Kresge's $6 Million Culture of Justice 2.0 Is Closed to Applicants. Here's How Cultural Organizations Get Invited Next Time.

The Kresge Foundation's most important line about its new $6 million Culture of Justice 2.0 initiative is not in the press release. It is on the initiative page: "This is not an open call for funding. Culture of Justice 2.0 is a closed cohort initiative developed through existing relationships with selected grantee partners and new partners invited to fill strategic issue-area or geographic gaps."

Many arts and culture organizations will see the November 2 announcement and look for an application. There isn't one. But the cohort's makeup and the way the initiative was built show how a growing share of multi-year, unrestricted cultural funding is distributed, and what an organization outside the cohort can do to be considered next time.

What Kresge announced

Culture of Justice 2.0 is a three-year, $6 million initiative of Kresge's Arts & Culture Program, run with the Movement Strategy Center (MSC) as intermediary. MSC curates the cohort and handles grant disbursement, programming, peer exchange, and wellness support.

The cohort's 15 community-based organizations receive "general operating grants and additional programmatic support, including peer exchanges, wellness, co-learning and knowledge-sharing engagements." Kresge did not publish individual grant sizes. If the $6 million were split evenly, it would come to $400,000 per organization, or roughly $133,000 a year. Some of the total almost certainly pays for MSC's programming and convenings, so direct grants are likely somewhat smaller.

The cohort, in full:

The initiative launched in February 2026 and went through "an expansive five-month co-design process with cohort participants." The first in-person retreat took place in June 2026 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with an opening ceremony led by Taíno elders. So the cohort was formed and working for most of a year before Kresge announced it publicly. That sequence is common for invitation-only initiatives.

"The Arts & Culture Program focuses on the role that culture and creativity play in advancing community power-building and justice movements," said Regina Smith, managing director of Kresge's Arts & Culture Program. "This cohort of culture and community practitioners represents bright spots in how cultural and community resilience manifests in place and across generations." Program officer Inés Familiar Miller leads the initiative for Kresge.

From $1.2 million to $6 million

The original Culture of Justice launched in November 2019 as a $1.2 million initiative with five organizations, each receiving $240,000:

• Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (Oakland)
• Operation Restoration (New Orleans)
• Performing Statistics (Richmond, VA)
• Shooting Without Bullets (Cleveland)
• The Carnegie Hall Corporation (New York)

That version was jointly run by three Kresge units: Arts & Culture, the Boys and Men of Color Working Group, and Human Services. Its focus was narrower, on reimagining community justice, which in practice meant the criminal legal system.

Version 2.0 is five times larger in dollars and three times larger in cohort size. It "expands the work beyond community justice." The new cohort covers land and housing (Richmond LAND, the Cooperative Community of New West Jackson), disability justice (Sins Invalid), Black historic preservation (the Marian Cheek Jackson Center), youth arts (RE:Frame), and cultural economic development (SoHarlem).

The cohort also turned over. None of the five 2019 grantees appears in the 2.0 list. Kresge said 2.0 drew on "existing relationships with selected grantee partners," meaning organizations already in its grant portfolio, and "new partners invited to fill strategic issue-area or geographic gaps." The 2019 organizations did not automatically carry over.

What the cohort tells you about selection

Several patterns run through the 15 organizations.

Place-rooted, not national. Every organization works in a specific neighborhood or city. There are no national service organizations and no large regranting intermediaries other than MSC. Kresge's emphasis on "cultural and community resilience" that "manifests in place" is reflected in who was chosen.

Culture as a strategy, not just programming. Few of these are traditional arts presenters. The University of Orange is a free community "people's university." Richmond LAND works on community land control. Maverick Landing Community Services is a public housing community services organization. Mixed Blood Theatre is the most traditional arts organization in the group, and it is known for access-focused practices such as Radical Hospitality, its free-ticket program. The common thread is using creative practice to build community power, not the art form.

Geographic spread with intentional gaps filled. The cohort covers the Northeast, Midwest, South, Southwest, West Coast, and Puerto Rico. It includes Detroit, Kresge's hometown, through Wisdom Institute Detroit. Kresge said it invited new partners to fill "geographic gaps," and the Jackson, Phoenix, and Portland groups look like deliberate choices to round out the map.

Small to mid-sized budgets. Most cohort members are community-scale organizations for which $100,000 or more a year in unrestricted money is significant. Funders choose this kind of cohort when they want general operating support to change what an organization can do.

Why this model is spreading

Culture of Justice 2.0 combines three trends in large-foundation grantmaking.

1. Intermediary-run cohorts. Kresge is not managing 15 grants directly. MSC handles disbursement, programming, and relationship management. This lowers the foundation's administrative cost and gives the cohort a facilitator from the movement field. For grant seekers, the intermediary becomes a second gatekeeper, and often an easier one to reach than the foundation.

2. Closed cohorts instead of open calls. Open calls in arts and culture now draw application volumes that program staff cannot review carefully. The Getty Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and others have all experimented with invitation-only or concept-first structures. Kresge itself currently lists no open funding opportunities on its funding page.

3. Multi-year general operating support with "plus" services. Peer exchange, wellness, and co-learning are part of the offer, not extras. Funders increasingly treat the cohort as part of the benefit: sustained relationships with peers working on similar problems in other places.

How to get on the radar for the next one

You can't apply to Culture of Justice 2.0. These steps put an organization in a better position for this kind of invitation-only cohort, at Kresge or elsewhere.

Get into the portfolio first. Kresge said 2.0 started with "existing relationships with selected grantee partners." The most reliable way into an invitation-only cohort is through a prior, smaller grant. Watch for Kresge's open calls, which do appear periodically. Earlier this year Kresge's Arts & Culture Program ran a Detroit-focused cultural heritage call. Kresge recommends its weekly newsletter for new opportunities, and applications run through Fluxx.

Build a relationship with the intermediary. MSC is a movement-support organization with its own networks, convenings, and programs. Taking part in MSC's public work and related field gatherings puts your organization in front of the people who curated this cohort.

Name a gap. Kresge invited new partners to fill "strategic issue-area or geographic gaps." If your organization works in a region or on an issue the cohort does not cover, say so in your communications with program staff. Examples include rural communities, the Mountain West, the Gulf Coast outside New Orleans, Indigenous communities on the mainland, and immigrant-led cultural work in the South. Funders building cohorts look for coverage.

Tell the culture-and-power story clearly. Every cohort member can explain how its creative work changes conditions for its community, whether that means land, housing, safety, or economic opportunity. Organizations that describe their work only as arts programming do not match this funding approach.

Document the place-based track record. Long tenure in a specific neighborhood, resident leadership, and visible community partnerships appear across the cohort. Make them easy to find on your website and in your annual report, because program officers review those before any conversation.

The bottom line

Culture of Justice 2.0 is a meaningful investment, $6 million in mostly unrestricted money to community-scale organizations at a time when federal arts and humanities funding has become unreliable. But it is not, and was never going to be, an open opportunity. For most arts and culture organizations, the lesson is to treat relationship-building with foundations and their intermediaries as a continuing part of fundraising, not something to start when an RFP appears. The 2019 cohort received $240,000 each. The 2026 cohort is three times larger, its budget five times larger, and its membership entirely new. A third round, if Kresge runs one, will likely be invitation-only too.

Source materials: Kresge Foundation announcement, Culture of Justice initiative page, and the 2019 launch announcement.