Organizations

Based in St. Louis, Missouri and incorporated in 2014, the Story Stitchers Artists Collective uses a collaborative model to create social justice art. The mission of Story Stitchers is to document St. Louis through art and word and to promote understanding, civic pride, intergenerational relationships, and literacy. Story Stitchers works to promote a better educated, more peaceful, and caring region through the creation and dissemination of original art.

National Alliance of Commuity Economic Development Associations (NACEDA) serves as a national convener of the community development sector since 2015. They aim to make creative placemaking a frontline strategy for community developers. Through their support, they encourage their members to use arts and cultural strategies to improve physical and social character of places. “Artists have engaged neighborhoods in development plans. CDCs became arts advocates. Banks became arts investors. NACEDA networks throughout the country began thinking how artists and cultural strategies could enhance the impact of traditional community development.”

Forklift Danceworks is a civic practice dance company that collaborates with people and associated organizations that have no dance background through a rigourous process based on shared learning and listening. The aim is to build "trusting relationships" and for "our collaborators to have agency to tell their stories in ways that are authentic to them". This long-term committment "amplifies the voices of community collaborators" such as Austin Parks and Recreation's Aquatics Division, which brought attention to the inequitable distribution of crumbling swimming pools in East Austin and the goal to change the City Council's investment decisions.

Design Studio for Social Intervention is an artistic research and development organization committed to changing how social justice is imagined, developed, and deployed in the United States. This is done by partnering “with artists whose work expands our imaginations, with cultural workers whose understandings have kept communities alive in the most dangerous games, and with systems gurus of all stripes, including writers, tricksters, clowns, and trouble makers who trouble the rules at play.” Their most notorious and impactful work includes supporting place-based investments of entities such as Boston Transportation Department and Fairmount Cultural Corridor.

The Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) is an organization that works closely with residents in underdeveloped communities to create resources that address physical, social, and economic priorities through design. They work toward the creation of permanent spaces and policy change to create more of these spaces. "In other places where communities are not recognized or are neglected, we drag the city along and try to change how they work". Meaningful participation is at the heart of the work with community organizers to cultivate leaders and make planning and design accessible.

LA Commons engages comunities in the creation of art for public spaces that describes their unique stories, serving as a vehicle for dialogue, interaction, and better mutual understanding among Los Angeles communities. They strengthen community by enhancing everyone's sense of belonging and build stronger bonds between the diverse people in this community. "Art is a critical tool to bring underground community stories to light and shift to societal narrative that values everyone, not only the wealthy and powerful."

The Cheyenne River Youth Project (CRYP) begain in 1988 when a bar was converted into a youth center. It now offers comunity meals, weekened arts and culture camps, arts fellowships, and a graffiti jam to connect youth to their Indigenous arts and culture. Graffiti jam is a two-day event of creating murals to beautify the city by selecting empty building to improve through art as-well-as preserve the Lakota language through its use in street art. Overall, CRYP utilizes making heritage and culture the foundation of positive youth development.

Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) is a community organization supporting health, wellness, and healing by organizing for social change, cultivating the arts, and operating a health center. Their investment in arts and culture supports the "creation, collaboration, and presentation of community-engaged art that unites disconnected communities, facilitates transforming healing, and fosters the ability to radically reimagine the world".