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

    $70,000 - Awarded August 2021

    Focus areas
    Movement Media
    Description

    The 2021 Community Voices grant will support building community narrative power rooted in a cooperative nonprofit community bookstore and social center movement space. This project will feature an open access library, archive, and reading room; a year-long oral history and lecture series around Philadelphia's Black Radical Tradition; political education around media systems and community media literacies around policing, housing, education, care, and food issues; and community-based media content creation licensed under creative commons for community use.

    $25,000 - Awarded August 2021

    Focus areas
    Youth
    Representation in Media
    Description

    To cultivate a space for Philadelphia organizations focusing on youth media to build community, share resources, learn from each other, identify common areas of growth and collaborate towards solutions.

    $65,270 - Awarded August 2021

    Focus areas
    Representation in Media
    Description

    The 2021 Community Voices grant will support the documentation of the lived experiences, hopes, concerns, needs, and overall cultural perspectives of representatives from the Philadelphia drag and queer arts community.

    $75,000 - Awarded August 2021

    Focus areas
    Movement Media
    Representation in Media
    Description

    To expand and deepen WURD Radio's multimedia coverage and conversations around environmental racism and its direct impact on Philadelphia's Black community with a lens towards action, solutions and empowerment.

    $37,000 - Awarded August 2021

    Focus areas
    Immigrant Voices
    Representation in Media
    Community-Centered Journalism
    Description

    The 2021 Community Voices grant will support the distribution of a free community journal, published in Arabic and English, that amplifies culture from the Southwest Asia and North Africa region, with writers predominantly from the region. Distributing a physical newspaper across Philadelphia (and now Allentown) will put Arabic in public space to be seen and felt.

    Stay in Touch

    Sign up for our Community Zine to get notified of available grants and stay up-to-date on grantee work.