Our 2025 Year in Review
As 2025 winds down, we’re looking back with pride and joy at the dozens of programs, hundreds of actions, and thousands of people we supported over the year.
At the end of 2024, we promised that we were ready for the hard work ahead. In the face of some of the greatest challenges our country and planet have ever known, we challenged ourselves, too: to make our programs stronger, to test our ideas about what works and collaborate with others to find what the moment really demands, and to develop new resources and ways to help everyone doing the sometimes impossible-seeming work of building the better world we need.
In the process, we supported so many people and projects that made the impossible possible. Below are some of our highlights from the year.
In 2025, we
- Trained over 1500 people in artistic activism and how to use it in these most trying times
- Supported 50+ creative activism campaigns that reached tens of thousands of people in support of a huge range of causes (voting, gun violence prevention, reparations, fair wages, reproductive health rights and justice, judicial integrity, LGBTQIA+ rights and trans liberation, student civic participation, accessibility justice, community climate solutions…)
- Worked with people in 20 countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, and North and South America, and even traveled to work in-person in Indonesia, Brazil, and (closer to home but just as exciting) Canada
- Collaborated with a huge range of groups: international organizations; artist councils; funders and funding networks; issue-specific coalitions; local, state, regional, and national nonprofits; and new collectives who had come together, eager to make a difference in this moment
- Dazzled at dozens of conferences and convenings, supporting everything from student voting to inclusive city planning to global artistic activism
- Hosted five public events on how to energize our actions and audiences — and our most popular event ever, on how artistic activism is uniquely positioned to counter authoritarianism
- Published new resources — plus our book, The Art of Activism, reached a major milestone when it went into its second printing, and our toolkits continued to help hundreds
- Won an award!
What People Needed Most
Across all of this work, key insights emerged about how to best help those fighting for social justice right now.
Focus on Emotional Impact
One of our most appreciated training modules this year was our lesson on emotions. Often in activism, people focus on the facts they think their audiences need to know, and on the specific call to action they want them to take. What is crucial — but often overlooked — is the emotions they want to instill in the people they’re trying to reach. Feelings are what can bridge the gap from thinking to doing and really mobilize people to take action. Proactively identifying the desired emotional response to actions can lead to much stronger campaigns.
Confidence We Will Win
All successful activism has been artistic activism. From our work over the years and around the world, we’ve seen so many inspiring examples of people overcoming the worst situations by approaching them with innovation and creativity. We shared many of those examples and identified key principles from them that can be applied to work today.
Check out the recording of our Anti-Authoritarian Artistic Activism event, where we shared nine stand-out examples.
Support in Experimentation
We know the traditional methods aren’t working — if they were, 2025 would have been a very different year. Through our Field Tests program, we partnered with some of our favorite organizations around the US to experiment and learn what’s really working in activism right now. One of the major takeaways was just how underfunded this kind of strategic experimentation is — and how important it is to change that.
Join our upcoming event all about the Field Tests program on December 11! And stay tuned for an upcoming resource about the importance of funding experiments in the progressive movement.
Professional Development and Capacity Building
In the face of polycrises, funding cuts, and serious burnout, people across sectors are looking for ways to work better and smarter. This year, we had a record number of foundations and organizations reach out to us to ask for help training their networks, grantees, and staff on building their creative activism skills.
Research on our 15 Years of Impact shows that our artistic activism trainings help advocates in eight key ways, and we’ve loved bringing these benefits to more folks this year. We worked with a variety of organizations to help them unlock creativity across their teams, spark bold new thinking, and design transformative campaigns that deliver more effective and affective results.
Want to work with us to increase your organization’s capacity in 2026? Reach out!
Special Highlights
For our major programs, in which we worked with changemakers for extended periods of time, we helped advocates and artists realize dozens of actions that reached tens of thousands of people around the world in support of progressive causes. Read more about a few of our favorites.
What’s next?
It’s up to you!
2026 will, without doubt, present more challenges — and more opportunities to approach them with the creativity and innovation required. We hope to offer more insightful workshops, resources, and training opportunities in the new year, but we need your support. Donations from you are essential if we’re to be able to continue our work.
If you like the work you see here and want to see more of it happen in 2026, please make a year-end donation. Any amount would be hugely beneficial to the activists and artists we’ll support in 2026.
And if you’re at an advocacy organization, arts organization, foundation, or other group, and you’re looking to increase your team’s capacity for innovative and impactful work, get in touch! We’d love to fill up 2026 helping you win big.
