Context
NAPA came together through a series of events, meetings, and discussions with stakeholders who perceived the need for better advocacy and policy infrastructure to fight for and win economic security for creative workers. United States Artists incubated NAPA’s Discovery and and Co-Design phase with funding from Good Chaos, the Barr Foundation, and Creatives Rebuild NY. The process was co-facilitated by Althea Erickson, Claire Rice, David Holland, and Judilee Reed.
The process unearthed many insights, which could be valuable to other efforts that share NAPA’s goals and values. We share all of the materials from this phase of work in the spirit of transparency and the hope that they may prove useful to others in the field who are tackling similar challenges.
Discovery Process
NAPA hosted two field convenings in early 2024 to engage stakeholders, define challenges, and identify opportunities for advocacy and policy change. Alejandra Duque Cifuentes co-designed and facilitated the January and March convenings, and synthesized the findings from the convenings into a comprehensive report. In May, we convened a smaller group of artists and field leaders to assess those insights and offer guidance on a path forward.
Through these gatherings, we hoped to:
Understand opportunities to support existing and new connections among creative workers and their allies;
Create space for organizations and individuals already active in advocacy and policy efforts supporting creative workers to share current projects and identify opportunities for collaboration;
Meet with artists to develop a timely and informed perspective on their lived experience and potential priority areas for collective action; and
Build relationships with potential collaborators to articulate a shared understanding of possible challenges, opportunities, and futures for NAPA.
On Monday, January 29th, NAPA hosted a gathering in Washington D.C. focused on supporting individual artists. The event was organized as a pre-conference to the Healing, Bridging, Thriving Summit hosted by the National Endowment for the Arts, and included many individuals attending that event.
Facilitated by Alejandra Duque Cifuentes of ADC Consulting, the convening sought to answer the following questions:
What do creative workers need to thrive?
What role might NAPA play in supporting efforts to meet those needs?
Through the course of the meeting, participants offered perspectives on creative worker needs, shared and mapped work in the advocacy and policy space, identified strengths and weaknesses in the field, and built strategies to address top priority needs.
On Thursday, March 21, NAPA hosted a convening of mostly individual artists and artist organizers. The gathering was held digitally to enable broader access. Facilitated by Alejandra Duque Cifuentes of ADC Consulting, the convening focused primarily on community organizing and relationship building among creative workers and organizers.
Participants offered perspectives on creative worker needs, joined small group discussions sharing common experiences, challenges, motivations, and opportunities for collective action, anchored by Marshall Ganz’s Public Narrative framework, then came together in a larger group discussion to share insights and identify points of commonality and difference.
On Thursday, May 16, NAPA convened a smaller group of artists and field leaders in Chicago, IL. This group assessed insights from the first two NAPA gatherings and offered guidance on a path forward. Guided by NAPA Co-facilitators, the convening sought to explore strategic directions for NAPA, with the meeting outcomes and recommendations serving as the foundation of a broader co-creation process.
Participants were asked to:
Review insights from two prior meetings and outline strategy and governance documents,
Shape strategic choices about the direction, governance, and priorities of NAPA,
Contribute to the expansion of the NAPA network, and
Consider being a co-designer of the NAPA effort
Co-Design Process
From our early meetings, the NAPA co-facilitators shared a belief that NAPA must emerge from within a deeply collaborative, shared leadership model, and be led by creative workers and organizers who have the most skin in the game. Put another way, we felt the design choices we made about how to advance this effort would determine the value of what NAPA delivers for creative workers.
Many stakeholders raised important foundational questions about other values that underpin this effort. Do we seek to build whole new systems, or iterate within the status quo? How do we understand our efforts in the context of broader movements such as just transition or the labor movement? These are important decisions that will shape NAPA’s work going forward, but they are not choices the co-facilitators could make alone. With that in mind, we felt the moment of transition from NAPA’s discovery to design phase was the right time to transition leadership from the co-facilitation team to a larger co-design team that:
Foregrounded the leadership and lived experience of working artists as the primary driver of this effort;
Intentionally connected to larger social movements focused on workers rights and social change;
Brought experience in community organizing and democratic governance within a backbone structure.
The Co-Design Team was a short-term transitional body – convened for four months – tasked with translating the insights from NAPA's discovery phase into a plan of action. In particular, the group was tasked with establishing the strategic foundation for NAPA - mission, values, core constituency and strategic focus, as well as determining NAPA's core activities, operating model, and strategies for engagingits core constituents and partners in its work
The group advanced its work via three project teams: Stewardship, Activities, and Engagement, each led by a team leader and supported by a project manager. Together, they produced NAPA's initial strategic plan, which we expect to evolve and iterate over time as needed.
Co-Design Team Members
Adia Sykes
Arturo Méndez-Reyes
Althea Erickson
Cézanne Charles
Claire Rice
David Holland
Emily Washines
Evan Bissell
Gabrielle Chapman
Gustavo Herrera
Judilee Reed
Kara Elliott-Ortega
Laura Zabel
Paloma McGregor
Sarah Calderon
Ted Russell