Catalyst Fund Grantees

Tiny WPA’s Building Hero Project provides design, leadership and entrepreneurship skills to individuals ages 16 and up who want to be part of a diverse community of civic change agents. The Project harnesses the enthusiasm of those interested in the maker movement by providing deeper learning and connections to a trade. The Project centers on an 8-week training program where participants acquire the design and fabrication skills needed to create products and the know-how to undertake neighborhood revitalization and design-build improvement projects for the community. Using lessons learned from national models, Tiny WPA will build the Project into a sustainable social enterprise that provides fabrication services by Building Heroes to the design and manufacturing sector.

Cultural organizations regularly collect data around their work, however, due to an ongoing capacity gap in terms of knowledge, skills and resources, they often do not effectively use this information to tell their story and analyze their work. DataArts will integrate an online, on-demand educational curriculum designed to build arts professionals’ data fluency into its well-established and widely-used data gathering platform. By providing this information and training across the cultural sector, the curriculum has the potential to significantly influence and improve how arts professionals do their work.

Northeast Philadelphia is a rapidly changing community and its neighborhood high school, Northeast High School (NEHS), is a unique microcosm of the growing diversity. NEHS is the largest public school in Philadelphia and one of the most diverse high schools in the nation, serving over 3,000 students, with 56 languages spoken and 750 English as a second language students. Currently, there are few opportunities for channeling this level of diversity in positive ways. Al-Bustan will engage NEHS students, parents, faculty and staff in a multi-faceted arts program that will use deep exploration of cultural identity and connectedness to further important conversations about diversity at NEHS and in other schools and neighborhoods. This work has the potential to promote understanding of and have a deep impact on communities that are often overlooked and, therefore, misunderstood.

Philadelphia has a rich cultural sector that provides informal educational opportunities for youth. These are often disconnected from the needs of the city’s schools. The Greater Philadelphia STEAM Initiative will explore how to bring together the cultural and education sectors to facilitate a more robust and academically purposeful relationship between the two sectors to create an integrated STEAM curriculum. A planning process that engages key stakeholders from each sector will aim to determine how to leverage the valuable programs of the cultural community to better support schools. If planning efforts are successful, subsequent phases of the Initiative will include creating a full curriculum and piloting it in three high schools.

Through HandCrafted, The Clay Studio will use collaborative, low-commitment, social experiences to acquaint new audiences with their work and highlight how ceramic art is part of day-to-day life. This creative approach to audience engagement provides an accessible entry point for new visitors to learn more about a typically niche art form and is a gateway to expanded opportunities like workshops and collecting. HandCrafted will be replicable by organizations looking to creatively link art and experiences.

Open Source, a project of Mural Arts Advocates, will consider Philadelphia’s diverse urban identity through the works of 14 artists from around the world. These artists will work within the community to broaden the conversation around topics including mass incarceration, education, youth development and economic challenges. The project will culminate in a series of talks, tours, visual documentation and direct engagement with the artists in October 2015. These forums will provide an opportunity for Open Source to spur dialogue and catalyze social change.

Philadelphia Young Playwrights will undertake the 1219 Vine Project to activate new levels of partnership with the Asian Arts Initiative and Mural Arts Program to create a model for deep and lasting collaborative work. The project harnesses the momentum of transformation in the Chinatown North neighborhood and will culminate in one or more community-centered events and/or artistic works. By integrating their resources and skills for the purposes of the project, a model for collaborative practice may be established that can be adopted and adapted by other organizations nationwide and inspire innovative thinking around other creative placemaking efforts.

The Cultural Alliance will develop Phillyfunpass, a free, patron loyalty card for visitors to participating cultural venues. Data gathered from Phillyfunpass will allow the Cultural Alliance to see patterns of cultural participation across the sector and at individual organizations to gain a better understanding of consumer habits. The Cultural Alliance will share data to foster innovative audience outreach strategies that are based on knowledge rather than assumptions.

Started in 2013 as an experiment in engaging neighborhoods in documenting their public history, the Philadelphia Public History Truck is a neighborhood-minded mobile museum that records neighborhood stories and makes them accessible by turning them into an art exhibit. The Center for Public History investigated creating a formal graduate level program based on the History Truck concept in support of the Center’s mission to raise awareness of Philadelphia’s recent past and train historians for work beyond academia.

Update: During the grant period Philadelphia Public History Truck engaged with 16 community organizations and served over 2,000 real and virtual users.  Participants in North Philadelphia programs considered issues such as race, power, violence and economic disparity during block parties and other events.  This work culminated in the exhibition They Say They Gonna Build. History Truck received extensive coverage including 20 print exclusives and three radio features.  While the Center continues to develop its plans for how History Truck will fit into its curriculum, other schools around the country are beginning to adopt the model.

In February 2016, The Philadelphia Public History Truck, the project’s founder Erin Bernard and Temple University Center for Public History were awarded the 2016 Outstanding Public History Project Award from the National Council on Public History.