Strategy here is not just a document—it is a shared practice and compass that shapes how decisions are made every day.

This service area focuses on designing and implementing a strategy that is grounded in community, cultural equity, and real organizational conditions. It includes strategic planning intensives, board and governance development, facilitation of planning retreats and working sessions, and support for aligning programs, staffing, and resources with an organization’s purpose.

Who this is for & how it helps:

• Organizations looking to refresh or build updated strategic plans (organization-wide, program-specific, or across multiple focus areas) with community and staff at the center of the process.

• Helping Boards seeking to become more aligned, accountable, engaged, and equity-focused in their governance roles with their organizational staff and community partners.

• Leaders who need thought partnership and high-level strategic implementation support in turning big ideas and values into clear, actionable roadmaps.

Partners will gain sharper, shared direction; realistic, actionable plans; and governance practices that align with their publicly stated values. This support helps everyone move in the same direction, reduces confusion and burnout, and creates more space for abundance mindsets, creativity, experimentation, and care inside an organization.

This service area partners with funders, intermediaries, and collaboratives to design, co-lead, and facilitate arts and culture funding initiatives that are community-informed, accountable, and oriented toward long-term equitable futures for communities and constituents.

This may include grantee/stakeholder engagement; portfolio reviews and landscape analysis; program and initiative design; centering participatory, trust-based, and community-informed frameworks; leading learning and research projects; and facilitating convenings that bring grantees and funders into deeper conversation, solidarity, and relationship.

Who this is for & how it helps

• Foundations and intermediaries seeking to better support arts, culture, and community-based work through a truly equitable lens.

• Funders wanting to shift power in their processes and relationships.

• Collaboratives or networks looking to imagine and build new models for cultural investment and infrastructure building for social change and justice.

Partners benefit from clearer, equity-grounded strategies; practices that move resources closer to communities; and learning structures grounded in community knowledge and field-wide research that inform future decisions and strategies.

This work supports funders in becoming more transparent, relational, and responsive—helping cultural ecosystems not just survive, but shape the futures they want and deserve to live in.

This service area supports organizations navigating big moments of change - like senior leadership departures, organizational growth, restructures, or periods of instability. It includes fractional and interim executive leadership (in key areas such as strategy, narrative, or impact leadership) and carefully guided transition planning with boards and staff.

The focus is on stabilizing operations, strengthening organizational culture, and preparing a grounded transition for teams and communities as they prepare for what comes next.

Who this is for & how it helps

• Organizations facing an ED/CEO departure or planning one in the near (6-12 month timeframe) future.

• Arts, culture, and community organizations that need targeted and experienced fractional senior-level leadership but cannot yet sustain a full-time hire.

• Boards seeking a trusted partner to hold both day-to-day management and the longer view of transitional periods and goals.

Communitas offers a range of models that will consider budgetary challenges in the field while also compensating highly skilled labor equitably and appropriately.

Partners benefit from steady, values-aligned leadership that keeps work moving while slowing down enough to listen, repair, and redesign. This support helps teams feel held rather than abandoned, gives boards clarity and confidence, and creates conditions for new, permanent leadership to enter with a clearer mandate and a positive foundation to build on.

This service area centers Communitas’s work as a cultural producer and lab for implementing our work and values creatively by designing, curating, directing, and stewarding projects that bring together artists, cultural workers, and communities around shared themes, questions, and lines of creative and equitable inquiry.

It includes producing for residencies and festivals, co-creating performances and public programs, developing community-centered commissions, conducting oral history and documentation work, and building experimental spaces where narrative shifts and cultural organizing can thrive. Our focus is interdisciplinary, yet dedicated to making work that is rooted in community, honors lived experience, and pushes the imagination of what culture is and can be.

Who this is for & how it helps

• Organizations, collectives, and venues looking to co-produce projects, series, or programs that center queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities (QTBIPOC).

• Funders and partners seeking to seed or support new cultural initiatives, residencies, or narrative-shift projects with strong grounding in community practice.

• Artists and cultural workers interested in collaboration, co-curation, or shared producing structures.

Partners benefit from a producing ally who can hold vision, logistics, and relationships simultaneously - bridging institutions, artists, and communities. This support helps projects move from concept to reality with care, clarity, and integrity, creating cultural experiences that are deeply felt, publicly visible, and responsive.