Biscuits & Banjos is a new festival debuting in 2025. Curated by GRAMMY & Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens, the new festival is dedicated to the celebration and exploration of Black music, art and culture in her home state of North Carolina. Biscuits & Banjos is a 3-day festival to exchange ideas, expand conversations, uplift traditions, and trace the musical and geographical connections of old time, country, Americana, folk, jazz and blues to highlight their complicated origins.
The Once & Future Sounds Fund works to improve equity in the music industry by elevating artists from historically marginalized and exploited groups. The Fund will launch two signature programs — The Once & Future Laureate Program and the Once & Future Festival — over the next three years.
We Are North Nashville is a two-year multimedia storytelling project. Led by artist, author, activist, and community organizer M. Simone Boyd, with the support of Andrea Tudhope and Steve Haruch, the project has a goal to gather, document, and share wisdom and sacred knowledge from North Nashville community elders to fortify us for the uncertain future ahead. The project will also redistribute wealth via resources raised for the project to community members.
Your Song, founded by songwriter and music therapist Kyshona Armstrong, is a collaborative songwriting program that connects performing arts centers, musicians, and artists with vulnerable communities to promote healing and community connectedness.
Missy Lane's Charitable Foundation is on a mission to expand the audience for jazz and improvised music. With a primary goal of educating, preserving, presenting, and promoting all forms of jazz as an American art form, Missy Lane’s is based in Durham, North Carolina.
Unmanageable is the Fiscal Sponsor and Co-Producer of the annual Rancho La Puerta Artist Retreat and Folk Festival in Tecate, Mexico, which includes a wealth of collaborative concerts, artists talks, and spontaneous performances, sharing the power of folk music traditions while focusing on diversity, collaboration and the dissolution of boundaries through creative exchange. Along with Producer, artist and visionary, Amber Rubarth, we are honored to share the beauty and healing power of the Ranch with retreat artists.
Bread & Roses Collaborative will partner with Song Confessional and Boom! Lawyered will partner with local and national abortion funds to collect abortion stories. Our emphasis will be on those individuals who have sought reproductive healthcare, along with people whose partners have had abortions, and those who work in the reproductive justice movement. We will interview and include local reproductive justice advocates and musicians in every location. Boom! Lawyered will complete a deep dive into how we got here, alongside long-form journalism that tells the story of abortion in America today. Song Confessional will produce an album with songwriters and artists from across the country, turning abortion stories collected into songs that support abortion funds in perpetuity. In 2025, we will complete a tour, hosting public and private salons in select cities, screening a short film, and hosting benefit concerts to support and uplift local abortion funds. An educational web series, storytelling training, advocacy toolkit, and impact campaign will accompany the project, collecting donations for abortion funds. Sale of the short film will benefit abortion funds nationwide.
Directed by Daisy Friedman, The Squad is a short documentary which explores the impact of a medical mystery, the failures and successes of the American medical system, and a unique community that has formed in its wake.
Lovers is a narrative feature film created by writer/director Taylor McFadden. She is known for her award winning short film Loose Ends, experimental films, and music videos. Taylor is passionate about the intersection of music and storytelling, and the film Lovers is a convergence of these two worlds. The story is told from the unique perspective of female artists and musicians, emphasizing the importance of friendship and the value of community. The film touches on suicide and addiction that so often permeates creative culture, with the hope of bringing awareness about the importance of mental health in artistic communities.
* The Women’s Wisdom Circle (July 2024 - June 2025)- a bimonthly collective summit of female-identifying Nashville-based artists, activists and community leaders which centers the open sharing of everyday wisdom that women and non-binary voices lean on to imagine and create a more loving, compassionate world
* Anna Roberts-Gevalt’s Sick Center (2024-2025)- a multi-dimensional project imagining a fictional library and archive created by sick artists throughout history with resources designed to encourage contemporary sick artists to continue to create
* The Light & Sound Convening (Fall 2024) - a convening of artist and activist mothers in Tennessee to share resources, networks, and knowledge over the course of a facilitated 3-day retreat
Founded by internationally recognized musician, songwriter and producer Amber Rubarth, Cover Crop Music provides community offerings to nourish and deepen people's connection with their local environments through song and story in an immersive experience.