How do marginalized communities build systemic power that is enduring rather than merely episodic? For many grassroots organizers, the answer is deeply rooted in culture.
In 2025, the Center for Evaluation Innovation (CEI)—in partnership with Intelligent Mischief and Root. Rise. Pollinate!—evaluated the Culture & Community Power Fund (C&CPF) to understand how culture drives structural transformation.
The Innovation: A Laboratory for Trust-Based Philanthropy: The evaluation highlights C&CPF’s role as a laboratory for philanthropic innovation. By shifting from transactional, one-time grants to a high-touch, high-trust model of unrestricted awards, C&CPF places decision-making power directly into the hands of communities. This approach ensures that resources respond to genuine, on-the-ground needs rather than the distant dictates of a foundation, proving that ceding control is a prerequisite for long-lasting impact.
Key Learnings: Culture as the Engine for Change: Our evaluation team identified a profound, symbiotic relationship between cultural integration and community power. Key insights include:
- Culture is Core – Grantee-partners described culture as “the water they’re swimming in”. Integrating arts and culture makes the rigorous work of power-building joyful, accessible, and engaging, inevitably inspiring out-of-the-box solutions to shared structural challenges.
- The Governance Shift – The most sustainable, long-term systemic change occurs when communities move beyond direct service to collectively govern their own cultural institutions. When arts and culture are integrated directly into governance and decision-making, communities can effectively leverage that cultural power to build enduring economic and political sovereignty.
- Trans-Local Learning – Amplifying impact requires trans-local exchanges where grantee-partners visit other sites to share strategies. Crucially, the evaluation found that this model is most transformative when funders themselves actively engage in the learning process alongside community leaders.
Explore the full evaluation report to discover how philanthropy can shift its norms, embrace trust-based funding, and support a new paradigm for social change with culture at its core.