Ashé Cultural Arts Center

The Ashé Cultural Arts Center and its partners in the Alliance for Cultural Equity will address the structural failures that have resulted in disparities of support for locally-based arts and cultural organizations. They will deploy solutions that highlight the transformative power of art and culture, and the institutions that advance them, to affect the economy and the quality of life of the city and state. Building upon an IMLS-funded research project that supported the development of the Alliance for Cultural Equity, the team of 19 institutions will launch an outreach and education campaign calling for a more complete telling of their history, advocate for cultural heritage representation on municipal boards, identify policies that can be changed and work to change them, and create a new way to archive particularly for oral, non-material and non-written traditions. In the long-term, the Alliance for Cultural Equity will identify the distinctive challenges and dismantle the barriers to sustainability for small museum, archive, and cultural organizations in the Louisiana ecosystem, and build a collective body with the capacity to implement approaches that help arts and culture institutions thrive and evolve.