Building Collaborative Capacity is a series of workshops, gatherings, and partnerships that help build the connective tissue necessary to deepen collaborative work so it can be truly effective. It brings together a group of artists, activists, policymakers, and communicators to learn from one another, share resources and strategies, form new and deeper alliances. It also takes advantage of two opportunities for collaboration: participatory budgeting taking place in NY for the first time, and the launch of the new Naturally Occurring Cultural District citywide coalition.

Artists and organizers often work in isolation of one another, or only come together briefly around sporadic projects. BCC aims to shift this fragmented practice into a more integrated approach to community transformation grounded in values of equity, diversity, creativity and democratic participation. 

The program design, based on conversations with potential partners about their needs and interests, includes diverse forms of engagement:

1) Workshop series -where a core group of participants can learn from one another, and include their extended networks. The core group includes those offering and cosponsoring workshops, those hosting events, and representatives of cultural network partners and allies. Workshops include:

* Urban Bush Women’s Entering, Building, and Exiting Community

* Center for Urban Pedagogy workshop (affordable housing/zoning)

* Arts & Democracy Project’s Cultural Organizing workshop

* Political education

* Video workshop

* Workshop with NOCD-NY about creative uses of space

* Workshop with ArtHome

2) Participatory budgeting pilot project – supporting the involvement of arts, culture, media and design from the start as part of this new civic engagement opportunity.

 

3) Collaborations with allies and networks doing related work including:

* Laundromat Project

* Naturally Occurring Cultural District Working Group (NOCD-NY) 

* Center for Media Justice / MAG-Net

* America Project - Peoples Potlucks

* City Council member Brad Lander