Want to bring more creativity and bold action to civic engagement work in 2024?
Apply to join our Unstoppable Voters Fellowship for leaders at U.S. voting organizations!
Receive one-of-a-kind training, mentorship, and hands-on support – and make the impossible possible.
Apply by November 13
Across the United States, civic engagement advocates are gearing up for a challenging and critical election year in 2024. With so much on the line, we need creative and innovative strategies to get people to the polls and protect our fundamental freedoms.
Through the Unstoppable Voters Fellowship, the Center for Artistic Activism (C4AA) will support five voting champions who are leading civic engagement efforts in the U.S. and help take their work to the next level.
Apply now to join this cohort of diverse advocates from around the country who will learn new ways to take boundary-pushing ideas from concept to reality during the 2024 election cycle – and beyond.
The third year of the Unstoppable Voters Fellowship builds on previous successful cohorts in 2022 and 2023 that saw voting champions infuse wonder, joy, laughter, and more into inspiring actions that moved local communities across the nation.
Fellowship Overview
The Fellowship is a special artistic activism mentorship program that runs from January through November 2024. It merges action-oriented professional development with many outlets for brainstorming, exercising creativity, and building community with peers at the forefront of civic engagement. Crucially, it has flexible timelines to support the particular demands of this major election cycle and the unique needs of your civic engagement organization.*
The Fellowship is divided into three phases:
Phase 1
Exploration and Strategizing (January-February)
We kick things off with a multi-day, in-person retreat. Fellows enter a space where imagination has no limits and you are trained in artistic activism approaches that can unleash innovation in your work.
Fellows then return home and transform the spark of ideas from the retreat into a concrete Fellowship action plan, with one-on-one mentorship from C4AA.
Phase 2
Prototyping and Action (February-June)
Fellows work to incubate and test key aspects of your plans before enacting your actions in your home communities.
In a timeline that the Fellow deems most conducive to your work, your team, and your project, C4AA will travel to spend 3 days on the ground to support you in carrying out your successful action.
Phase 3
Iteration and Integration (June-November)
After your actions, Fellows will work with C4AA to develop a tailored plan for how to integrate key lessons learned and increase impact in all election actions through the remainder of the 2024 cycle.
Financial Support
Each Fellow will receive:
- a personal stipend of $1200
- a project stipend of $4000, and
- reimbursement for all travel expenses to and from the in-person retreat.
Community Support
As an Unstoppable Voters Fellow, you’ll join a community of over 1,000 exceptional voting champions that we’ve worked with across the US.
You’ll also meet monthly with your 2024 cohort for community learning and support to help everyone develop, iterate, implement, and evaluate your creative campaigns. Fellows will also have direct access to the Center for Artistic Activism’s expert directors, who have supported successful campaigns for decades, all over the world.
Application Timeline
- October 2: Applications open, through November 13.
- October 24: “Ways to Win with Unstoppable Voters in 2024” information session. Register here and learn more about the Unstoppable Voters Fellowship and other programs we’re offering next year.
- November 13: Applications close at 11:59pm ET.
- November-December: Application review, finalist interviews, and Fellow selection and announcement.
Preview the application here.
Excited but hesitant to apply for 2024?
If the Fellowship excites you but you find yourself thinking, “This is a ton of work and time required during one of the most important elections of our lives!” – we feel you.
After the in-person retreat, the remaining program elements including the virtual one-on-one mentorship and monthly cohort meetings are meant to fit easily within everyone’s schedules. We fully adopt a model of flexibility to ensure the program adds to – not detracts from – the crucial work you’re already doing.
Further, we work to ensure the Fellowship can provide a supportive environment and community for purposeful pauses and reflection that combat burnout, rather than contribute to it.
*Don’t work at a “voting organization” but still supporting voters in the U.S?
That totally qualifies! And feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions about eligibility.
More about Unstoppable Voters
Through the Center for Artistic Activism’s expansive Unstoppable Voters program, we support creatively risk-taking, strategic, ambitious organizations, people, and projects that address urgent and specific anti-voter attacks. We provide training and community building for individuals and groups who are passionate about protecting the freedom to vote and bringing the needed innovation to that fight. And we provide funding and support to help manifest that innovation and bring real, measurable impact. To date, we’ve helped over 100 organizations and over 1000 individual activists, artists, and everyone in between make voting accessible, safe, joyful, powerful, and irresistible.
Focuses and Values
We most want to support those who are in U.S. geographies and helping communities that face the highest barriers to voting. We support by meeting people where they are, bringing our expertise with artistic activism while knowing our partners understand what’s best to overcome anti-voter attacks and protect those they serve.
We understand creativity and activism expansively. The people we work with have no “typical” creative, artistic, or activist experience. No formal training of any kind is required or expected.
We collaborate best with people of any background who, like ourselves, value new approaches, imagination, joy, experimentation, rigorous evaluation, and the high rewards that can come when we take risks, center utopia, learn from iteration, and work and laugh hard together.
We are a 501c3 nonprofit, and the work we support cannot advocate for or against any candidate running for office or otherwise work to influence an election.
More about each Fellowship Phase
Phase 1 – Exploration and Strategizing (January-February)
Phase 1 is all about discovery and goal-setting. At its conclusion, Fellows will have identified and/or refined a key objective they want to tackle over the course of the Fellowship and built out an action plan for how to achieve it, creatively and effectively.
At the multi-day Fellow retreat in January (dates TBC), all Fellows will come together to be trained by the Center for Artistic Activism. Our trainers have taught thousands of activists around the world – and hundreds working to protect the freedom to vote here in the U.S. – on how to use the powers of art and creativity to make their advocacy have more impact.
This retreat will bring together opportunities for inspiration and play alongside practical professional development to:
- Help each Fellow brainstorm ambitious, innovative ways to advance voting work in the communities they serve;
- Define the goals, objectives, strategies, and audiences that will help make your civic engagement dreams a reality; and,
- Build a close community of voting champions from across the country.
Following the retreat, each fellow will continue honing your action plans supported by one-on-one mentorship with C4AA.
Phase 2 – Prototyping and Action (February-June)
In Phase 2, you’ll get your hands dirty and test and carry out your actions – joined by C4AA to help.
After the development of your action plans and timelines, Fellows will embark on a dedicated period of testing and prototyping. C4AA will share tried and true methods for evaluating and improving tactics to make sure your actions can maximize their impact and help you meet the objective you set at the start of the Fellowship. (Spoiler alert: some of these will take as little as 5 to 10 minutes.)
C4AA will join Fellows in your respective communities for an on-the ground workshop with your broader organizations and/or partners and to carry out an iteration of the action. While you’ll be running point on everything to do with your action, you’ll be able to tap into the years of experience C4AA has carrying out similar actions in the U.S. and around the world, gain a few extra hands, and have support in orienting your partners to the power of your artistic action.
Phase 3 – Iteration and Integration (June-November)
You did it! You carried out a successful action, the Primaries are over, and you’ve reached Phase 3. With eyes on the demands of the rest of the election cycle, Fellows will craft a plan to help carry forward creativity and innovation through the 2024 election and beyond.
The actions Fellows undertake are just the beginning – a way to practice and embody new ways of thinking and doing your work, while making an impact. To keep these learnings fresh and continue building your new skill sets, you’ll work with C4AA to develop a plan to evaluate, iterate, and infuse your work with these new approaches and ideas. Additional mentorship will be provided for the remainder of the Fellowship through November, on a schedule set by the Fellow.
Meet Past Unstoppable Voters Fellows
Here are profiles of just two of our incredible past Fellows
Aileen Loy
Céshia Elmore
Application
Complete this application by November 13. If you have any difficulty with the application, reach out to us and we’ll be happy to help.
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