The Divided City Community Grant Recipients
The Divided City is not currently accepting proposals for Community Grants. Learn more about current Community Grant recipients below.
Current Community Grant Recipients.
2022
We are pleased to announce the seven recipients of the 2022 Divided City Community Grants to support individuals and organizations in the St. Louis metro area engaged in community work or creative practice related to urban segregation. These 2022 Community Grants are cosponsored by the Office of the Provost as part of WashU Here and Next (learn more about that plan here).
The recipients are:
Held during Violence Prevention Month, this event features ten self identified men from varying backgrounds who share bold personal stories about how masculinity has affected them and discuss challenges such as bullying, hazing, violence against women and other men, homophobia, transphobia, gender inequality, HIV/AIDS, and health care.
Learn more about their project here.
Goodie House offers a space for emerging poets as well as established writers. Their readings are curated, and aim to highlight the work of Queer and BIPOC writers, culminating in a beautiful array of human difference and experience.
Learn more about their project here.
A multimedia site-specific art installation by St. Louis artist and community activist Robert E. Green, this project speaks to the spatial displacement of lives and communities fractured by the politics that have fostered years of systemic oppression of African Americans in St. Louis.
Learn more about their project here.
Somewhere Above the Earth and Beneath God (I Found Home) explores the Black vernacular (space/photographs/objects) as a site of preservation and self-realization for Black people of Queer experience. Within this body of work, Shabez Jamal explores the disseminated city of Kinloch, Missouri through the Black home and its interior.
Learn more about their project here.
The Phoenix Project will train youth in the 22nd Ward to interview and videotape residents who have lived in the ward for at least three generations. The oral histories will capture their hopes, dreams and challenges that give insights and appreciation into the inspiring lives of elders.
Learn more about their project here.
| This new project from STL Reentry Collective will create a documentary film on the reentry process and exposing system-level gaps that often lead to reincarceration, poverty, poor health, and further stigmatization. A public film screening and panel discussion will offer actionable steps for individuals and organizations to support and advocate for system-impacted people in St. Louis and nationally. |
Learn more about their project here.
The WHY of MY City will bring together African American youth and professionals in historic site preservation and the humanities to produce and publish a series of four audio podcast episodes, recorded live on stage as part of an expanded theatrical piece also called The WHY of MY City.
Learn more about their project here.
Previous Community Grant Recipients.
2021
The recipients are:
Mobile Stories: A Creative Inquiry is a mobile storytelling project focused on Migration and Resilience. In this project, Dail will interview community members to collect stories of resilience. The collection of stories will then be edited and included in a sound installation in North Saint Louis.
Learn more about the project here.
Over the course of a year, the STL Reentry Collective will produce documentary film interviews of formerly incarcerated people in St. Louis and host public screenings and workshops that offer strategies to better support system-impacted people in the St. Louis community. This project will center the diverse narratives and experiences of formerly incarcerated people to ground local conversations about mass incarceration and reentry around those who have experienced it. Research consistently reports high recidivism rates nationwide, which mainstream narratives attribute to bad individual choices. Instead, these films and series of workshops will highlight individual strengths and expose system-level gaps that often lead to re-incarceration, poverty, poor health, and further stigmatization. The STL Reentry Collective is a volunteer coalition of formerly incarcerated people and allies founded in July, 2020.
Learn more about the project here.
Superfun is an “alt-institution” creative practice project—developed by artists Aaron Owens, Jenny Price, and Allana Ross—that mimics the federal Superfund website and program for the St. Louis region. It connects the dots from extreme toxicity in the U.S. to Americans’ everyday fun—cars! toys! rec centers! —and thereby makes visible what Superfund tends to obscure: the ubiquity and relentless production of industrial toxics, the endemic failures of clean-up and remediation, and how Superfund actually actively feeds an economy that prioritizes growth and profits while being hard-wired to ignore social and environmental costs.
Learn more about the project here.
The MARSH Food Patch Partnership connects the issues of climate ecology and urban agriculture, neighborhood disinvestment, cultural exchange, historical land ownership inequities, poverty, and food insecurity by building a structural framework for community involvement in land management and food production. The Food Patch is an established food forest at the intersection of the Patch and Carondelet neighborhoods in far south city St. Louis. The site was planted using permaculture design principles and envisioned as a free food resource to neighbors. With this new partnership and funding provided by Divided City, paid worker-owners can provide collaborative management to grow food and create a cultural space for gathering, organizing, accessibility, agency, and social investment in the health, well-being, and quality of life for the immediate and wider community.
Learn more about the project here.
“BlackTea” is an audio/visual podcast series. Hosted by Alisha Sonnier and Jami Cox, the show pairs informational programming with hot social topics. In communities where there are educational and income disparities, there are also gaps in access to information. Tailoring their series to a young audience, the hosts of “BlackTea” bring much-needed attention to local and national issues perpetuating economic and racial disparities, as they work to bridge the information access gap in underserved communities in our city. Although emphasizing issues disproportionately affecting the Black community, the aim of BlackTea is to be fun and engaging for a broad audience.
Learn more about the project here.
ACTION is a new original play about Percy Green, his group of activists (Action Committee To Improve Opportunities for Negroes), and their series of protests against The Veiled Prophet Organization. The story culminates in the Veiled Prophet Ball of 1972, when the group infiltrated the segregated event and “unveiled” the Veiled Prophet. Written by local playwright Colin McLaughlin, the play analyzes the political and economic landscape of St. Louis, and how racism and entrenched economic power have exacerbated and maintained disparity and inequity. The poverty in the region is by political design. Coming to grips with St. Louis’ troubling past is imperative to challenging the structural racism of the present.
Learn more about the project here.
2020
We are pleased to announce the six recipients of the Divided City’s Community Grants in support of creative practice, design, and community building and development. We received 82 applications – nearly all of which were deserving of support. We are both humbled and heartened by the breadth and depth of creative and innovative energy in this city – so in evidence in each and every proposal – and by the determination of so many to end racism, division, and inequity in the St. Louis region and to build toward a more just tomorrow.
The recipients are:
