Wellness in Action is committed to promoting arts-based holistic and culturally appropriate approach to community mental health in which we create diverse strategies to enhance the quality of life of immigrant, refugee and indigenous communities. We do this through on-going collaboration with local artists with small funding opportunities and through community arts engagement activities.

Community arts installations and projects

For the past 3 years WiA has collaborated with local organizations and artists to create site specific art installations and cultural celebrations to honor the Bay Area Immigrant and Refugee community.  Some of our art projects include:
  • Beauty inside outside
  • Re: Start again
  • The Garden of Belonging
World Refugee and Immigrant Day 2019
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Arts & Wellness Mini-Funding opportunity

The Arts & Wellness mini-grants are a one-time funding opportunity of $450 created to increase awareness about mental health and wellness among immigrant, refugee, and indigenous communities living in the Bay Area, using the arts. 
Through this mini-grant we want to encourage emerging artists to:
  • Use your artistic skills with an option to involve your community members in the creation of an artistic piece that promotes mental health and wellness in your community. Visual arts, spoken word, music, dance and other creative, arts-based expressions and/or healing modalities will be considered.
  • Clearly demonstrate integration of arts and wellness in your project.
  • On at least one occasion, present and/or create art with the local community through workshops, presentations in classes, conferences, community gatherings, etc. 
  • Allow WiA to share your project design with other local community leaders and mental/behavioral health agencies, with appropriate credit to you  

Eligibility Criteria
In order to be eligible for this funding, please check that you meet all of the following criteria:
  1. Be an emerging artist.  An emerging artist is someone who is in the early stages of their career and is working to establish their reputation amongst different sectors of their field: critics, funders, buyers, audiences, galleries, etc.
  2. Be at least 18 years of age
  3. Identify as immigrant (or 1.5-2 generation), refugee or indigenous preferred
  4. Not currently funded by WiA to do the proposed work 
  5. Local to the Bay Area preferred
  6. Projects should be concluded before June 30th, 2020.
Interested? Submit your idea!