What We Support
Compton Foundation has adopted a new mission:
We ignite change. We support transformative leadership and courageous storytelling, inspiring action toward a peaceful, just, sustainable future.
The status quo is not shifting rapidly enough toward a peaceful, just, and sustainable world. Our new mission highlights a sense of urgency and a willingness to take risks in order to transform the way we live. Bringing forth a positive future requires innovative ways of understanding and naming the problems we face, as well as new methods for collaborating to solve them. Implicit in the mission is support for progressive and democratic social change.
What will we fund?
In 2012, we want to learn how the work of our existing partners in the fields of peace, environment, reproductive health and rights, and money in politics might align with our new mission. We will also look for new relationships with organizations working in and thinking about these fields in novel ways.
Change requires both long-term movement building and the ability to respond quickly to opportunistic moments when transformation and/or real short-term gains are possible. We will support organizations building the long-term capacity to ignite change as well as providing rapid response and emerging opportunity funding. We value projects that explore the connections between issue areas.
Transformative Leadership
We believe that the most effective leaders focus not only on strategizing, organizing, and campaigning, but also on personal relationships. Success in creating a more just and sustainable world will require emotional authenticity in addition to intellectual analysis, and the courage to lead morally, as well as politically.
The leaders (and the institutions that support them) with whom we will engage are driven by a strong sense of social purpose and have a searing passion for making a difference. As leaders, they are able to craft and communicate a compelling vision of the future, translate that vision into clear strategies and achievable goals, build community, and adapt flexibly to shifting contexts for their work. They take risks. Not only do they respect and embrace diverse voices, they are also able to work across boundaries to find agreement around shared goals.
In this area, we expect to support:
- Institutions that are training, convening, and coaching leaders with the above qualities.
- Networks of leaders working across difference in issue, approach, or constituency.
- Exemplary organizations that demonstrate new ways of working, creative collaboration, and transformative leadership qualities.
Courageous Storytelling
We believe that there is a need for compelling stories about who we are, how we should live, and our purpose on this planet. This moment of global transition requires translation. How can we imagine a new world without sharing brilliant stories about what the future could be—how it might taste, smell, sound, and feel? To us, courageous storytelling means:
- Speaking truth to power.
- Using visual art, music, drama, film, writing, and creative social media to amplify critical issues and to blend personal with political, emotional with intellectual
- Disrupting our understanding of the status quo, or giving voice to previously unheard narratives.
- Communicating compassion, linking our past to our future, and offering positive visions/dreams of what might come next.
In this area, we expect to support:
- Creative media (art, film/video, music, drama, writing, photography) that captures imagination, expands our understanding of critical social and environmental problems, and articulates a positive vision for the future.
- Exemplary and emerging leaders or efforts that command attention and convey clear narratives with passion, vision, and impact.
- Artist capacity building organizations that help creative artists engage with social and environmental change organizations or campaigns, or provide artists with experiences and/or information that can help them work more effectively on real world problems.
