Midwest Culture Lab

In the wreckage of the 2016 election, Prentiss Haney of Ohio Student Association and Stevie Valles of Chicago Votes were concerned about the disengagement of youth of color in the Midwest as well as a rightward shift among white youth in the region that they believed reflected increased racial resentment. In discussions with Sarah Audelo, then the newly appointed executive director of the Alliance for Youth Organizing, they identified further concern that the progressive establishment, including funders, would sideline young people in the region, particularly young people of color, in favor of investments aimed at engaging older, white Midwesterners. Prentiss, Stevie, and Sarah — all young leaders of color — were committed to building multi-racial grassroots coalitions: they understood that working class and low income Midwestern families were suffering from the shared effects of forty years of deindustrialization. They felt that by collaborating as a regional block, they could better build power and resources for their organizations and the communities they served. 

Simultaneously, veteran cultural strategists Liz Manne and Erin Potts were talking about the need to empower smart and skilled cultural organizing — a practice that fuses arts, culture, and political organizing — at the state level. They believed the top-down, Beltway-centric, transactional model of “messaging” and “surrogates” was contributing to America’s narrative crisis and political dysfunction. They had a hypothesis that a strategic approach to narrative and a commitment to long-term culture change led at the local level could help shift the tide.

Matt Singer, founder of National Voter Registration Day and the Bus Federation (which in 2017 was renamed as the Alliance for Youth Organizing), was privy to both conversations and introduced the groups, recruiting We The People–Michigan to round out the regional strategy, and a new partnership was born. Matt’s theory was that a regional approach to state-level cultural organizing was the right scope for an experiment: choosing a single state was too small, the entire country too big. What could be learned in a region in 2018 could be scaled in 2020 and beyond.

This was the genesis of the Midwest Culture Lab, a project to leverage culture and narrative change strategies to increase the civic and political participation and the real political power of young people in the Midwest region. 

With funding from Investing in US, the Midwest Culture Lab brought together artists, organizers, and strategists to co-create a shared “story platform” to undergird and hold together the different groups’ campaign content and locally-rooted cultural organizing. The Lab, now housed at the Center for Cultural Power, continues to grow and evolve.

Design Team: Sarah Audelo, Kirk Cheyfitz, Renee Fazzari, Prentiss Haney, Liz Manne, Rebecca Petzel, Amber J. Phillips, Erin Potts, Art Reyes, Matt Singer, Stevie Valles

Partners: The Alliance for Youth Organizing, Chicago Votes, Ohio Student Association, We The People–Michigan

Funders: Investing in US