Grants from the Community Foundation Support Community, Diversity, & Inclusion

Grants from the Community Foundation Support Community, Diversity, & Inclusion

Ringling College of Art and Design today announced the award of two grants totaling $25,000 from the Community Foundation of Sarasota County to support the Center for Diversity and Inclusion (CDI) at Ringling College of Art and Design and production of CDI’s Narrative Collective Project. The Community Impact and Equity and Access grants reflect the Community Foundation’s commitment to enhance programs that care for underrepresented and geographically underserved populations. 

Specifically, the CDI’s Narrative Collective Project is a multidisciplinary, intergenerational, and multimedia framework that brings awareness to social justice issues while elevating, celebrating, and raising the voices of marginalized stories that need to be told in the intentional spirit of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion through the arts, education, and dialogue.

“We are grateful for the support of the Community Foundation of Sarasota County,” said Yoleidy Rosario-Hernandez, Associate Dean of Students for Diversity and Inclusion and Director of the Center for Diversity and Inclusion at Ringling College. “Current events have put into stark contrast how through oppression and marginalization certain communities are made invisible. The Community Foundation’s investment in CDI and our programming shows what a valuable role community support and Ringling College can play in helping to bring recognition to, and celebration of, stories that need to be told.” 

The Center for Diversity and Inclusion (CDI) at Ringling College received an initial $10,000 grant from the McCauley-Brown Fund of the Community Foundation to support the CDI’s Narrative Collective Project, a documentary film series initiated by the CDI in 2019. Violet Stripes is the first film featured as part of the project, which brought together an intergenerational LGBTQ group comprised of Ringling College students and local residents to share stories of their individual journeys. The grant supported the completion of post-production for Violet Stripes and upcoming film screenings, gallery events, and discussion programs. The Violet Stripes trailer is viewable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8SAhLESwHw

The $15,000 Equity and Access grant supported the second documentary film undertaking in the CDI’s Narrative Collective Project – Warriors of Sarasota: Powerful Women of Color in Sarasota – a multi-part documentary and gallery project featuring the powerful stories of women of color in Sarasota who are working in service of bettering our community and shifting systemic oppression and other social injustices within our Sarasota-Manatee communities.

Through the project, the CDI, in collaboration with Arts and consulting organization Mosaic Movements, is hosting Intergenerational intergroup dialogues, writing curricula that will be accessible for free to educators and community organizations, creating content for its YouTube channel, and intends to produce and screen an original film each year. 

“Violet Stripes and Warriors of Sarasota: Powerful Women of Color in Sarasota are CDI projects that cement our voices and let them be heard and included as part of our bigger community,” Yoleidy concluded. “We want to be valued, acknowledged, respected, and to be treated with love, kindness, and humanity. Thus, by highlighting these kinds of stories, we are showcasing consciousness and creating visibility for many stories that have been ignored or erased from our collective education and history.”

ABOUT THE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION OF SARASOTA COUNTY

The Community Foundation of Sarasota County is a public charity founded in 1979 by the Southwest Florida Estate Planning Council as a resource for caring individuals and the causes they support, enabling them to make a charitable impact on the community. With assets of $421 million in more than 1,500 charitable funds, the Community Foundation awarded grants and scholarships totaling $48.9 million dollars last year in the areas of education, the arts, health and human services, civic engagement, animal welfare and the environment. Since its founding, the Community Foundation has been able to grant more than $323 million to area nonprofit organizations to our community thanks to the generosity of charitable individuals, families, and businesses. For more information, visit www.CFSarasota.org or call (941) 955-3000.

ABOUT MOSAIC MOVEMENTS

Established 2017, Mosaic Movements is a JEDAI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, Accessibility and Inclusion) arts and consulting organization focused on empowering communities by affirming, expressing, and reclaiming intersectional indigenous and diasporic narratives through transformative arts and cultural experiences, innovative consultation, impactful education, and critical discourse. Follow Mosaic Movements on Facebook or Instagram, and for more information, please visit: http://www.mosaicmovements.org/

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