“The bag is secured, now what?!”

-Karega Bailey

BE-IMAGINATIVE , in partnership with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) and the California Arts Council (CAC), will be one of the administering organizations in the Bay Area for the Creative Corps Initiative, providing artists with a living wage as they work with nonprofit institutions within one of the four key issue areas to create a project of our choice. These issues include civic engagement, social justice, climate justice, and community health & wellness. As directed by the CAC, the Creative Corps Initiative will prioritize communities below the 25th percentile on the California Healthy Place Index. In San Francisco, those communities include Chinatown, Tenderloin, and Bayview/Hunters Point. In the East Bay, those areas include parts of Oakland, Richmond, and Hayward.

BE-IMAGINATIVE is a collective of passionate and dedicated Emmy Award-winning artists, healers, and community leaders who are committed to addressing the profound grief experienced by black, brown, and indigenous communities. Our approach to healing is centered around the power of storytelling, which we believe to be transformative and empowering for our community members who have experienced our work.

YBCA will utilize a community co-design grant-making process to implement this initiative in San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond, and Hayward. This process will be led in partnership by a facilitator that is deeply rooted in each community. BE-IMAGINATIVE will be the facilitator for the Richmond and Hayward areas, focusing on the key issue area of community health & wellness. The first step in the co-design process will be a community listening session (CLS) with artists, nonprofit leaders, and cultural bearers of the neighborhood. At the CLS, we will discuss the needs of the community, how artists can affect changes within the community, and how artists intersect with organizations working in the issue areas to create a campaign or project. The next step after the CLS will be the creation of the RFP/RFQ (request for proposals/qualifications) by a select group of participants that were engaged in the listening session. After the creation of the RFP/RFQ, the application will be made available based on the direction of those who created it.

Before attending, please take our pre-event survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/D6W65H2

Light refreshments will be provided, and participants will receive $100 for their valuable contributions to the conversation.