Projects, Initiatives, Partnerships that are for a time, but not forever
Creative Currents Peer Learning Fellowship In 2025 The Southwest Folklife Alliance was pleased to oversee the Creative Currents Peer Learning Fellows pilot program. This travel fellowship offered each awardee $6,500 in fellowship funds, $2,000 in travel support, and $1,000 for their peer learning partner. To ensure equal access, additional funds were available upon request for … Read more
The Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage is a research and educational unit of the Smithsonian Institution. They promote greater understanding and sustainability of cultural heritage across the United States and around the world through research, education, and community engagement.
Artists at Work (AAW) is a national initiative that provides artists in six cities including Tucson with an eighteen-month salary, health care, and professional support as they work alongside community organizations to address local needs through their art practice.
Beginning February 2026, SFA formally established a partnership with the UC Berkeley Disabled Ecologies Lab (DE Lab) to expand the fields of folklife and disability studies using Disability Justice principles as a core tool of analysis within already established cultural communities. The partnership is supported by a three-year Mellon Foundation grant establishing two DE Lab … Read more
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Leia Maahs, then Executive Director of the Southwest Folklife Alliance, surveyed heritage-based artists in Arizona about their immediate and long-term needs. Many said they needed a virtual marketplace and ways to increase their economic mobility. A pilot online market with 10 artists was launched during the Tucson Meet Yourself … Read more
SFA and TMY serve as a presenter of interactive educational content at the Children’s Day Festival (Día del Niño) and Vive el Grito! Mexican Independence Celebration, two Arizona Bilingual events.
This collaboration with the Smithsonian Foliklife Festival will present the Of the People Village at TMY’s October 2026 festival, featuring a Narrative & Dialogue Stage hosting facilitated civic conversations on work, culture, and belonging and Occupational Folklife Demonstrations.
Tucson Meet Yourself (TMY) is one of the longest consecutively running folklife festival in the nation and an immersive cultural experience — a free, three-day celebration held every October in downtown Tucson that has brought together the living traditional arts of Southern Arizona and the broader U.S.–Mexico border region since 1974.
SFA worked with Yaqui and Yoeme communities in Sonora and Arizona to explore connections between the cultivation and preparation of wheat and the tribe’s resiliency and cultural preservation. We assisted communities in developing a strategic plan for its economic recovery using oral histories, test planting sites, and artisanal cooking workshops.
Folklife PAR is SFA’s participatory action research methodology — a framework for community-led inquiry that brings a folklorist’s lens to the research process, centering the creative and expressive practices through which communities already make meaning together as both data and driver of change.