This workshop carries forward the urgency, questions, and commitments of GIA’s 2025 Collective Action workshops, grounding them in Memphis as a place of practice, reflection, and shared responsibility.
In 2025, participants were invited to consider what collective action requires from arts grantmakers in a moment of escalating political threat, institutional fragility, and attacks on creative freedom. In Memphis, those questions take on new texture. The city grounds this program as a place where artists, cultural organizers, and community leaders have long used culture to build power, sustain memory, support community self-determination, and practice democratic possibility through conditions of chronic underinvestment.
From this Memphis grounding, the program will also look regionally across the South, inviting participants to consider what Southern cultural ecosystems can teach the field about shared risk, co-governance, accountability, and the infrastructure needed to move together.
Alongside an invitation into Memphis' cultural power-building practice, the program includes two participatory components: Culture & Community Power Building in the South and Developing Power: Co-Governance through Cyanotype. Together, these sessions will help participants consider what it means to build power with artists, organizers, and communities at the center.
Sunday’s program also helps prepare participants for Wednesday’s conference-wide Collective Action Assembly by seeding the questions, relationships, and practices that will carry into the larger gathering.
Organized by: Nadia Elokdah, (Grantmakers in the Arts), Erik Takeshida (Culture and Community Power Fund), Lincoln Mondy (Surdna Foundation), and Amber Hamilton.
Expectations: This workshop will be hosted at the Commons on Merton, a former church that now serves as a community hub for immigrant and migrant community members as well as organizing for local community power building. Registration includes lunch & snacks on-site.
Cost: $200