MEET THE 2023-24 ADVOCACY AND ORGANIZING FELLOWS
Pictures of fellows. Top row, from left to right: Amyas McKnight, Alison Yueming Qu, Ami Bennitt, Richard Chwastiak, and Cidjud Felix
Bottom row, from left to right: Catherine Headen, Claudia Paraschiv, Wylder Ayres, Yaffa Fain, and Thasia Giles
BOSTON (11/15/2023) - MASSCreative is proud to announce the 2023-2024 Advocacy & Organizing Fellowship Cohort members. These 10 individuals each possess a diversity of lived experiences, artistic and creative disciplines, and reside in eight distinct geographic regions of the Commonwealth. The Advocacy & Organizing Fellowship is a year-long, stipended leadership development cohort for activists, creative workers, and emerging cultural leaders to sharpen their organizing skills and grow their advocacy capacity to achieve a more equitable and inclusive creative sector.
Since its incorporation in 2012, MASSCreative has organized statewide with the goal of building a Commonwealth where arts, culture and creativity are an expected, well-funded, and valued part of everyday life. They are committed to advancing the advocacy learning and cross-sector alliances necessary to achieve a more inclusive and equitable creative sector. The Advocacy & Organizing Fellowship is one of MASSCreative’s major initiatives seeding sustainable, rooted, and direct advocacy leadership models in every region of Massachusetts.
“For over a decade, MASSCreative has worked with the creative community for year-round stronger and united advocacy. The Advocacy & Organizing Fellowship will support strong local and regional advocacy leaders who are focused on directly addressing the cultural policy issues their communities are facing.”
MASSCreative introduced the Fellowship in Fall 2021 and successfully graduated nine fellows who are continuing to lead advocacy and organizing efforts in their communities. In its second iteration, the Advocacy & Organizing Fellowship will match participants with experienced organizers, cultural leaders, and political strategists to deepen the skills needed to address critical arts and cultural policy issues in Massachusetts. The Advocacy & Organizing Fellowship is made possible thanks to sponsorship from the Barr Foundation.
“Building a more equitable and creative Massachusetts takes strong, inclusive, transformative statewide arts advocacy. The Barr Foundation is proud to support the Advocacy and Organizing Fellowship because it helps a great diversity of artists and advocates build skills, relationships, and experiences to propel a policy agenda to make that vision for Massachusetts a reality.”
After an extensive re-evaluation process, MASSCreative designed the new Fellowship model and opened applications for the 2023-2024 cohort in September 2023. 114 individuals across Massachusetts applied for 10 open spaces over a two-week application period, resulting in a 8.8% acceptance rate. MASSCreative is proud to announce that the following individuals will begin their fellowship orientation on November 17, 2023 at the Worcester Public Library:
Amyas McKnight, Managing Director of Dorchester Art Project
Cidjud Felix, Individual artist in Greater Boston
Richard Chwastiak, Manager, External Affairs at Cape Symphony
Alison Yueming Qu, Co-Founder & Executive Director of CHUANG Stage
Ami Bennitt, Founding volunteer member of #ARTSTAYSHERE Coalition
Catherine Headen, Independent design contractor in Bristol County
Claudia Paraschiv, Owner & Founder of Studioful Design
Thasia Giles, Director of Community Engagement at Jacob’s Pillow
Yaffa Fain, Assistant Cultural Development Officer for the City of Worcester
Wylder Ayres, Development Director for the Parlor Room Collective
“Organizing this fellowship has been a joy and It’s so wonderful to bring this diverse cohort together for this upcoming year of learning and growing from each other. There’s a lot of beautiful potential within this cohort and it’s my hope that the work we do together will be an investment into what a more beautiful, equitable and sustainable creative sector can look like.”
These individuals were selected based on their proposed projects and interest in scaling their impact regionally and statewide. Their projects include preserving and protecting creative spaces, developing cultural volunteer networks, cultivating public spaces as cultural landmarks, and building systems to meaningfully support transgender and gender-diverse artists. MASSCreative will continue to share the fellows’ progress throughout the next year.
