Culture Bearer Community Initiative

Historically, we have seen how many of our cultural treasures and cultural hubs were made possible by visionary artists or collectives who built a vision or responded to a community need for greater opportunity or possibility. Their chosen ways of working centered stories, dance, song, craft, and creative expression to reinforce community relationships and strengthen a vision for an empowered future.

This practice is similar to what other communities have described as Culture Bearers: creative leaders who skillfully weave relationships, networks, and systems to build a community that feeds intergenerational possibilities and connects histories to exciting futures.

The Culture Bearer Community Initiative is the next resource initiative designed to invest in our individual artists and small collectives who are building a thriving and abundant future for Greater Houston’s cultural communities. We build from our successful learning community model that connects communities and weaves networks, to form a more resilient ecosystem across this city and beyond.

The Culture Bearer Community Community Conversations are a community inquiry process designed to inform the launch of H.I.C.’s inaugural Culture Bearer Community Cohort. Rather than defining “cultural bearer” internally, H.I.C. will convene conversations across Houston’s diverse communities to inform the criteria and review process. Learnings from the sessions will provide local examples as to how Culture Bearer practices manifest across the Greater Houston Area.

The title of Culture Bearer comes from communities themselves, naming the people who carry memory, values, and responsibility from one generation to the next.