About this project

Creative Wildfire supports artists and grassroots organizations to create art that fuels our movements and imagines the world we need to thrive.

What is Creative Wildfire?

Creative Wildfire is a cultural organizing project that supports artists and organizations to build relationships and collaborations embodying our liberatory values. We work with cultural workers in all media, providing funding and support through the entire process of creative production, from proposal through distribution. Artists receive political education in frameworks including the Solidarity Economy, Ecological Justice, and Just Transition. Working with organizations on the frontlines of our movements, we distribute art to the people and places where it is meaningful, beloved, and strategic.

Who we are

Creative Wildfire is led by the Climate Justice Alliance, Movement Generation, and New Economy Coalition (see below). The program is stewarded by cultural organizers Ebony Gustave, Micah Bazant, and Robin Bean Crane. Check out the amazing artists from our previous cohort.

History

  • In 2014, Movement Generation held the first Creative Wildfire Eco-Justice retreat, bringing together artists and organizers to build relationships and align on core frameworks.

  • During the 2020 uprisings and pandemic Movement Generation, Climate Justice Alliance, and New Economy Coalition came together to create the Resist and Build Manifesto. Rooted in this vision, in 2021 we launched the first Creative Wildfire cohort with 19 artists, culminating in 14 creative projects and a group exhibition and workshop series.

  • In June 2023 Creative Wildfire will launch the second national cohort, supporting collaborations between artists and grassroots organizations. This cohort will prioritize relationship building with deeper partnerships, collaborative distribution strategy, and weaving local and national campaigns.

Why is this project called Creative Wildfire?

Destructive wildfires are wreaking havoc in North America and around the world as a result of rising temperatures, longer droughts, and decades of fire policies guided by strategies of fire suppression. Frontline communities, who have been disproportionately impacted by these disasters, have exhibited incredible resilience. 

The Creative Wildfire project stands for different kinds of fires, fires that benefit the environment and our communities, fires that give birth to new life. For millennia, fire has played an important role in the health of ecosystems and in Indigenous stewardship practices. Deliberate burns shaped landscapes in North America, and are rooted in the relationship between Indigenous communities to the land. 

With Creative Wildfire, we want to fan the flames that arise from artistic sparks, we want to feed the fire to devour the extractive systems that cause harm to our communities, and make space for new ways of thinking, being, collaborating, providing, and caring for each other.

Climate Justice Alliance

Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) is a growing member alliance of 74 urban and rural frontline communities, organizations and supporting networks in the climate justice movement. Member organizations lead CJA by anchoring major Just Transition projects focused on the social, racial, economic and environmental justice issues of climate change. We are locally, tribally, and regionally-based racial and economic justice organizations of Indigenous Peoples, Black, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander, and poor white communities who share legacies of racial and economic oppression and social justice organizing.

To learn more about how CJA members are moving from an extractive economy to a future of meaningful work, equity, and a clean environment, check out Climate Justice Alliance’s Story Snapshots, listen to our podcast Stories from Home: Living the Just Transition, with Keenan Rhodes of CJA and the Kheprw Institute, and watch the video Frontline Youth – Fighting for Climate Justice. For more information about the Climate Justice Alliance and to follow our work, please sign up for our updates here.

Movement Generation
Justice & Ecology Project

Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project inspires and engages in transformative action towards the liberation and restoration of land, labor, and culture.We have engaged hundreds of organizations and thousands of change agents (community leaders, activists, and organizers) through intensive retreats, political education, hands-on skills workshops, peer exchange, campaign development, alliance building, strategic support and more. We are rooted in vibrant social movements led by low-income communities and communities of color committed to a Just Transition away from profit and pollution and towards healthy, resilient and life-affirming local economies.

To learn more about MG’s work and strategic frameworks, you can visit our website to sign up for our newsletter, listen to our podcast Did We Go Too Far?, and read our blog This Is The Beginning on Medium.com.

New Economy Coalition

The New Economy Coalition is a membership-based network representing the solidarity economy movement in the United States. We exist to organize our members into a more powerful and united force, in order to accelerate the transition of our economic system from capitalism to a solidarity economy. NEC’s 200+ members are a cross section of nonprofits, mission-driven businesses, grassroots community organizations, and sectoral associations. While many groups are focused on a particular strategy or are based in a specific geographic region, they join NEC to be part of a network that is cross-sectoral and national in scope. Together, we understand ourselves as part of an international social movement ecosystem that includes tens of thousands of groups using varied and different strategies to build a more just, liberatory, and democratic world. Learn more and plug in with organizations in the network at neweconomy.net. Sign up to get our biweekly newsletter.