Equity & Inclusion

CHF practice area leaders, ambassadors, and subject matter experts comprise a wide range of gender identifications, ethnicities, age groups, life experiences, perspectives, and social and economic backgrounds. This is an organic reality that underscores how creative intelligence and creative entrepreneurship are embedded in our shared humanity. Art reaches every sector of the human population and inspires all of us.

In keeping with the notion of patronage, not parentage, CHF's programming is shaped largely by the aspirational input and practical feedback of its constituents. Artists and creative professionals not only give us the raw insights for producing leaning programs that serve them; these creative entrepreneurs serve on our board, operate as subject matter experts, and facilitate communities of peers under CHF's flag. It's an inductive, grass-roots approach in which those we intend to thrive create the conditions under which they actually do.

The creative class has long been marginalized from the traditional role as cultural leaders to one of dependency and mere entertainment value. Artists are routinely offered education that omits the essential professional and business training their peers in other professions take for granted and without which they cannot succeed personally and financially. They are excluded, frequently, from the decision-making processes on which we all depend and which benefit, precisely, from infusions of creative intelligence. We turn this model on its head, restoring artists to a central cultural role while empowering them to be self-sufficient individuals redolent of personal and professional dignity and abundance. CHF removes the contrived and artificial barriers between creative professionals and other professionals, creative entrepreneurs and other entrepreneurs, art-businesses and other business, so that artists are ascendent to full participation in our shared economic system, cultural context. We reconnect the mutually complimentary opportunities for creative expression and prosperity.

Our core team members, including executives and members of our board, are themselves entrepreneurs and business leaders from all walks of life—creators, investors, working across multiple sectors to ensure the constructive ingenuity that shapes verdant lives and thriving communities is leveraged on behalf of a full expression of culture.

A crucial tool for advancing underrepresented categories of creators is something we term 'pivotal projects'. Whether or not a given project has an explicit demographic focus (this is up to the artist's particular vision), we encourage and help creative professionals structure, pitch, and gain investment support for projects that simultaneously advance their own careers and demonstrate to the culture at large the benefit of supporting artists who, without sufficient investment in the form of education, tools, connections, and access are quieted voices in the cultural landscape. We equip creators to be as loud as they choose.

By supporting CHF's programs and/or collaborating with us across localities, demographic groupings, creative professions, and cultural missions, we unite in producing a more just, equitably, and inclusive cultural conversation. CHF is a cornerstone, but culture is pivotal. CHF is a mission, but art and a robust cultural context filled with it is the point. Mobilizing champions, ambassadors, and creative professionals toward a more innovative world and human experience enables us to be impactful in our mission. That, in turn, also makes the surrounding cultural context more reflective and attuned to the people we serve and with whom we partner. We continue to reflect, challenge, and push to create a better organizational context that is stronger because of equity and inclusion and contributes to social justice by demonstrating that commitment.