Model and Strategy
YBCA’s Creative Incubator mobilizes diverse artists, thinkers, makers, activists and citizens around the most urgent questions of our time through:
1) The YBCA 100: An annual list of the 100 individuals, organizations and movements shaping the future of American culture. At the annual Summit, listmakers work with our Bay Area community to identify urgent questions to drive the Incubator’s work.
2) YBCA Fellows: More than 90 artists and creative citizens of all kinds then tackle YBCA 100 questions and collaborate to problem-solve; conceiving, incubating and prototyping new projects to transform our cities and our lives.
3) YBCA Commissions: Providing collaborative financial support and resource to seed the Fellows’ best ideas, moving them to their next phase.
With this process YBCA becomes a true creative home for civic action, cultivating a growing community of creative changemakers, spurring societal movement and pushing the boundaries of what creative social change can look like.
YBCA has pioneered a highly collaborative model that relies on deep crosssector collaboration—believing we are exponentially better together than on our own. Through these unconventional yet authentic partnerships, which bring together people from the arts as well as business, government, philanthropy, education and social change organizations, it has become possible to generate new and vital solutions to ongoing community challenges, with ideas emerging that would never have been found in any other circumstance. Our diverse collaborative also draws thousands of new community members to the Creative Incubator—with the many different people connected to our partners joining this work—increasing participation and ensuring the solutions that emerge are cocreated with people living across geographies, races, incomes and other aspects of difference.
Impact
We are creating a model that has the potential to transform arts organizations across the country, pioneering new ways to think about how to engage people of all kinds, connect them to the greatest living contemporary artists and thought leaders, and elevate their own creativity, activism and entrepreneurialism. Our Creative Incubator is designed to establish the art center as a place of diverse and activated participation, an igniter of public imagination, an incubator of great ideas and a commissioner and investor in bringing those ideas to life. This work both adds new people into our midst and focuses the arts on measurable community impact—solving some of the key challenges in our field.
In the long term we also expect to see impact and change across the Bay Area, moving the dial on addressing a variety of critical issues identified by our community. By commissioning the best ideas and creative projects developed through the Creative Incubator and bringing them to scale, we will increase empathy, connection and social and economic opportunity within our many neighborhoods. Whether we are investigating themes like Freedom, Equality and Citizenship, or other pressing needs we choose as a collaborative, there will be widespread benefits and impacts that make the Bay Area a better place for all.
Looking longerterm, we anticipate impacts to expand nationally and globally as we share our Creative Incubator plus its most successful issuebased creative projects with other cities, being highly transparent so others can learn from and adapt this work.
Leadership
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Deborah Cullinan
CEO