vision keepers
Our Board of Directors
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history
BLAC
In the summer of 2020 during the depths of the pandemic, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, two projects to reshape the Bay Area arts ecosystem crashed into each other and the idea for BLACspace Cooperative was born. Zakiya Harris was working on ArtsWeb, a funder-led initiative that aimed to match arts organizations with capacity-building consultants, and Anna Shneiderman was working on Reimagining Business Models in the Arts (RBMA), a research project on cooperative arts business models. Both leaders had been active in the Oakland arts and culture organizing ecosystem for decades, with multiple art-production, organization-creation, space-holding, and coalition-building projects under their belts. They connected in the CultureBank fellowship and realized that their trajectories and visions aligned deeply.
When a convening of 30+ arts leaders hosted by the RBMA project imploded around issues of trust, clarity of purpose and racial tensions, Zakiya & Anna gathered a circle of leaders of some of Oakland's most respected anchor Black cultural organizations to ask the question:
What would it take to cultivate an ecosystem where Black cultural groups not only survive but thrive?
This circle became the Vision Keepers, and over the following years, they engaged in an ongoing dialogue around their dreams, pain points, and possible solutions. This conversation was not always easy, and often the group did not agree. Issues of trust emerged and capacity was always a challenge, but the group stuck together, testing out several different theories of change. The Vision Keepers all agreed on one thing: they envisioned a thriving network that would nurture Oakland’s Black arts and culture ecosystem, and they knew that the way to get there was through cooperation.
From this vision, BLACspace Cooperative was born. It was incorporated as a California Cooperative Corporation at the end of 2022 and received seed funding from the Mellon, Rainin and Zellerbach foundations. In 2023, staff was hired and both tactical and relational infrastructure were built, and in 2024, the membership model and program was created and pilot projects were implemented to test out the model.
Like mycelium weaving through fertile soil, BLACspace connects, sustains, and amplifies the vibrant network of Black cultural groups in Oakland. It offers a foundation for collaboration, storytelling, and collective healing, rooted in the principles of mutual aid and shared growth.
"We, as a collective community, recognized that we were at a critical moment, and we could leverage the opportunity of the pandemic and the uprising toward a cultural reset."
– Zakiya Harris, BLACspace Co-Founder, and Cultural Architect
Members of the Artist As First Responder collective reading BLATANT zine. Oakland CA 2025 by Sasha Kelley