equitably Resourced

Youth organizing has historically embedded arts and culture in the work, however, philanthropy has siloed funding and inadequately resourced cultural and arts strategies in youth organizing. We must invest equitably in young people to continue implementing and testing these strategies as they seek to win and to fund them at scale.