Unfettering Artists' Productivity and Impact

Initiatives

Exploring new tools, programs and ideas can lead to the next generation of innovative solutions for artists everywhere.

The Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) has three major domains of activities: funding, professional development, and acting as a keystone piece of the arts field infrastructure in support of artists. This third activity of serving as an intermediary includes Artist Research, Advocacy, Convenings, and Partnership Initiatives. In short, CCI incubates ideas and projects that address gaps in the ecology by co-creating and developing new knowledge, tools, and programs that can result in advancements and breakthroughs in the support system for artists. It is in this domain that CCI’s impact extends beyond direct services to artists in California to influencing the national landscape of the ecosystem for artists.


Partnership Initiatives

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Creative Industries Incentive Network (CIIN)

CIIN is a three-year pilot program in partnership with the Surdna Foundation. The goal is to incubate experimental projects that will catalyze creative economies through investments in artists and arts workers in five distinct California communities. As a result of this effort, CCI hopes to develop new models for sustaining artists and creative entrepreneurs as well as shine a spotlight on our grantees’ efforts to incorporate artists into their local economies. >MORE

California Arts Leaders Investments (CALI)

A three-year initiative designed to strengthen and retain emerging administrative talent in the nonprofit arts field by providing individual training and professional development opportunities, convening activities, and grants to arts organizations to explore innovative policies and practices related to next generation arts leadership. >MORE

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Creative Capacity Fund

The Creative Capacity Fund is a collaborative funding project administered by the Center for Cultural Innovation. It provides grants to support professional development and next generation leadership opportunities for California artists and arts administrators. >MORE

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San Jose Creative Entrepreneur Project

Is there a role that the City of San Jose could play to make it a more artist-friendly city to both enrich its cultural vitality and advance Silicon Valley’s creative economy? This was the central question behind the San Jose Creative Entrepreneur Project. >MORE


Advocacy

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Artists United For Health Care

In 2007, with a legislative debate on universal healthcare looming, CCI worked with a consortium of funders, technologists and health care advocates to launch a new website portal for California artists in 2007 called Artists United for Healthcare (AUFH). The website was designed to provide individual artists with information and a voice in the state’s universal healthcare legislative debate. >MORE

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Arts In The California Governor’s Race

This project was established in June 2010 as a nonpartisan effort to ensure that issues related to the arts and the creative economy are successfully inserted into the California Governor's race. It was organized by a consortium of nonprofit arts organizations, arts support groups, artists and concerned individual supporters of the arts. >MORE