Planting Seeds, Taking Roots: NAVEL's Five Year Impact Report
Planting Seeds, Taking Root: NAVEL’s Five Year Impact Report
Read the Introduction Letter from Cesia Dominguez Lopez & Michael Holt below and then download the full report here.
Dear Kin,
It is with great pride and gratitude that we welcome you to our Five Year Impact Report for 2018-2023. This report marks a significant milestone in our journey, reflecting on the tremendous growth we have experienced since our inception as a collective experiment in 2018.
At the heart of our mission lies an unwavering commitment to cultural equity, social justice, and kinship. Our work symbolizes a seed of change, aspiring to transform the arts and cultural landscape in Los Angeles into a fertile ground where everyone—especially QT/BIPOC artists and cultural workers—can flourish.
Over the past five years, we have evolved alongside our growing networks, embracing new shapes and forms, guided by a tapestry of collective and intertwined inquiries.
We began by asking “How can we make our space accessible and sustainable in order to explore new ways of thinking, being, organizing, and making?” This question sparked the launch of the Collective Residency in May 2018, where over 80 local and international artists, curators, scientists, technologists, and activists had access to our space, equipment, and resources at no cost for 1 or 2 years.
Stills from ASSEMBLIES organized at NAVEL between 2019-2020
Amid the tumultuous backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and Summer 2020 uprisings, we sought answers to a crucial question: “What are the needs, desires, concerns of working-class QTBIPOC cultural workers in so-called Los Angeles?” This query included a deep recommitment to fostering more listening, learning, and sustainable action to ensure that QT/BIPOC folx, and others historically left out of creative spaces, remained at the core of NAVEL.
Consequently, we rewrote our mission, transitioned from theory to practice, and shifted our internal infrastructure by sunsetting our traditional nonprofit governance structure. In the process we became a worker self-directed non-profit, moving decision-making power closer to those it affects the most, the artist-workers.
As a group, we moved towards divestment from white supremacy and other oppressive systems that permeate everyday infrastructure, including in the arts. These reflections led us to dive into the root causes of challenges facing artists and cultural workers, asking in 2021, “What needs are not addressed within arts institutions or spaces? What is being left behind? What has been lost to WHITENESS?”
To respond to this, we invested in political education and capacity-building, steering our work towards a systemic-change approach.
Explore the full archive of ASSEMBLIES 2022 project-based pods and pláticas.
This brought us to our most recent inquiry: “How might we ‘Just Transition’ artists and cultural workers from our current extractive cultural economy to a regenerative and caring one?”. Through our ASSEMBLIES experiment in 2022, we collaborated with local artist-organizers and cultural workers to facilitate project based-learning pods to create a collective vehicle for practicing our values and embody being a Test Site for Kinship.
Our emergent and continuous practice of inquiry, experimentation, learning/unlearning, reflection, and adaptation, has woven care and kinship into our organization’s fabric, calling on each of us to practice living our values and to make kin with one another.
We present this Impact Report as part of our practice of Fearless Accountability, aiming to illuminate our successes and challenges, showcasing the resilience, determination, and creativity that have been NAVEL’s driving force. By sharing our journey, we seek to inspire our communities, igniting a collective passion for driving change and championing justice in the arts and cultural sector.
Your unwavering support has been instrumental in our growth and evolution. As we present this report, we celebrate our shared accomplishments and reaffirm our commitment to shaping a more inclusive and caring cultural landscape. Thank you for being part of our journey.
With heartfelt appreciation,
We extend our deepest gratitude to our Pollinators, supporters, partners, and allies, who have played an invaluable role in our growth and success. We rely on the generous support of a broad network of grassroots donors, sustaining contributors, funders, and volunteers to fuel our commitment and actions to create a more equitable and inclusive arts and cultural landscape in Los Angeles.