Cool Culture

Each year, more than 50,000 New York City families use Cool Culture’s Family Pass to visit 90 different cultural institutions throughout the city for free. Behind that access is a mission 25 years in the making: to ensure that families of color and low-income families feel welcome in the city’s museums, gardens, and cultural centers.

Cool Culture emerged in 1999 when children’s educator and former NYC Commissioner of Head Start, Edwina Meyers, noticed the disconnect between cultural institutions and the families they were serving.

“Our belief is that bias comes from a lack of relationship and knowing other people,” said Cool Culture’s Executive Director, Candice Anderson. “Our approach is really to build strong relationships between educators, schools, and with families, being the most important.”

Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, Cool Culture has grown from Meyers’ small pilot program into an organization that helps tens of thousands of families access cultural resources every year. Cool Culture works with young students from 450 Early Childhood Centers and Title I schools to provide free access to museums, science centers, gardens, and zoos. Last year, 83 percent of participating families identified as people of color, and nearly half spoke a primary language other than English.

“We exist to ensure that families of color and families with low income have access to the cultural resources that all people need to thrive,” said Anderson.

For Cool Culture, their mission isn’t just about expanding access to cultural institutions. It’s about what access to art can do for individuals’ well-being; it’s about helping people connect with their identity and build their cultural competence.

“We really believe that families, individuals, and communities need arts and cultural celebration as a way to express themselves, and to ground themselves in what’s valuable to them and their culture,” said Anderson.

Through their events and programs, the organization provides children with opportunities to explore and gain a deeper understanding of the world around them. Sometimes that means handing them small cameras to capture moments of beauty in their neighborhoods, and other times it means letting them dig in the dirt at the Botanical Gardens—connecting the herbs they see growing in the ground with the ingredients they recognize in the kitchen.

With funding from Brooklyn Org, Cool Culture has been able to bring this vision to life. “It is just incredible to be able to say that we’re supported by Brooklyn Org,” said Anderson. “It gives us the freedom to feel like we have funding that sustains the organization and allows us to dream about and build depth through current projects.”

One of these projects includes Cool Culture clubs, which families requested after years of participating in guided programs, asking, “What’s next?” With training and curriculum support from Cool Culture, these clubs allow families to lead visits to art museums, gardens, and zoos in their own neighborhoods by themselves. By providing families with the tools they need, Cool Culture has empowered them to create community, while also fostering leadership and activism.

Another new initiative helping to empower families is the Parent Power Project for Cultural Equity. In Bed-Stuy, Cool Culture is working with parents to remember what their neighborhood’s cultural life looked like before gentrification — and to envision a more abundant future. Through interviews, mapping, and community research, families are building a policy agenda to bring equity to the forefront of the city’s cultural plan.

“Year after year, it’s been frustrating to see the distribution of cultural funding skewed towards folks who are affluent,” Anderson said.

“With our Parent Power Project, we’re working with families in Bed-Stuy to imagine what a culturally abundant neighborhood looks like, and to get equity back on the city’s agenda.”

In dreaming about future projects, Cool Culture also wants to put arts and culture at the fingertips of families with a digital app. In addition to giving families easy access to events and programming for their children, the app would create a feedback loop for families to share their museum experiences — from stroller access to staff interactions to the representation they see on the walls.

“Often it’s the affluent who are valued most by museums, but with some additional visibility into how people of color are really viewing their institutions, museums can flip the dynamic of who is most valued,” Anderson explained.

With support from partners like Brooklyn Org, Cool Culture is ensuring that every family can see themselves reflected in New York City’s cultural life and is helping to shape a more equitable cultural future for the next generation.

This story was written by Casey Glickman.