THE FIRE THIS TIME FUND

2006 Grantees

AREA Chicago Art/Education/Activism Publication
Produce and promote AREA Issue #4 "No Justice, No Peace" to confront the criminal justice system and challenge mass incarceration and redefine justice. ($1,000)

Co-op Image Group
This collaborative 10-week multi-media workshop took place in a west-side elementary school and consisted of collecting media from youth, showcasing their work, and connecting youth to local organizations that support youth-made media. ($1,000)

The Crib Collective
Youth leaders of "The Movement" to facilitate collaboration across the cultural gap of segregated North and South Lawndale neighborhoods through dialog, art and in making the Voices Across Borders community album. ($1,000)

Female Storytellers Initiating Revolution to End Violence (F.I.R.E)
A Southside multiracial, intergenerational group of women and girls created Storyteller, a publication of survivor stories of violence, and the stories of people who have done something to end violence in their daily lives. ($1,000)

Kuumba Lynx
"Arts Explosion Day" to involve activism workshops and civic engagement discussions in collaboration with CAAAELII to focus on Immigrants Rights for youth. ($1,000)

None on Record
Audio documentary oral history project with a goal to amass the histories and stories told by and about LBGTQ Africans all over the world - from neighborhoods within larger cities like Chicago to smaller towns and villages of African countries. ($1,000)

Proletariat Productions
Support a music performance, art exhibit and panel discussion (in the round - modeled after Camp Democracy) to grapple with understanding the relationship between socially conscious art and politically conscious movements to happen Fall 2007. ($1,000)

CD project of Teen Living Programs
Record and produce message-oriented C.D. The goal of the cd is to inspire youth to find more motivation in attending school, build healthier relationships, and talk about what is going on in their lives. ($1,000)

Yellow Armbands
To organize in solidarity with transwomen by educating attendees of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival about the benefits of inclusion, and to also encourage their participation and level of comfort at the festival, which is seen as the pinnacle of open space for women. ($1,000)

Young Chicago Authors
Kings of Poetry workshop series designed for young men to explore notions of gender sensitivity and create More Than Mothers, an anthology of essays and poems commemorating the lives of women. ($1,000)

Young Women’s Empowerment Project
Youth-led social justice campaign to learn about theories and practices of social justice in order to become better activists in the fight for justice for young women in the sex trade everywhere. ($1,000)


2007 Grantees

Art Exhibition
Chicago County Fair/Coming Home Chicago
for a photo series called "Sex Offender Coming Home." The photographs will invite the viewer to think about an interesting hypothetical situation: to imagine what it would be like if Sex Offenders (SOs) were welcomed back into society and supported in building a new life. "Chicago Home Coming" will be presented in conjunction with the educational and political activities of the S.O. Work Group, an informal group that has been developing projects to promote informed and productive dialogue about SOs and their classification, registration and restriction. ($1,000)

Son de Las Barricadas: Art and Resistance in Oaxaca, Mexico
ChicagOtra will organize a series of three expositions of art from the Oaxacan social movement that will generate public awareness and create a space for an ongoing dialogue about government accountability and popular movements for justice. ChicagOtra is a collective of activists and organizers dedicated to promoting the Zapatista ideals of democracy, autonomy, and social and economic justice in Chicago. ($1,000)

Audio/Music
Campaign to End the Death Penalty/Death Row Shuffle Tour
Darby Tillis, blues gospel singer, composer and mean harmonica player, is Illinois’ first exonerated death row prisoner. The Death Row Shuffle Tour will bring Darby and organizers from the Campaign to End the Death Penalty to high schools and youth groups in communities affected by the criminal justice system. The hope is that youth will learn from Darby’s personal experience, songs and storytelling and feel empowered to organize and see themselves as agents of social change. ($1,000)

Revolushunary Strippa Musik
"What if we created music that was catchy, mainstream but actually inspiring and made you think? That would be Revolushunary Strippa Musik." This compilation CD of local socially conscious hip hop music and spoken word artists uncovers the gender sexism and street pimpism prevalent in mainstream hip hop music. A Chapbook of the song/poem lyrics and the monologues will be produced with the CD. ($500)

Environmental/Use of Bikes
Beyond Today
Beyond Today is a grassroots group of residents, a.k.a Riverbank Neighbors, committed to working together to promote environmentalism, social justice, and peace. The grant will be used to institute an environmental activism internship program at Waters elementary school in Ravenswood/Lincoln Square to work with youth. ($1,000)

West Town Bikes
for its Youth Build A Bike  program that provides hands-on activities and education for youth around biking self-sufficiency. West Town Bikes is a community bicycle learning workshop often used as a creative workspace for special bicycle building, utilitarian human powered design, kinetic art, advocacy projects and constructive creation. ($1,000)

Radio/Video/Film
Actor Slash Model
for the making of a documentary film about the joys and positive creativity of a nationwide community of trans-identified musicians. Capturing material while performing, filming and conducting interviews on the road, ASM’s film will focus on the successes and full lives of these artists and raise visibility of the multi-dimensionality of transgendered people who are often negatively portrayed in mainstream media. ($1,000)

Cabrini Green Chapter of the Hip Hop Congress
to work with Cabrina Green young male teens to create a half-hour DVD to address and raise awareness about the issue of violence in Cabrini Green. The young men will conduct interviews with each other about the violence and what it has meant in their lives, and about the ongoing redevelopment in the community with community members from Cabrini Green Rowhouse Council, 100 Man Standing, and the Coalition to Protect Public Housing. ($1,000)

Chicago Independent Radio Project
CHIRP will secure a broadcast license for a new community radio station in Chicago, committed to local, independent programming, and to further the causes of localism, diversity, and independence in broadcasting, more generally. The group is working to convince Congress and the FCC to remove existing barriers to the granting of low power FM radio licenses in urban areas, including Chicago. ($1,000)

San Lucas Workers Center
for their "Discrimination - Never Okay" Video Project, an anti-discrimination media project to expose and educate around the blatant race and gender discrimination in the day labor/temporary work industry - specifically against young African-American day labor agency workers. San Lucas Workers Center is a grassroots worker-membership, worker-led organization group working for racial and economic justice in Chicago. ($1,000)

Yellow Wing Productions
for the documentary Fish out of Water, a local film that aims to challenge long-standing beliefs, shatter misconceptions, and ask crucial questions of pastors, theologians, the Institute of Religion in Democracy, politicians, and members of the LBGTQ community about their values and perceptions based on what religious texts say about homosexuality. The grant will help pay local animators to create art for the film. ($1000)

Theater Workshops/Performance
National Boricua Human Rights Network
for the play Crime Against Humanity, about the lives of 11 ex-political Puerto Rican nationalists and their everyday experiences in prison before being released in 1999 after agreeing to clemency from President Clinton. The play will help to reach a broader audience including families, youth, university students, as well as theater patrons to raise awareness about the independence of Puerto Rico and the freeing of the two remaining political prisoners Oscar Lopez Rivera and Carlos Alberto Torres. ($1,000)

Stillpoint Theatre Collective/Sisters Rising
Sisters Rising is a group of formally incarcerated women who have built community through participating in theatre/improvisation games and creative writing workshops. The grant will allow them to continue participating in theater workshops and sharing and writing each others’ stories. ($1,000)

ThickRoutes Performance Collage
"Where Seeds Have Grown" will be an interdisciplinary dialogue-raising workshop series to take place in Spring 2008. Through creative writing, movement theater, text and music activities, the facilitated workshop process will invite a group of diverse cross-race participants to collaborate and talk openly about experiences and conceptions of race and the influence that the African Diaspora as had on their lives. ($1,000)

Zine Making/Literary
African Textile Magazine
Students from Bowen (B.E.S.T) High School will take part in a creative research and self-publishing project to compile, lay out, assemble, and distribute magazines based on textile traditions and experiments in the African Diaspora. Students will learn about abstract and narrative traditions in African-American quilting, and learn about technical and design traditions that will give way to appreciating the visual work of their ancestors and their contemporaries working in the 21st Century. ($500)

Chicago Books to Women in Prison
The edition of Bound Struggles - Alternatives to Criminal Justice Control  will invite women in prison to contribute to an artistic form of expression to discuss resistance and alternatives to the criminal justice system. Chicago Books to Women in Prison uses Bound Struggles as a way to share incarcerated women's stories with people on the outside and provoke critical thought and raise awareness in the community through distribution of their writings and artwork. ($1,000)