Guiding Principles

The following principles guide CCI's decision-making and priorities. But they are more than policy; they are the fundamental rationale for CCI’s service:

• Inclusiveness and Diversity: CCI is committed to inclusion as the diversity of artists, their practices, and variety of cultural expressions contribute to a richly textured and meaningful human experience. These values are reflected in our operations and governance, and infuse the types of services we offer, the openness of our guidelines, and our outreach efforts.
• Egalitarian: CCI is a keystone entity in the support structure for individual artists. In this role, CCI believes in providing opportunities to all types of artists, creative entrepreneurs, cultural producers, independent designers, and arts workers, without privileging any one kind of artistic practice over another. CCI also strives to expand opportunities for all, particularly those who have been overlooked or marginalized by conventional funding, financing, and investment support systems.
• Knowledge and Creativity: CCI combines empirically based knowledge with creative strategies. These principles infuse our partnerships and the design of all our programs, and are what compels CCI’s commissioning of primary research and the incubation of innovative approaches to support the creative workforce.
• Community and Partnerships: CCI cannot accomplish our mission alone. We prioritize partnerships based on sound knowledge, creativity, and a spirit of collaboration to generate products and services as well as improve living and working conditions that enable artists, of the broadest definition, to realize financial self determination, which unfetters their productivity and impacts.

CCI realizes our principles by:

• Providing funding opportunities and services to as many artists and arts workers as possible. We aim to use open application processes (versus nominations-based), set prices for our workshops and classes at affordable levels to encourage broad participation, and avoid pre-selecting participants for our services based on resumes, recommendations, or perceived standing in the field.
• Creating and advocating for opportunities for those who feel they have been marginalized by the formal arts system, including individuals in the arts whose pay and benefits are not enough to realize creative self-determination.
• Incubating projects that are values-aligned. This means, CCI is working to improve the conditions of: individuals, those who have been marginalized by conventional support systems, and arts and culture communities outside of already-infrastructured urban hubs.