One year into this administration, we know violence is not theory. We see it as four children, including a five year old Liam Conejo Ramos, were detained by ICE agents in Minneapolis yesterday. As James Baldwin said, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
Violence moves through the bodies of Black and brown communities, through the lives of trans people and children. It touches all of us in some way—through the people we love, the communities we carry in our hearts. Authoritarianism is real. It is structural. And it aims to take everything from us.
But fascism doesn’t only move through laws. It moves through the stories, images, and narratives that go unexamined—what we see, what we hear, what we believe is normal. Every message shapes who we value, who we fear, and what we imagine is possible. Art, culture, and storytelling are not optional. They are the frontlines of resistance.
I hold that reality every day—scrolling through the news, listening to loved ones who are trying to stay whole, feeling the weight in my chest. And through it all, one line keeps returning: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair.”
That is the spirit we carry to The Solidarity House at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Not denial. Not distance. But a collective refusal to surrender imagination. Artists, funders, strategists, and organizers coming together to align, deepen solidarity, and build the cultural conditions that make justice possible.
If you’re in and around Sundance, we hope you’ll join us and our partners at The Center for Cultural Power, Sunday, January 25th, 10 –11 AM MT for Catalysts and Culture Keepers: Funding Culture Change. Our very own Nicola Schulze will be on the panel, alongside culture leaders exploring how to resource narrative power, community-led storytelling, and long-term cultural transformation. And if you’re not there, know this: we will report back, carry the learnings forward, and keep building the imagination infrastructure this moment demands.
Register for Our Panel at Sundance
At Women’s Foundation California, this work lives within our Culture Change Fund. We invest in imagination, joy, and storytelling because when systems are built to erase people, choosing to imagine—loudly, collectively, without apology—is an act of resistance.