This new article on HuffPo by Rob McKay just came out that highlights some of our cultural organizing work, particularly with musicians. This work centers around our mission to engage young people and people on the margins, and our experience that the best way to engage is to connect to them through culture, give them ownership over their activism, and support the heck out of them.

Our work with musicians is just a part of this. We're working with a colleague who is also featured in this article, Eli Lee from New Mexico, on an experiment to invite young New Mexicans to the table—literally and figuratively--and provide them the space, tools and support to use their talents and extensive social networks to inspire and engage others around the themes of opportunity, sustainability and the future of the state. Collectively, these activities can jumpstart the cultural conditions necessary for significant political change to happen.

I sometimes talk about this work that we are creating the cultural conditions for change...that like a wildfire, where a lighting strike or errant cigarette will set afire only if the conditions are dry enough and there is enough material to burn, change only happens when conditions are right. We're working to make those conditions right...In New Mexico, in the music communities across the country and beyond.

I gave a speech last month to a group of funders in which I talked about how cultural strategies for engaging people in causes and civic life is not bottom-up as we often like to say in the nonprofit sector, but rather bottom-out.

It is peer-to-peer, and spreads horizontally first, rather than vertically. Of course, it has vertical effects as well--just look at how presidential campaigns have begun to incorporate web 2.0 tactics.