Community Storytelling

Focus Areas
Film
Media Training
Immigrant Voices
Archives
Representation in Media
Community-Centered Journalism
Media Policy
Movement Media
BIPOC Stories
Collaborative Audio
Community Radio
LGBTQIA+

The Greater Philadelphia region is a hub for BIPOC-led grassroots media groups and projects with deep roots in the communities they serve. At the same time, they have to go through hoops to gain access to resources that would help them grow and strengthen their organizations, support the important role they play in their communities, and give them equal footing with white-led/mainstream media organizations.

IPMF believes that storytelling builds and strengthens community resilience and brings ideas to life. Through the Community Storytelling program, the foundation supports storytelling that centers, preserves, and highlights the complex experiences of diverse and marginalized communities through a lens of care and compassion. The program supports:

  • Projects or organizations that aim to increase the representation and visibility of storytelling by communities harmed by systems of oppression and media erasure. 
  • Independent filmmaking by emerging and professional storytellers to tell their own stories and share it with a wider audience. 
  • Community radio networks and collaborative audio storytelling that report, discuss, connect, and distribute news and stories important to neighborhoods in the region. 
  • New and existing archives, community history projects, and BIPOC stories that help communities deepen their connections, reclaim narratives, and build power. 
  • Projects or organizations that aim to increase local audience engagement with independent filmmaking, community storytelling and archives.

Examples of this work include:

  • BlackStar Philadelphia Filmmaker Lab, a fellowship designed to support emerging Black, Brown, and Indigenous filmmakers. 
  • Presente Media, a Latinx collective of journalists and filmmakers producing bilingual media focused on social justice. 
  • G-town Radio, a community radio station in Germantown focusing on local news, ideas, sounds not heard on mainstream radio.

See our glossary for definitions of terms we use to describe our work

What We Support

    Projects
    There are no grantees to show right now.

    $570,000 - Awarded December 2019

    Focus areas
    Movement Media
    Description

    This three-year grant provides Leeway the opportunity to make small, community-centered grants to artists at the intersection of media and social justice, and to bring much-needed capital to marginalized communities.

    $310,000 - Awarded December 2019

    Focus areas
    Archives
    Description

    This two-year grant will underwrite the professional digitalization, centralization and cataloging of FPA's archived stories, allowing them to utilize archived material to expand their programming, demonstrate the archive's value to people across the region and beyond.

    $25,000 - Awarded December 2019

    Focus areas
    Movement Media
    Description

    Nominated to receive a grant for Trash Academy. The initiative is a “collaboratory” between community members in Southeast Philly, artists, environmental activists, and high school students from all across the city who inspire a wellspring of actions around trash issues.

    $25,000 - Awarded December 2019

    Focus areas
    Representation in Media
    Archives
    Media Training
    Description

    Nominated to receive a general operating grant.

    $1,001,945 - Awarded December 2019

    Focus areas
    Movement Media
    Policing and Community Safety
    Description

    Through this three-year grant, in collaboration with Free Press and Media, Inequality, Change Center, Movement Alliance Project (MAP) will convene and connect community-based organizations and local leaders in an educational and strategic visioning process that will lead to action-taking to reshape narratives around safety, trauma and violence. In this work, MAP and their community partners will center, support, and help cohere people impacted by violence and the criminal-justice system.

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