BIG We Foundation (BWF) is a nonprofit arts and culture intermediary built to provide infrastructure and opportunity for high-potential, under-resourced communities. The organization employs a cultural strategy framework that leverages content (storytelling and narrative), community, and capital. BWF works to achieve its mission to be and build beloved community through three priority areas, womxn and girls, environmental wellness, and restorative economics, primarily in Southern Black communities. Our vision is to generate a well culture and well communities where we can all experience sustained safety, love, joy, and abundance.
OUR PRIORITY AREAS
This initiative unleashes the power of girls and womxn by supporting narratives and programs that center the hopes, dreams, ideas, vision, and work of girls, womxn, and femmes. Now, more than ever, the world needs the leadership of Black, Brown, Indigenous, Latina/e, API, and multiracial girls, womxn, and femmes. Our work is built to uncover the brilliance and power of feminine-centered leadership by supporting the growth, positioning, and full self expression of women all over the country.
Environmental Wellness
Our environmental wellness work focuses on shifting from extractive and hazardous environmental policies and practices to ones based on safety, love, joy, and abundance while restoring the relationship between humanity and the environment. In our current projects, we work with invisibilized communities that have been harmed by current environmental practices and policies to acquire, redevelop, and steward land through the creation of sustainable and community-owned and -driven food systems, affordable housing, and shared community spaces.
Restorative Economics
Designed to address the racial wealth gap, this body of work supports community ownership/governance, community wealth building & restorative development. Derived from the Restorative Economics work of Nwamaka Agbo, the restorative economics portfolio focuses on the fiscal healing & restoration of under resourced communities who have been marginalized by an extractive economy, by investing in strategies that create shared prosperity, sovereignty, & self-determination.
Restorative Economics is an invitation for communities to come together & form relationships that allow them to reimagine a new way of being grounded in cooperation instead of competition, inclusion instead of exclusion, & abundance instead of scarcity. With a Restorative Economics approach, neighbors can come out from behind their fences & gather in the streets to make decisions about how to invest in & transform a blighted empty lot or create a climate resilient energy microgrid. Restorative Economics places the wellbeing of the entire community directly into their hands.
Southern Shift Initiative
The Southern Shift Initiative lives at the intersection of culture & economy, in an effort to scale restorative models of economic & community development to communities across the Black Belt South that build community wealth & advance food sovereignty and economic & ecological equity in historically Black communities.
The Memphis Futures Fund
The Memphis Futures Fund does the work of repair in Southern African American communities both urban and rural. This body of work addresses the financial, cultural, and emotional harm done to Black people in the United States as a result of Slavery, Jim Crow, and institutional systemic racism.
Wellness Equity
We define wellness as the act of creating supportive systems,
infrastructure, laws, & environments to allow individuals and
communities to actively & intentionally pursue safety, love, joy,
& abundance in holistic ways that honor their cultural practices,
beliefs, & values. This definition allows us to focus from the
lenses of justice and equity simultaneously.
Building economies for the purpose of creating community wealth,
structuring economic relationships to generate & build value.
The BIG We Imagination Fund provides infrastructure for creative partners of The BIG We to receive program related investments to access our vast network of storytellers, community based experts & cultural strategy practitioners. This work is supported by our strategic frameworks, models, and technical expertise.
Through The BIG We Imagination Fund, The BIG We unleashes the social imagination of those who often go unheard & supports the building of a world reimagined from their point of view. By following the vision & leadership of girls & women, black, brown, indigenous, & API people & people who live in or come from historically undermined communities, the fund contributes to building a holistically well culture that is safe & sustainable for all people, for animals, & for the planet.
While we are committed to supporting the chorus of transformative voices across the country, we are especially committed to amplifying the voices & visions of southern black women who have often been our silent leaders & the bearers of the spiritual, emotional, political, & physical labor of our collective liberation.
With the mission of working with social visionaries to co-create a world where deep democracy is irresistible & inevitable, The BIG We Imagination Fund facilitates the advancement of the creative & transformative work of a personal & collective liberation. We work to actualize community governance, create sovereignty over community resources, & cultivate the tools & relationships needed to fundamentally transform every community into bastions of love, abundance, possibility, & joy.
EQUITABLE DEVELOPMENTThrough Restorative Development, The BIG We Imagination Fund aims to improve & repair relationships between people & their communities. The purpose is to build healthy communities, increase social capital, decrease crime & antisocial behavior, repair harm & restore relationships.
LARGE SCALE STORYTELLINGThrough Large Scale Storytelling, The BIG We Imagination Fund aims to facilitate the telling of large scale, powerful stories to shape perspective & impact how people experience the world. We believe that, if given the proper healing, resources & access, we can help transform communities. We also believe that people want to participate in a more loving, equitable society & that many people want to make the world better but don’t know where to start.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP & ACCELERATIONThe BIG We Imagination Fund focuses on exponentially increasing the frequency of investment in strategies that generate community wealth, produce governance structures that benefit the whole, & create community power that builds the next economy—one rooted in equity, regeneration, & interdependence.
By connecting the creative economy, the restorative economy, & the work of community building, The BIG We believes that access to capital & capacity building can help to address generational poverty as well as create space for connection & healing required to address generational trauma.