YOCCF held a recent gathering to reflect on the fund’s impact in bringing together youth organizers and culture creators. Several grantee partners, including Asenhat Gomez of El Puente, Austin Greene of DreamYard, and Carry Pak of CAAAV, shared important insights from their experiences as members of the fund’s inaugural cohort.
As YOCCF’s fund advisor Cristina Jiménez framed it, the purpose of the meeting was to “create a culture of learning” and understand the “added value of this fund” in bridging the gap between youth organizing and arts/culture. Jiménez additionally noted that the cohort’s development of a creative brief has helped to establish “relationships that are going to be the foundation for collaboration and work and dreaming and strategizing and actualizing things together.”
YOCCF’s creative brief, entitled “Nurturing Seeds for Our Future: A Storytelling Guide for Growing New York City,” outlines four main “story threads” or narrative priorities:
- We hold each other up and keep us safe
- We are rooted in freedom, and together, we are destined to thrive
- We build intergenerational success
- We are committed to tending our gardens
As the brief explains, these narrative threads are meant to be “expansive enough for an artist to make it their own and specific enough to hold multiple stories together.”
By co-creating this overarching narrative framework, the cohort developed a shared analysis and language to describe their collective vision for New York City based on healing, abundance, intergenerational struggle, and hope.
The creative brief serves as a blueprint to guide messaging, organizing strategies, and cultural interventions. During the briefing, partners described how it has already impacted how they approach environmental justice campaigns, youth leadership development and more.
Key Takeaways:
The fund has successfully bridged a gap between youth organizers and artists by facilitating collaborative spaces for connection, developing shared language, learning from each other’s experiences and collaborative strategizing.
Going through the process of developing the creative brief helped organizations clarify and operationalize their values, strategies and theories of change.
The cohort model has fostered long-term alignment between partners rather than transactional coalition-building.
There is enthusiasm about creating fellowship opportunities to sustain intergenerational learning and collaboration.
Conventional coalition building too often limits collaboration to transactional asks. But YOCCF’s cohort is charting a different path — integrating the arts, storytelling, and intergenerational ties to cultivate the deep trust needed for lasting, transformative change. As they continue co-creating the world they wish to see, partners demonstrate the radical possibilities that emerge when we center healing, creativity and the leadership of young people of color.