Independence Public Media Foundation Announces $800,000 in 2024 Community Voices Grants
PHILADELPHIA, November 21, 2024—The Independence Public Media Foundation (IPMF) announced its 2024 Community Voices Fund grant recipients, with $800,000 awarded to 33 organizations and projects. These grants will support the documentation, sharing, and preservation of community stories to advance social justice, build power, and strengthen local information networks.
“The Community Voices Fund allows us to conduct a listening scan of the region’s media ecosystem, but more importantly, the fund shifts power to mediamakers of color who understand the necessity of amplifying the voices and experiences of marginalized communities,” said IPMF Program Associate Samíl Jimenez-Magdaleno.
This year, nine community members with deep relationships and expertise in the fund’s focus areas reviewed all the proposals and decided how to allocate the $800,000 fund. The panel’s decisions are always final, without influence from IPMF staff and board. This community-led approach aligns with the foundation’s commitment to share power with communities traditionally excluded from philanthropy while also being impacted by harmful and racist media narratives.
IPMF selects panelists based on recommendations from local community organizations and leaders. The following organizations suggested this year’s panelists: Spiral Q, Drag Arts Oral History Project, SIFT Media 215, Lil’ Filmmakers, Centro de Cultura, Arte, Trabajo y Educacion (CCATE), South Asian American Digital Archives, Paul Robeson House, POPPYN, and South Jersey Information Equity Project.
The fund also aims to center voices and leadership from communities counteracting white supremacy and state-sanctioned violence through community-led storytelling, archives for building community power, community-centered news and journalism, and media for movement building. Grant recipients include:
- Still We Rise Freedom Coalition ($25,000) — to support "We Free Us," a storytelling project for currently and formerly incarcerated women and transgender and gender nonconforming people in Philadelphia jails to share their stories and build power towards large-scale decarceration.
- The MOVE Activist Archive ($35,000) — to support the archiving of the MOVE Organization's history in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the MOVE bombing.
- Philly-Afghan Info Hub ($25,000) — to support the Philly-Afghan Info Hub, which will amplify community narratives and meet the information, civic engagement, and networking needs of Afghan refugees in the Philadelphia region.
“We’re excited to continue supporting the region’s media ecosystem. More than ever we need stories that accurately reflect the experiences of communities of color, advance social justice movements, and cultivate joy and accountability,” said IPMF Program Officer Nuala Cabral.
Here are the 2024 Community Voices Fund grant recipients:
Community Storytelling
Arts Holding Hands and Hearts
$15,000
To support the Restorative Justice Filmmaking Program, where young people impacted by the juvenile justice system will be trained to use filmmaking to share their stories.
Cambodian American Girls Empowering
$25,000
To support Five Over Fifty (5 Over 50) which collects the advice and stories of Southeast Asian middle aged women for the purpose of archiving community history.
Hot Bits Film Fest
$25,000
To support Hot Bits Philly 2025, a queer erotic film festival that aims to activate personal and community healing from shame and repression, and to center self-determination, joy, desire, and pleasure as an essential pathway toward collective liberation.
Sanctuary Wholistic Arts
$27,500
To support the launch of the Black Women's Basketball Museum, the museum will use existing archives and collect new archives during community events where attendees share their personal basketball history to include in the museum.
Mighty Writers
$15,000
To support the production of a documentary about generations of Hispanic immigrant mushroom farm workers in Chester County who have socially and culturally integrated into the community.
Millennial Juneteenth
$20,000
To support a documentary about Kingsessing's history and challenges, and to connect this Southwest Philadelphia community to Millenial Juneteenth celebrations to showcase its resilience, pride, and cultural heritage.
Ollin Yoliztli Calmecac
$27,500
To produce the documentary "Meeting of Condor and the Eagle," which showcases the experiences of native and Indigenous people living in Philadelphia.
One Art Community Center
$35,000
To support the completion of One Art Media Division's Urban Survival Skills short film series, as well as pilot additional digital offerings.
PA Youth Vote
$30,000
To provide an intensive media training program for Philadelphia high school students in order to amplify the voices of younger community members on key public policy issues.
Philadelphia Obituary Project
$27,000
To support the Writing Heals project, which trains family members of people lost to homicide to write and reframe the narratives of their loved ones' lives and call for social change.
Trash Academy
$20,000
To support "End Legacy Dumping," a storytelling project that uplifts the experiences of frontline community members as they battle the environmental and racial injustice of illegal dumping and littering.
Ugworji
$15,000
To support the preservation of West Philadelphia's rich performance and creative history in a community-accessible archive.
Community-centered News and Information
Artreach
$10,000
To support the Disabled Resident Oral History Pilot, which will collect and share the oral histories of Philadelphia's disability community in efforts to make public cultural sites more accessible.
Centro Integral de la Mujer Madre Tierra
$30,000
To support "Voces Verificados: Combatiendo la Desinformación en la Comunidad Latina de Filadelfia," (Verified Voices: Combating Disformation in Philadelphia's Latinx Community) which will produce Spanish-language multimedia about disinformation in the Latine community via community radio stations and social media.
Create Genius Media
$35,000
A multimedia journalism project, including a podcast, that looks at healthcare outcomes for justice impacted individuals in Pennsylvania.
Green Philly Company
$27,500
To support Gritty & Green: We Are Seeds podcast series, which uplifts the voices of marginalized communities that have reclaimed food and gardening as tools for self-sufficiency.
Healthy NewsWorks
$20,000
To support a video journalism project that teaches elementary and middle school students to become communicators of relevant and accurate health information for their peers, families, and neighbors.
Inti Media
$20,000
To support the production of Diálogos, a 12-episode investigative podcast exploring topics related to affordable housing, economic mobility, and social issues related to Afro-Latinos and the Latine identity.
Philly-Afghan Info Hub
$25,000
To support the Philly-Afghan Info Hub, which will amplify community narratives and meet the information, civic engagement, and networking needs of Afghan refugees in the Philadelphia region.
Prison Health News
$25,000
To support Prison Health News, a platform that expands access to health information to people who are incarcerated and amplifies personal narratives around prison abolition, health justice, and tools for surviving prison.
Archives for Building Community Power
Philly Black Cinema Archive
$28,000
To support a digital archive of films and tapes from Daniel A. Moore Sr., a civil rights leader and the founder of the African American Panoramic Experience Museum.
The Land Alchemists
$27,500
To support the creation of an immersive multimedia project to resist genocide and engage in land-based struggles, drawing from current and historical archives and in partnership with local organizers and allies.
Students for the Preservation of Chinatown
$30,000
To support the Ginger Arts Center, an intergenerational "third space" for youth in Chinatown to document community stories through art and oral histories and learn collective organizing alongside community elders.
The Iglesias Garden
$30,000
To support the creation of an archive of community members' efforts to promote land stewardship and combat gentrification in Philadelphia.
La La Lil Jidar
$35,000
To support the archiving and documenting of La La Lil Jidar's organizing of community experiences to shift harmful narratives around Palestine and foster healing.
The MOVE Activist Archive
$35,000
To support the archiving of the MOVE Organization's history in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the MOVE bombing.
The Preserving Black Haddonfield History Project
$10,000
To support a docu-series uplifting the stories of Haddonfield's Black residents, past and present, in order to preserve the rich and diverse history of the Haddonfield community.
Narrative Shift and Media for Movement Building
Acting Without Boundaries
$10,000
To support the Acting Without Boundaries' Youth Acting Lab Film Project which amplifies the voices of BIPOC youth who have disabilities by sharing their talents and stories through film.
Camden FireWorks
$25,000
To support people-powered storytelling that aims to contest and shift narratives about environmental justice in Camden, New Jersey.
Down North Foundation
$30,000
To produce a documentary in partnership with Black youth and adults impacted by the carceral system that deconstructs the myth of individual culpability and highlights how to holistically address cycles of criminalization in Philadelphia.
Philly Black Worker Project
$20,000
To support "Let Them Only See Us," a multimedia initiative documenting the work of Black women fighting for education justice and Black workers' rights.
Still We Rise Freedom Coalition
$25,000
To support "We Free Us," a storytelling project for currently and formerly incarcerated women and transgender and gender nonconforming people in Philadelphia jails to share their stories and build power towards large-scale decarceration.
Youth Art and Self-empowerment Project
$20,000
To amplify the voices of youth impacted by the carceral system as they share their stories, in order to change community perspectives around responses to harm and violence committed by young people.
For more information, contact Enni Aigbomian, enni@independencemedia.org
About Independence Public Media Foundation
Formerly known as WYBE Channel 35, Independence Public Media Foundation was founded in 2018 when WYBE sold its broadcast license as part of the Federal Communications Commission’s Broadcast Incentive Auction and received a one-time payment of $131.5 million. With these funds, IPMF supports Black-led, Indigenous-led, and people-of-color led media organizations and media making projects that help communities build their narrative power for equity and justice.
