Partnership for the Public Good and Unai Reglero received an Artist Employment Program grant from Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY), to launch “Creativity To The People”, a creative advocacy agency.

Unai will host this agency inside PPG for the next two years to amplify and make more visible community-based projects and advocacy campaigns. Unai will offer creative services to PPG’s large network of partner organizations—applying arts and design, marketing, and narrative work to their collective policy change goals.  

As Art and Cultural Organizer, Unai will focus on three areas of work: 

1) Advising partners on how to advance their Community Agenda Campaigns with diverse creative and storytelling strategies;

2) Offering “creative first aid”—creative consulting services—directly to partner organizations and community groups, on how to improve their communication strategies and develop visual communication pieces on urgent projects; and

3) Sharing expertise by leading workshops on how to use non-extractive storytelling in advocacy, communicate ideas visually, and translate policy work and advocacy goals into engaging public materials.

Unai is a Spanish visual artist, art director, graphic designer, and cultural organizer, based in Buffalo, New York since 2019. He worked in advertising agencies and his own graphic design and communication studio before founding CaldodeCultivo in 2006, an art collective that creates socially and politically engaged projects which are always context-specific. Their work has amplified the struggles of those who fight for social justice using different creative strategies, from public installation to film. Through CaldodeCultivo, Unai has developed many projects in cities in Europe and The Americas, including Bogota, Barcelona, Warsaw, Detroit, and Buffalo.

“We believe in the power of art and creativity to effect change and imagine new worlds, but we also know that to create meaningful transformations in society, art needs to center the communities and organizations that have been fighting injustice for years,” said artist Unai Reglero. “With Creativity To The People agency, we'll put the powerful instruments that art, advertisement, and creativity offer to the service of communities and organizations in order to amplify their work and widen their impact.”

“At Partnership for the Public Good, we have always believed that artists bring invaluable skills to policy campaigns and community change work,” said PPG Executive Director Andrea O Suilleabhain. “We are delighted that this grant allows us to employ Unai as a full-time artist-in-residence and design adviser. This will help PPG and our partners produce more accessible and engaging materials, broaden the reach of our work, and influence public discourse on key social issues in our region.” 

Designed to support employment opportunities for artists, the Artist Employment Program is funding 98 collaborations involving a dynamic group of 300 artists employed by community-based organizations, municipalities, and tribal governments across New York State. CRNY has awarded a total of $49.9M in funding to support artists’ salaries and benefits, with an additional $11.7M in funding provided to the organizations holding employment.

“If we are to truly rebuild our amazing state, we must celebrate artists’ contributions not only to the economy but to what makes us human,” said Creatives Rebuild New York Executive Director Sarah Calderon. “The incredible work being funded through CRNY’s Artist Employment Program underscores the importance of direct support for both individual artists and the organizations that hold their employment.”

Artist Employment Program recipients were selected through a two-stage process by a group of twenty external peer reviewers alongside CRNY staff. From an initial pool of over 2,700 written applications, 167 were shortlisted for interviews with reviewers. View the full list of 98 Artist Employment Program participants.

For more information about Creatives Rebuild New York’s Artist Employment Program, please visit their website. For more information about Partnership for the Public Good, please visit our website.