As nonprofits face increasing threats to funding ahead of Trump’s presidency, The Black School (TBS), a Black community-centered experimental art school rooted in advancing radical social and political change, is adopting a new funding model that it hopes will make it more sustainable.
The school has significantly grown since its beginnings in 2016, when it operated as one-time creative activism workshops in high schools and community spaces across New York City. Following a residency and exhibition at the New Museum in 2018 and the launch of its Design Apprenticeship Program in partnership with the Bronx Museum of Arts the following year, TBS relocated to New Orleans, co-founder Joseph Cuillier III’s hometown, where it is currently building a new schoolhouse in the city’s Seventh Ward neighborhood, slated to be completed this fall.
Now, TBS has undertaken another new venture with the launch of We Fund Us, a monthly donation program that seeks to strengthen the school’s financial stability. By tapping into their own community for support, the organization’s leaders hope they can become less dependent on institutional grant funding and more self-reliant.
The program will add to TBS’s other streams of revenue, including an online store, crowdfunding campaigns, and annual Black Love Festivals that have funded its independent programming until this point.
Cuillier and co-founder Shani Peters told Hyperallergic that the initiative “draws back to the fundraising models of past social justice and grassroots movements.”
“This type of program is much needed in our neighborhood and community in the current moment where gentrification and discriminatory policies have created fractures and isolation,” Cuillier and Peters said.
Since it began, TBS has taught more than 600 students, held over 175 workshops, and employed and trained 35 Design Apprentices, including D’Aliyah Jackson, a young artist originally from the Seventh Ward.
Now a junior design mentor and junior designer, Jackson told Hyperallergic that the school has helped her foster a purpose for her art beyond herself and within community.
“I’m not only creating for me anymore; I’m creating with the intent of making the revolution irresistible,” Jackson said.
In addition to sustaining TBS’s existing programming, We Fund Us will also support the launch of a weekly afterschool program, weekend workshops, and community kitchen.
Strengthening its self-sufficiency has become especially pertinent in the wake of right-wing threats on tax-exempt nonprofit organizations over the past year. In particular, these threats have targeted organizations aimed at serving historically marginalized groups. In November, the House of Representatives passed a controversial bill that would give the Executive Branch the ability to terminate the tax-exempt status of organizations determined to “fund disruptive and illegal activity nationally and terrorism abroad;” the bill is still awaiting approval from the Republican-controlled Senate.
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find funders who are willing to take the risk of supporting an organization named The Black School, an organization that is directly by and for BIPOC people,” Nuha Fariha, development coordinator for TBS, told Hyperallergic.
”We’re at a really difficult crossroads with all these traditional fundraising methods that are increasingly asking us to change the very fabric of what our organization is, and that’s what makes We Fund Us even more pressing right now,” Fariha added.
