WHY CULTURE CHANGE
At Women’s Foundation California, we know that policy change alone isn’t enough. To truly shift society toward gender, racial, and economic justice, we must transform the cultural narratives that shape how people think, feel, and behave.
Culture is where hearts are won. It’s where minds are opened. It’s what tells us who we are—and who belongs. From abortion access to climate justice, culture influences what’s politically possible.
That’s why we launched the Culture Change Fund in 2019, as the first collaborative of its kind focused on gender justice through cultural strategy.
Over six years, we’ve invested $10 million in culture shift across California, Georgia, and Michigan. Together, our partners have:
Reached over 1.5 billion people online and offline.
Created award-winning films, viral campaigns, murals, podcasts, and educational series.
Shifted public sentiment on issues from abortion to voting to gender expression.
Built a replicable strategy for philanthropic investment in cultural organizing.
The Culture Change Fund starts with a simple belief: that artists, organizers, and storytellers can transform the world. Together they have the power not just to interprete it, but to reimagine and create something new, compelling, and irresistible that liberates us all.
Our core strategies—grant-making, a learning community, and a data-driven narrative research project—were guided by artists, culture-makers, activists, and narrative strategists, along with funders.
Together with anchor partners like The League, IllumiNative, Center for Cultural Power, Harness, and 13 funders, we’ve created a powerful ecosystem for change.
Building Story at Scale, a powerful tool designed to help partners create resonant, targeted content for persuadable audiences. But this wasn’t a one-size-fits-all approach.
We identified three states—Georgia, Michigan, and California—where we had an interest in shifting culture, partners with deep relationships, and the ability to make change happen.
We provided ongoing technical assistance by linking partners with groups like Vision First who could create, test, and distribute content.
We formed a cohort of the partners to meet regularly, provide each other with encouragement and learnings, and troubleshoot as circumstances changed.
We need to change attitudes and build broad public support before and while we achieve legislative change, or we risk regressing and fighting an uphill battle. Bia Vieira, CEO of Women’s Foundation California
Since 2020, the Culture Change Fund has supported dozens of groundbreaking projects, reaching millions across digital platforms and in real-life third spaces. Here are just a few:
Third Spaces
Trust Black Women
SisterSong’s cultural activation at Essence Fest helped reframe Reproductive Justice for new audiences and invited thousands into the movement.
Full Set Society
The League’s stylish civic education hub reached Gen Z femmes of color in clubs, nail salons, and digital spaces.
Black On Purpose
Reached Black men in Detroit and Milwaukee who are also part of the For the Win audience. They held events geared toward their interests and created open spaces for discussing issues that matter, where their voices often aren’t heard: masculinity, family, mental health, community issues.
Clinic Reimagined
Feminist Women’s Health Center transformed their Atlanta space to reflect the dignity and care patients deserve.
Art as Organizing
Bell Gardens Rent Stabilization
Through art and narrative strategies, The Center for Cultural Power and California Latinas for Reproductive Justice supported a local affordable housing effort in Bell Gardens, California—leading to a historic rent control victory in this majority-Latine city.
Atlanta Needs Abortion Care with Heart
Feminist Women’s Health Center with Vision First created impactful media campaigns, to complement FWHC’s more targeted, physical space project with a louder, broader declaration that FWHC provides care with love.
Abortion is Freedom
A multimedia campaign with GIFs, a video, images, and memes to make abortion-positive assertions a core part of the culture for their target audience of young Black women in Georgia.
Entertainment
Sir Lady Java
A powerful biopic-in-progress telling the story of a legendary trans activist, launched with early funding from CCF.
American Genocide
A true crime podcast that set off a 360 degree social activation campaign about Native boarding school history and encouraged listeners to support a just future for Indian Country.
Birthing Justice
A film centering the voices of Black women from all walks of life to show the systemic disparities they experience in pregnancy and childbirth outcomes.
The Aunties
A short documentary honoring Black land stewards and culture bearers Donna Dear and Paulette Greene as they care for Mt. Pleasant Acres Farms, 111 acres of community and history in Preston, Maryland.
Over five years of doing this work, we have learned a lot about how to change culture and where there are still gaps.
Offer surround-sound support—not just a check.
Culture Change Fund partners were able to make swift progress because of the way the Fund was set up.
Know your audience and start there.
An effective theory of change requires knowing who you want to reach and how you want their behavior to change. By starting with audiences, smart segmentation, and an understanding of the audiences’ core desires, our partners could better tailor their content and outreach strategies, and focus their messages and dissemination.
Work directly with artists, culture makers, and connectors, especially if they are not “political.”
Most of the audiences our partners were trying to reach do not think of or organize themselves into politically-affiliated groups. Therefore, reaching them requires authentically entering into the third spaces they occupy, spaces not classically political in nature: nail salons, night clubs, churches, block parties, and instagram feeds.
Get offline.
While almost every effort had an online component and calls to action that included signing up for mailing lists or viewing content on a website or social media platform, real culture change happens person to person.
Create ongoing learning opportunities for funders.
Traditional philanthropic strategies require grant partners to provide metrics and quantify impact in a way that isn’t always possible for culture change work.
Culture change takes time. It requires vision, trust, creativity, and deep investment. As right-wing culture wars threaten our freedoms, our commitment to culture rooted in liberation, care, and belonging is more vital than ever.
We need to keep investing in the future we seek, to ultimately bend our society toward racial, economic, environmental, and gender justice. Ultimately, we don’t just want to pass a bill. We want to forge a just future. Remembering that goal—not winning a specific campaign but building a world that belongs to all of us—can help us invest our time and money more effectively.
We are building a feminist future where everyone belongs. And we invite you to be part of it.
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Together We Are Unstoppable.
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