FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 8, 2021
JACKSON NAMES SEVEN LIVE. IMPACT. CREATE. FELLOWS FOR 2021
Program part of $1.2M award from Surdna Foundation to advance racial justice through art
(JACKSON, MS) – The City of Jackson today announced its seven 2021 Live. Impact. Create. Fellows, a select group of artists and creatives tasked with curating projects that shed light on community needs. Over the course of this year, the fellows will partner with young creative people of color to cultivate unorthodox solutions to community problems. The Live. Impact. Create. Initiative is geared toward empowering people of color to use their artistry and voice to address social justice radically through the arts. The initiative financially supports fellows in their projects and offer training to develop leadership and social injustice resolution skills.
“We are happy to announce our fellows and to be fully launching this important work, especially now, in a time when people are struggling in the midst of a pandemic and productive creative outlets for expression are very much needed,” said Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba. “Art has long been a means of influencing culture and speaking to social concerns. And so, we’re happy for this partnership that allows us to continue a necessary conversation about how we confront issues of racial justice and inequity.”
Jackson’s 2021 Live Impact Create Fellows:
- Karnessia Georgetown, Producer and Community Developer
- Shambe’ Jones, Visual and Musical Artist, Educator, and Activist
- Jazmine Walker, Sociologist and Reproductive Justice Advocate
- Jina Daniels, Creative Flow Coach
- Stephen Brown aka 5th Child Emcee, Composer, and Music Biz Coach
- Kwame Braxton, Visual Artist and Digital Fabricator
- Edward Dorman, Musician, Educator, and Artivist
Jackson’s Live. Impact. Create. Initiative is funded through a $1.2M award received this past spring from the Surdna Foundation to work with the Community Aid & Development Corporation as part of a regranting and municipal partnership, to invest in artists from communities of color. The award will be distributed in equal parts over the course of three years through Surdna’s Thriving Cultures program, which will support up to 260 projects by artists of color working with their communities around the country to imagine and practice racially just systems and structures. Through this award, regranting partners, such as the Community Aid & Development Corporation, will distribute Surdna’s funds to artists, artist collectives, and small artist organizations and will provide direct, on-the-ground support and technical assistance.
The City of Jackson joins a diverse cohort of 11 regranting partners, which are national and regional in focus, and include several learning clusters of organizations attempting to impact prevailing inequities in arts grantmaking in specific ways. Among the clusters are organizations focused on the U.S. South, local cross-sector partnerships between municipal governments and local arts nonprofits, and culturally specific intermediaries serving Latinx and Indigenous communities. The City of Jackson is a proud member of both the U.S. South learning cluster as well as the Cross-Sector Partnership learning cluster.
Learn more at www.liveimpactcreate.com.
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