Compton Foundation Art as a Strategy for Change

The Compton Foundation supports the arts, including individual artists and filmmakers, with the explicit intention of amplifying critical issues in a way that blends the personal, political, emotional, and intellectual. It makes these grants based on a recently updated mission statement that recognizes “courageous storytelling” as a powerful strategy for “inspiring action toward a peaceful, just, sustainable future.” The family foundation, launched in 1949 and long focused on issues of peace, the environment, and women’s reproductive rights and justice, awards up to $3.5 million a year from its $60 million endowment. In the arts, this includes grants ranging from $35,000 to $50,000 to advocacy organizations that integrate the arts into their work and to artists making art that illustrates, activates, and advances the foundation’s key concerns. The foundation also makes equity investments in films that envision and promote change.