In June, fifteen organizations from fifteen places stood in a circle on a patio in San Juan, Puerto Rico, each holding a section of one long piece of fabric. The Kresge Foundation’s officers were in the circle with them. That retreat, the cohort’s first in-person gathering, is the working picture of what Kresge announced this week: Culture of Justice 2.0, a three-year, $6 million initiative built with the Movement Strategy Center.
The initiative backs 15 community-based organizations that work where culture, creativity, and justice meet. Each receives general operating support, the money nonprofits can spend where it is needed most, along with peer exchanges, wellness offerings, and structured co-learning across the cohort. The three-year investment launched in February 2026 and builds on Kresge’s original Culture of Justice initiative.
The cohort
The organizations span the country and one territory: AgitArte in Santurce, Puerto Rico; BECOME in Chicago; Cooperative Community of New West Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; the Marian Cheek Jackson Center in Chapel Hill; Maverick Landing Community Services in East Boston; Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis; the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans; One Square World in Boston; Prismid Sanctuary in Portland, Oregon; RE:Frame Youth Arts Center in Phoenix; Richmond LAND in Richmond, California; Sins Invalid in San Francisco; SoHarlem in New York; the University of Orange in Orange, New Jersey; and Wisdom Institute Detroit.
Built with the grantees, not just for them
The structure is the story as much as the money. Before the cohort’s work began, the Movement Strategy Center ran a five-month co-design process with the participants, and grantee input continues to shape the learning sessions, exchanges, and wellness offerings. Kresge describes working through an intermediary as a deliberate choice about power: the partner closest to the work holds more of it.
“The Arts & Culture Program focuses on the role that culture and creativity play in advancing community power-building and justice movements,” said Regina Smith, managing director of Kresge’s Arts & Culture Program, which runs the initiative under program officer Inés Familiar Miller. Sophie Lan Hou, the Movement Strategy Center’s vice president of ecosystem and innovation, put the moment plainly: “In this monumental time of transition, these movement and community leaders are doing essential work.”
The program rests on three stated aims: strengthen the partner organizations, deepen connections across places, and leave room for the cohort to picture, together, what thriving communities look like. The San Juan retreat worked that way in practice. It opened with a ceremony led by TaÃno elders on the island known by its TaÃno name, Borikén, and included workshops with traditional knowledge keepers and site visits to Corporación Piñones Se Integra and host grantee AgitArte.
A Detroit foundation with national reach
Kresge, based in Troy, Michigan, outside Detroit, holds about $3.98 billion in assets and funds arts and culture, education, environment, health, and human services in American cities, with a large portfolio in Detroit itself. Culture of Justice 2.0 is its arts program thinking out loud about how change actually happens: slowly, in place, through the organizations neighbors already trust.
Smith called the cohort “bright spots in how cultural and community resilience manifests in place and across generations.” The most telling review came from inside the circle. In an anonymous survey after San Juan, one cohort member wrote: “Being in space with a funder in a way that the power dynamic did not overshadow the purpose of the retreat was new. I’ve never engaged with funders in this way before, and it was very refreshing.”
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