The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) uses the power of art, design and visual culture to increase public participation in shaping the city, particularly among historically underrepresented communities. Their proposed project, Making Policy Public, will be a publication series that uses design to demystify the complex systems, laws and regulations that impact our neighborhoods. Like all of CUP’s projects, the publication will be created through a highly collaborative community-based model in which CUP collaborates with artists and designers as well as community and advocacy groups. These community partners will then distribute the resulting product to targeted constituencies that will particularly benefit from these tools.

The Laundromat Project is a community-based arts organization operating at the intersection of arts and social change. Funding from A Blade of Grass will support their longest running program, Create Change, which puts artists-in-residence in their local laundromats and offers a series of professional development workshops and salons that focus on socially relevant, social practice art­making. This training totals more than fifty hours over five months, and is intended to move diverse artists from a conventional public art model to a practice that emphasizes the catalytic potential of art and artists to create social change via active problem-solving and relationship-building.

freeDimensional supports culture in the service of free expression, justice and equality, based on the belief that creative expression fuels social justice movements. The organization does this work, for the most part, by placing artists who are at political risk into artist residency programs worldwide. Since 2006, freeDimensional has supported over 150 artists from 30 countries facing threats, censorship, violent assault, or imprisonment for speaking truth to power and voicing the concerns of their communities.

Nobutaka Aozaki is a multi-media artist inspired by his experience of immigrating to New York City from Japan. He creates exchanges with people he meets in the city and collects traces of this contact, such as drawings used to give directions, portraits drawn on plastic smiley-face bags or Starbucks cups with names and coffee orders, and re-presents them as evidence of himself in space with others. Aozaki relies on making the artist invisible, so that the people he encounters are unaware of their participation in an art project. By diminishing his role as author of his own works, he is able to give and receive as an ordinary person, transforming a familiar, throwaway item into a memento of human contact.

http://www.nobutakaaozaki.com/

Rachel Falcone and Michael Premo are the co-founders of Housing is a Human Right, an art project that uses creative storytelling to create an ongoing documentary portrait of the struggle for home. Falcone and Premo interview people about their community and experiences trying to obtain or maintain a home, and collect these oral histories as well as photographs and multimedia. So far, they have recorded more than a hundred stories in New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and South Africa. These narratives describe community and the human right to housing and land, and compose a living portrait of human rights that is both poignant portraiture and effective activism.

http://housingisahumanright.org/

Kambui Olujimi invites his audience to share and make literal trades, such as photo exchanges and opportunities for penny-wishing, and uses these activities to bring the audience into a world of imagination within an installation or sculptural environment. His approach to engaging audience through these literal exchanges, and the way these interactions function to bring a wide range of audiences into rich mythological fantasies, is particularly lyrical and generous.

http://kambuiolujimi.com/

The Center for Artistic Activism is the home for artists, activists and scholars to explore, discuss, reflect upon, and strengthen connections between social activism and artistic practice. CAA facilitates projects and strengthen networks. CAA's goal is to make more creative and more effective citizen activists by adhering to the following principles:

There is an art to activism.

Activism is too often flat and colorless...and it doesn't need to be.

An aesthetic eye and a creative hand are essential for building a better world.

Everyone has an artistic life they can bring to their activism.

Cultural transformation is necessary for lasting change.

Belief in Utopia, not as a destination but as a direction.

Flux Factory is a non-profit art organization that supports and promotes emerging artists through exhibitions, commissions, residencies, and collaborative opportunities. Flux Factory is guided by its passion to nurture the creative process, and knows that this process does not happen in a vacuum but rather through a network of peers and through resource-sharing. Flux Factory functions as an incubation and laboratory space for the creation of artworks that are in dialogue with the physical, social, and cultural spheres of New York City (though collaborations may start in New York and stretch far beyond).

The central guiding concept of Flux Factory is that innovative new works are created out of a rigorous commitment to collaborative processes. It is thus a forum that encourages participants to work with new collaborators, with unfamiliar media, and within a stimulating and unique social environment. As an artist-run organization, Flux Factory is a distinguished cultural component of its Queens neighborhood and the greater New York art world. Flux Factory produces four major and dozens of smaller exhibitions per year, runs a residency program, and presents monthly events that serve the artistic communities and general public of New York City.

More Art is dedicated to forging a powerful link between contemporary art and artists, and the community at large by seizing opportunities to enable people from all walks of life to approach and access art. By engaging viewers with alternative methods, unique venues, and a dose of the unexpected, More Art makes art truly approachable for all who encounter it.

More Art partners with neighborhood schools, community centers and other local organizations, but not with the aim of simply generating a larger audience for established works. Rather, More Art actively involves its participants in the creation and exhibition of new contemporary art pieces, and forges a powerful community at the same time.

No Longer Empty embraces a fresh perspective on creating, presenting and experiencing art. Through site-specific exhibitions that draw together the vitality of the contemporary art world and the values of building community, NLE creates in each exhibition a community of artists, designers, educators, scholars and the public who, together, create and experience art, free of market imperative and institutional constraints.

The Andrew Freedman Home was conceived by its founder in 1907 as a haven for elderly people who had lost their fortunes. After 25 years of limited use, the Home will be reconnected to its neighborhood and open to the public through No Longer Empty's exhibition, This Side of Paradise. The exhibition and its extensive public programming will draw together the economic and social history of the Home with the present day realities of the Bronx and its residents. The art will respond to the home's founding purpose, architecture and spirit, and explore a landscape of memory, immigration, storytelling, aging and fantasy that is both universal and specific to the home and its surrounding neighborhood.