City’s Impact Pilot Awards $100,000 Grants to Partners Pursuing Projects Fusing Arts with Equity

The city of San Diego has announced the artists and organizations that will receive funding through the Impact pilot program for arts-based heritage, sustainability and justice projects.

Applicants were selected based on their potential to “make a lasting impact on challenges within the local arts and cultural ecosystems.”

The recipients, along with their collaborators, are:

• All for Logan, with the Barrio Logan Association
• Asian Story Theater, with William Virchis.
• Kim Phillips-Pea, with San Diego Sister Cities.
• Little Saigon San Diego, with the Indochinese Association of San Diego.
• South Bay Alliance Association, Inc., with John Roy Sound.
• The Aja Project, with Fatuma Fadhil.
• The Urban Collaborative Project with Maxx Moses.
• TuYo Theatre, with Veronica Marquez.
• WorldBeat Cultural Center, with Centro Cultural de la Raza.

The awardees’ projects include preserving a neighborhood’s cultural identity amid rapid gentrification, creating new models to address the lack of arts and culture spaces within neighborhoods and reversing cultural erosion by fostering traditional and folk-art practices and stories.

Each partnership will receive phased funding of $100,000 over 18 months to develop and implement change-making projects within “Communities of Concern” as identified in the city’s Climate Equity Index and San Diego Promise Zone.

Awardees also join a resource network to support them through project development and implementation.

“This year’s Impact recipients exemplify the creativity and ambition necessary to address the increasing challenges in the arts and cultural ecosystems,” said Jonathon Glus, executive director of Arts and Culture. “They represent new voices and models for change-making, and we are thrilled to foster collaboration among these local artists and organizations and to support their work in areas of the city prioritized for investment.”

In the inaugural Impact cycle, the city acknowledged post-pandemic challenges, historical imbalances in access to funding and the need to recognize and encourage growth in the following focus areas – Arts and Heritage, Arts and Sustainability and Arts and (a) Just City.

Awardees are working to plan and develop their projects for implementation from July 2024 to June 2025.

Impact is made possible by the Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT), a tax collected from visitors who stay overnight in hotels, motels, and other similar accommodations.