People:Power:Place Reconvenes and Distributes Grants to Community Organizations in Philadelphia

Asian Arts Initiative (AAI) had a tremendous opportunity to celebrate our community by investing directly in our cultural ecosystem. In May, we hosted the People:Power:Place Award dinner and distributed over $219,000 to 20 Philadelphia organizations who have been doing THE work in the name of the people’s Chinatown and creating programming that protects and empowers young citizens of Philadelphia. We view the funds distributed as both recognition of ongoing efforts and as a much needed resource for building equity for our teachers and space defenders.

Back in 2017, People:Power:Place was AAI’s planning process that centered the role of arts and culture in shaping how we lived and worked to build the Chinatown North/Callowhill neighborhood. The project brought together neighborhood stakeholders to make recommendations for our community work and to inform a larger community project. The need for community space emerged as a key priority from the cultural planning process. Subsequently, AAI launched Shared Spaces 共享空間, a project to provide low- or no- cost access to neighborhood spaces for cultural groups, immigrants, and artists based in the Callowhill/Chinatown North & Chinatown neighborhoods. By providing equitable space access to local cultural creators, Shared Spaces 共享空間 preserved and enlivened the cultural heritage of our neighborhood.

For years, AAI has had the honor of leading youth programming in our community and has always valued the cultural labor of teaching artists, from creating the Artists in Community Training handbook to the many iterations of Youth Arts Workshop that have taken place through Philadelphia. With a new gift from The Culture & Community Power Fund, we’ve decided to reconvene People:Power:Place with an expanded purview of stakeholders, which now proudly includes the Save Chinatown Coalition, protectors of third spaces, and citywide youth education organizations.

The next step of our strategic investment is designing a new and radically transparent participatory process to determine the shared strategic needs of our ecosystem. We believe that through local engagements and field trips to national cohort cities in New Orleans, Boston, Memphis, and Detroit with the members from the 20 organizations, we can begin to build trust and carve out the right tools to identify and enact fair systems of courageous funding for community power building. Our aim is to travel in pairs from late October 2024 to early 2025 and frankly, just see how it goes, learn from each other and the experience, and be in community with like minded folks with similar roles in mirroring organizations.

Here at Asian Arts Initiative, we value culture, by lifting up the artists and activists that preserve culture. We value place by valuing the people who leverage their power to make ‘place’. With the People:Power:Place project, we look forward to continuing to build out a sustainable and meaningful cultural ecosystem in the city of Philadelphia.

2024 People:Power:Place Awardees include:

Attic Youth Center

Creative Resilient Youth

Taller Portoriqueño

Youth Arts and Self Empowerment Project

Teen Lounge at Fleisher

I am the Move - Move Makers (illReality Inc.)

Youth Outreach Adolescents Community Awareness Program (YOACAP)

Southeast by Southeast

Future is Us Collective

Norris Square Neighborhood Project

Asian Americans United