Our open-license Climate Collection is LIVE!

We’re excited to announce that The Climate Collection – our unique open-license vault of illustrations on climate, launched together with TED Countdown – is now live! It features illustrations and digital artworks that showcase a hopeful climate future, or have a clear message around the urgency for actionable change.

The works have been selected as part of Artists for Climate – our open call that sought awe-inspiring digital illustrations, graphic design, lettering art, and typography targeting climate change. The illustrations focus on themes including conscious consumption, renewable sources of energy, protection of nature and species, and coexistence. 

The project received 2,222 submissions by 1,432 artists from 95 countries. The outstanding work of 50 Selected Artists has been chosen by the Artists for Climate’s esteemed jury panel, including visual artist and author, Oliver Jeffers; the founder of Goodtype, Brooke Robinson; the co-founder and Executive Director of TREEage, Shiv Soin; multidisciplinary artist Bahia Shahab; artist and designer Safwat Saleem, and other acclaimed creatives and experts. Together with the Selected Artists, the initiative also recognized 46 Finalists. In October 2021, Fine Acts will also announce a list of Honorable Mentions.

TED Countdown, a climate initiative powered by TED and Future Stewards to inspire and catalyze action around imaginative and scalable climate solutions, partnered with Fine Acts to curate а free library of artworks under a Creative Commons license to humanize the impacts of the climate crisis and showcase positive solutions. The open call urged artists to employ Fine Acts’ hope-based approach to build a new hopeful visual vocabulary around climate change that sparks climate action. 

The resulting Climate Collection is meant to serve as an invaluable resource and tool for non-profits, campaigners, and educators from around the world, working towards climate action. All works are published online under a Creative Commons license on TheGreats.co, our platform for free socially-engaged visuals, and are available for anyone to use and adapt non-commercially, to help shift the global narrative of the climate crisis towards a brighter future.

Visit artistsforclimate.org to browse the collection and put it into action.

Artists For Climate receives 2222 submissions

Illustration: Kissi Ussuki for Fine Acts

We're excited to announce that we received a record amount of submissions – a total of 2222 works by 1432 artists, submitted through our website form, and on Instagram! Thank you to all the talented artists who took part in our open call Artists For Climate, launched together with TED and Countdown – for digital illustrations, graphic design, lettering art and typography on climate change, with a focus on hope and solutions.

This has been a truly global call. Visual artists from over 95 countries joined Artists For Climate – from Burundi to the United Kingdom and Brazil to India. This amazing diversity is reflected in the artworks themselves – showcasing different cultures, diverse ways climate change is affecting us, and a multitude of ways we can act.

In August the jury will convene to review the submitted artworks. We will choose the 50 honorees, as well as the finalists whose works are selected to be included in the Climate collection on TheGreats.co. We’ll announce the results in September across all our channels, so stay tuned for updates: https://artistsforclimate.org/.

Our 2020 annual report is OUT!

We are so excited to share a digest of our finest acts yet. Click on the link bellow to see it.

2020 put us to the test, but amidst the crisis we found innovative directions that grew our artist and activist communities, as well as our creative arsenal for exacting change. From protest posters to animated videos of slam poetry, from urban art interventions for climate justice to art hackathons, from children’s books to online platforms for open visuals – we did it all.

In our busiest year yet, we produced artworks and campaigns that drove awareness and understanding, provoked empathy and sparked conversations. We played and experimented with new formats, taking us to places from Cairo to New York City, and from Vancouver to Seoul.

A BIG HUGE THANK YOU to everyone we’ve collaborated with – from the amazing artists to our trusted and brilliant partners, and most of all – to the Open Society Foundations and Sigrid Rausing Trust whose invaluable core support makes all our work possible.

A very special thank you to Punkt for designing the report and Oblik Studio for creating a digital experience like no other.

Launching Artists For Climate

EARTH TO ARTISTS: 👋❤️ Today, in collaboration with TED and TED Countdown, we are launching Artists For Climate – an open call for digital illustrations, graphic design, lettering art and typography, focused on climate change.

Together, we are building a unique collection of open-license art that inspires climate action. We are looking for awe-inspiring illustrations that depict a hopeful future around climate change. 

The top 50 illustrations, selected by our jury, will:

• Receive a $500 USD licensing fee

• Be featured on a global stage at the 2021 TED Countdown Summit in Edinburgh, and various TED conferences

• Gain exposure on TED and TED Countdown digital platforms, including social media channels, newsletters and blog pages

• Contribute to the broader goal of spreading awareness about climate action through your work by becoming part of this visual library, and by allowing TED, TED Countdown and Fine Acts to use your artwork to shape the climate conversation

• Be included on TheGreats.co, our free vault with carefully curated open socially engaged visual content intended to elevate art to help bring about social change.

In addition to new work, you may submit existing works that are not subject to exclusive rights and can be licensed based on our criteria. 

The 50 selected works will be published online under a Creative Commons license and available for non-commercial use. This collection of open-license art will serve as an invaluable resource and tool for activists, grassroots organizations and nonprofits to use in their campaigns about climate change awareness.

Visit artistsforclimate.org to learn more about the open call and how to submit your work. Submit by August 1 ❤️🌎
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Illustration: Sa6ettu for Fine Acts

We're Finalists in FC's 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards!

BIG NEWS! We’re super excited to announce that The Greats – Fine Acts’ platform for socially engaged visuals – was honoured as Finalist in Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Awards! We are one of just 4 Finalists in the Creativity category, amongst the largest number of entries ever received for the awards. 

TheGreats.co is the absolute go-to place for socially-engaged visual content. All available works are published under a specific open licence that allows free noncommercial use and adaptation, given the appropriate credit. It offers a solution to a key issue for the non-governmental sector – visual content is of grave importance for engaging support, however, often organizations lack the capacity and resources to create it. 

Since its launch last year, The Greats has become home to more than 750 artworks by 400 global artists. The works have been viewed more than 150 000 times and downloaded thousands of times. These are just a few examples of how different nonprofits have been using the illustrations:

• International Service for Human Rights

• National Coalition Deutschland

• Creative Commons’ Her Story series
  

Thank you to all of the hundreds of amazing artists that we’ve worked with over the past year, making all of this possible! We’re seeing a record number of activists use The Greats for their campaigns and initiatives, spreading a new vision for human rights.

2020 in review: Bringing hope to unchartered territory

2020 was like no other year we know. It was frightening, challenging, and overwhelming, but it was also uplifting, exhilarating and unifying, pushing us into new waters and territories. During this new stage, our community of artists and activists grew and so did our campaigns and actions. And even though we were confined to the walls of our very own homes for a greater part of the year, we felt that we travelled the world, working and carrying out meaningful initiatives in places from Cairo to New York City, and from Berlin to Seoul.

See our trends and highlights from last last year.

SPRING OF HOPE

Illustrations from our Spring of Hope campaign.

The pandemic upended our day-to-day personal and work lives. So to counter feelings of despair and anxiety, we launched Spring of Hope, our global open art campaign spreading hope. Hundreds of artists and creatives took part with powerful and uplifting illustrations, licensed under Creative Commons, that are free to print and share.

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BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT

Protest posters from our 12 Black artists, 24 protest posters campaign.

2020 protests on anti-Black racism and police brutality swept the United States and beyond. Our team supported the BLM movement and amplified important voices and messages through a number of art initiatives: 

12 BLACK ARTISTS | 24 PROTEST POSTERS: We collaborated with 12 Black typographers and lettering artists to create and release an open pack of 24 protest posters – all free to print and share, and ready to be unleashed into action. The posters made it to the March on Washington in August and were even projected onto the Brooklyn Bridge in NYC. Read more about our impact here.

POSTCARDS FROM FOREVER | For Postcards from Forever, our postcard writing campaign, we worked with prominent American photographers past and present in creating a powerful set of postcards that highlight the timelessness and perpetuity of anti-Black racism and police brutality in the U.S., while also creating a space where people can call on their legislators to work towards a more accountable and equitable future.

SURVIVING BLACKNESS | We teamed up with Lee Mokobe – an award-winning Black trans slam poet – on Surviving Blackness, a poem on systemic racism towards Black people. Injustice is not to be navigated, but to be fought. Watch our animated video.

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ARTISTS FOR COUNTDOWN

Featured artworks from our collaboration with TED Countdown.

Art can change climate change. In October 2020, we launched our global art action in collaboration with Countdown – TED’s global initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. We worked with a group of prominent TED Fellows artists to create ten public artworks in ten cities around the world - from Cairo to NYC and from Vancouver to Dallas, to bring the issue of climate change closer to home. Fine Acts curated and produced the collection. See all the artworks.

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THEGREATS.CO

In 2020, we revealed TheGreats.co, our new and unique platform for free socially engaged illustrations. It is the absolute go-to place for socially-engaged visual content - whether you want to use it, or donate it. Works (already over 500 of them) are published under a specific Creative Commons licence that allows free noncommercial use and adaptation, given the appropriate credit. 

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HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Illustrations from our Reimagining Human Rights campaign.

According to Amnesty International, 2020 has brought human rights to the fore of public debate. However, to be truly effective, we need to redefine how we speak about human rights. The future of human rights must be hopeful. When we only show the abuses, people start to believe that we live in a world of crisis with no alternative. Browse some of the campaigns we launched this year that tackle human rights’ image as a whole, or focus on specific issues.

REIMAGINING HUMAN RIGHTS | We launched Reimagining Human Rights, our campaign in partnership with hope-based comms, to challenge creatives everywhere on reimagining how we envision human rights. We were blown away by a wave of amazing submissions. Hundreds of organizations and activists used these visuals for Human Rights Day (Dec 10), and beyond.

VAGINA MATTERS | We released Vagina Matters, our illustrated sex education book for girls, in October. The book, initially the target of a smear campaign launched by a far-right political party in government, has been read over 75,000 times on our website, and reached women and girls all across Bulgaria. It will also be launched in the UK in 2021 in partnership with Your Daye and Brook.

LOVE SPEECH | A popular study states that looking into a stranger’s eyes for four minutes can bring you closer. Dozens of social experiments over the years have proven this claim. We decided to test it too - but with a twist. Watch our video that became instantly viral in social media, and see what happens when people meet and hear the stories of LGBT people, Roma people and POC. 

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As featured in

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A heartfelt thank you to all our donors and patrons for making this work possible. 

Uplifting Black artists’ voices

In response to the killing of George Floyd that set off mass protests across the United States, we collaborated with 12 Black typographers and lettering artists to create and release an open pack of 24 protest posters in June 2020 – all free to print and share, and ready to be unleashed into action in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

The project was widely covered by media outlets, including Mashable, Culture Type, Design Taxi. The campaign is still ongoing, and the posters are being used in protests and widely shared online, reaching over 200 000 people. Through a series of collaborations, Fine Acts also made it possible for the posters to be sent as postcards, projected on buildings, and turned into gifs, further amplifying the project’s impact. 

In the first of our collaborations, we joined forces with Congress cards, a platform where you can customize and mail real postcards to your representatives about the causes you care about. We published a selection of our posters in the form of postcards in support of the #BLM movement. Anyone can pick a card, write a message, and send it to your representative. For every card sent, $1 will be donated to the NAACP Legal Fund. 

In preparation for the March on Washington on August 28, 2020, together with our artist crew, we promoted our protest pack as an awesome resource tool for the demonstration that drew hundreds of thousands. The posters are published under a Creative Commons license, which means that they can be directly used, adapted or printed for free for noncommercial use. During the March, we were on the ground giving out hundreds of posters to amplify the message of the protest. 

People used social media to urge others to spread the word about our protest poster set to be used in local protests across the country. Supporters shared their printed posters with us.

We also teamed up with Into Action, a movement of designers, illustrators, animators and artists building cultural momentum around civic engagement and the issues affecting our country and world. They transformed our powerful protest pack into a set of gifs that can easily be found on Giphy’s platform through keywords such as “black lives matter”, “protest”, “justice” and “blm”. Not only that, they can directly be used on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

We collaborated with Projection in Protest, a group that projects images to transform spaces and inspire change. They lit up the Brooklyn bridge with a projection of Hust Wilson’s poster “Black Lives Matter” in July in solidarity with ongoing protests at the time.

Not only that, we also joined forces with Kosan, a company that produces ethical travel gear and clothes. We worked with them to produce a human rights apparel collection that features the amazing work of five of the talented Black artists we had a chance to work with on the protest pack. 100% of the profits from their sales goes towards a human rights cause. Besides being featured, each artist got to select which organization to donate the proceeds to. Among the chosen organizations were National Urban League, the largest historic civil rights and urban advocacy group, devoted to empowering communities, Know Your Rights Camp, a free campaign for youth founded by Colin Kaepernick, an American football quarterback and civil rights activist, Build Power, an organization that engages athletes and entertainers to use their platform to advance radical social change, and Black Lives Matters in Nashville.

Thank you to all the 12 artists we teamed up with: Adrian Meadows, Agyei Archer, David Jon Walker, Edinah, Emmanuel Wisdom, Eso Tolson, Gia Graham, Hust Wilson, Jean Carlos Garcia, Kevin Adams, Leandro Assis and Rick Griffith.

We’re launching Vagina Matters in two countries this fall

Illustration: Borislava Karadzhova (Borislava Madeit) and Mihaela Karadzhova (Stalker 1993) for Fine Acts

After much anticipation, we’re announcing the expected release of Vagina Matters, our illustrated sex education book for girls, this fall. The book was created by us at Fine Acts, and backed by close to 200 people in over 20 countries from across the globe in our Indiegogo campaign that we launched last May. 

And, we are launching in two countries simultaneously – Bulgaria, and the United Kingdom!

Vagina Matters covers everything from periods, vaginal health and STIs, to body positivity, sex, LGBTQ+ issues, and even self-exploration and masturbation. It aims to close the sex education gap in Bulgaria and beyond. It is the first illustrated sex ed book for girls in Bulgaria – a country that completely lacks sexual health education classes as part of the approved curriculum and, along with Romania, has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in the EU. 

1500 free print copies will be distributed in Bulgaria together with our partners Loveguide.org, the largest online platform for sexual education in the country, and the Bulgarian Fund for Women network. The book will also be available for free (in the form of a PDF) on the Vagina Matters website already in September. 

Vagina Matters is an open book, created with the idea to make it available for publishing in different languages and contexts. “We’re set on encouraging a culture of curiosity and openness around sexual health issues that are so crucial to growing up and understanding ourselves. For this reason, the book will be published under an open license, empowering anyone anywhere to translate it into their language,” says Svetla Baeva, Campaigns Director at Fine Acts and co-author of the book. 

In the first such collaboration, Fine Acts partnered with Daye, the gynae health innovator, and the UK's leading sexual health and wellbeing charity for young people, Brook, to publish the English edition of the book in the UK in November. The book will be available for free (in the form of a PDF) on Daye’s site, and in print for an affordable sum, to be fully donated to uplift women’s rights worldwide. 

“It is crucial that we empower our young people to understand their bodies as this allows them to become their own health advocates," says Ndidi Edozie-Ansah, Education and Wellbeing Manager at Brook. 

Vagina Matters is a project and a publication by Fine Acts. It is authored by Svetla Baeva, our Campaigns Director and activist Raya Raeva, and illustrated by two sister artists Borislava Karadzova (Borislava Madeit) and Mihaela Karadzova (Stalker 1993).

One month since we launched Surviving Blackness

In July 2020, we collaborated with award-winning Black trans poet and LGBTQ activist Lee Mokobe on Surviving Blackness – a spoken word poem and video calling for support of Black Lives Matter. 

In a continuous commitment to amplify Black artists’ voices, for the video Fine Acts used fonts by Vocal Type — a protest type foundry uplifting creatives of colour. 

@LeeMokobe – an award-winning #blacktrans slam poet and #LGBTQ activist - teamed up with @fine_acts'
Pavel Kounchev, a former Columbia @ObamaFoundation Scholar, to create "Surviving Blackness" a dynamic video with a powerful message. https://t.co/v8QCQcqeBm

— ColumbiaSchoolofArts (@ColumbiaSOA) July 16, 2020

Surviving Blackness – stirring spoken-word poem by slam poet, trans man of color, and #TEDFellow @LeeMokobe, commissioned by @Fine_Acts, a mighty force of art-driven justice in this world https://t.co/BXQsQ9dyCq

— Maria Popova (@brainpicker) July 29, 2020

The project was launched in mid-July, and already has over 50 000 views across platforms. It was widely shared by Black and Trans activists alike. 

Injustice is not to be navigated, but to be fought. I encourage you to not just listen, but HEAR 'Surviving Blackness', a spoken word poem by Lee Mokobe (@LeeMokobe) for Fine Acts (@fine_acts). https://t.co/kNAZMx4yaM

— Peppermint (@Peppermint247) July 27, 2020

We’ve got a lot of love for this poem by Lee Mokobe:
Surviving Blackness:https://t.co/pN2eCA0MPA@fine_acts#BlackTransLivesMatter

— Trans Actual (@TransActualUK) July 24, 2020

This Black trans poet just released a powerful poem on anti-Black racism

Today we released Surviving Blackness – a powerful spoken word poem on anti-Black racism. 

For this piece, we teamed up with Lee Mokobe – an award-winning Black trans slam poet and LGBTQ activist. The poem and kinetic typography video can be viewed at https://fineacts.co/surviving-blackness. 

Lee Mokobe, referencing to their experience as a Black transgender immigrant, speaks of the entrenched racism in the United States: “You who fashions nooses and makes us wear it like it is our birthright. [...] You who make Black parents teach us guidelines on how to survive.” They share their unapologetic set of survival skills developed over the years, sounding the empowering call to action to stand up and live.

“I have experienced racism intimately as a black person. Even more so as a transgender person and African. This piece is my own sort of lamentation towards the problems we face as a community and as individuals. It was to look at myself in the mirror and ask what do I want this world to look like for black people and how do we get there. I am constantly surviving my skin in a world that has the power to give me my human rights, without clauses and prejudice. It is to ask the world to do better by bettering ourselves,” says Lee Mokobe. 

People across the world have taken to the streets, calling for systemic change and an end to anti-Black racism and racial injustice. We wanted to bring a piece that both stems from the movement, and has the power to rally and uplift it. So we turned to the spoken word, an art form historically connected to the civil rights movement. We believe in the power of art to ignite and transform, and we are committed to producing works that matter, and to amplifying Black artists’ voices, which serve to inspire and point the way forward. 

Last month, we commissioned 12 Black typographers and lettering artists from around the world to create an open pack of 24 protest posters – all free to print and share, and ready to be used in action in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. The posters can be previewed and downloaded here: https://fineacts.co/blm

Need hope? Use our free inspirational artworks in your work!

In April 2020, we launched the global art campaign SPRING OF HOPE as a response to the acute necessity of hope and positive messages amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. The campaign included commissioned works, as well as an open global call, and engaged more than 80 artists from over 30 countries. It resulted in over 100 works - all free to use, share and adapt. It was featured widely by media outlets such as Mashable and It’s Nice That, and endorsed by global organizations such as TED, The Obama Foundation and Creative Commons. 

The campaign reached millions online, and engaged tens of thousands; the illustrations were used by dozens of organizations to promote their own work on social media; several books and reports also used the images, e.g the latest report by Oxfam on Narrative Power used 10 of the illustrations as their main visual components.

In June, one of the artworks served as an inspiration to South Korean composer Lee Sung Gyu to compose a music piece, played daily for a week on a local radio show. Romanian organization ArtLink included a selection of 20 of the artworks in their AR exhibition. 

Many people reached out with images of the artworks being printed as posters and postcards and distributed in different cities in Europe. 

We invited 12 Black artists to create an open pack of 24 protest posters

We teamed up with 12 Black typographers and lettering artists from around the world on an open pack of 24 protest posters  – all free to print and share, and ready to be used in action in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

The featured artists are Adrian Meadows, Agyei Archer, David Jon Walker, Edinah, Emmanuel Wisdom, Eso Tolson, Gia Graham, Hust Wilson, Jean Carlos Garcia, Kevin Adams, Leandro Assis, and Rick Griffith, who represent the US, the UK, South Africa, Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Dominican Republic. 

12 Black artists – one for each month of the year with deliberate violence inflicted on Black people by the state. 24 black-and-white posters – one for each hour of the day with systemic anti-Black racism.

All works, commissioned specifically for the campaign, are free to print and share – they are published under a Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC-BY-NC-SA) and are available for free noncommercial use and adaptation – given the appropriate credit.

We urge people to take the posters to the streets, place them around their neighborhoods, put them on their windows, or send them to friends and loved ones. 

“Whether it be for the lives of Black transgendered people being murdered, for Black lives being murdered by police, or for Black people being constantly oppressed by systemic racism, there’s a lot of causes worth fighting for right now. I wanted to make a piece that resonated enough contextually for each cause, but general enough to communicate the overall mandate: THIS HAS TO STOP”, says Memphis-based artist Eso Tolson. 

“We live in an era where police officers can kill innocent civilians, walk away and still get paid. The system is broken and the bloated budgets need to be re-evaluated”, says Atlanta-based artist Gia Graham. 

While all posters are free, we ask allies to donate to one of the fundraisers listed here: www.ally.wiki. 

Fine Acts Annual Report for 2019 is Out!

We are happy to share what we have been working on in the past year. Girls and boys, it was a handful!

Props to the artists we worked with, our partners and donors for their incredible support, our patrons and our friends. It was a good year!

We have so much in the oven for 2020. Buckle up!

So here it is - the report.

access the interactive report here: report2019.fineacts.co

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The project "New forms of transparency and community engagement" is implemented with the financial support of Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway under the EEA Financial Mechanism. The main goal of the project "New forms of transparency and community engagement" is to increase the capacity of the Fine Acts Foundation, as well as the civil sector in Bulgaria.

This material was created with the financial support of the Active Citizens Fund Bulgaria under the Financial Mechanism of the European Economic Area. Fine Acts Foundation bears the entire responsibility for its content and it can be assumed under no circumstances that this material reflects the official opinion of the Financial Mechanism of the European Economic Area and the Operator of the Active Citizens Fund Bulgaria.

More about Active Citizens Fund Bulgaria: https://www.activecitizensfund.bg/

We are recognized in FC’s World Changing Ideas Awards - again!

We are thrilled to announce that our open platform for free socially engaged art has been recognized in Fast Company's 2020 World Changing Ideas Awards.

TheGreats.co (previously known as TheAmmo.org) has been selected as an honorable mention in the Creativity category of the awards. We've been chosen from a pool of over 3000 global entries.

Illustration: Aleksandra Georgieva (Sa6ettu) for Fine Acts

Until now, The Greats has been functioning in its early beta stage, and we are launching a fully functioning platform next month that will feature hundreds of free artworks (on topics such as women's rights, LGBT rights, freedom of expression & more). Our platform is unique as it allows not just open use, but also free noncommercial adaptation by nonprofits and activists. Stay tuned for more, by signing up for our newsletter!

This is the third time that Fine Acts has been recognized in the World Changing Ideas Awards - we were selected as Finalists in 2017 with The Future (on armed conflict, with Alicia Eggert and Safwat Saleem), and in 2019 with Project Light (on avoidable blindness, with Peek Vision).

About the awards: World Changing Ideas is one of Fast Company’s major annual awards programs and is focused on social good, seeking to elevate finished products and brave concepts that make the world better. 

Calling all creatives: Join our global art campaign on hope

Today, more than anything, humanity needs hope. And art is the most powerful way to nurture it. That’s why we teamed up with 50 artists from 20 countries around the world on our global art campaign on hope.

Our new campaign – called Spring of Hope – shares one powerful and uplifting illustration per day, every day, until the end of May –– https://fineacts.co/hope.

All works, commissioned specifically for the campaign, are published under a Creative Commons License and are free to print, share and adapt non-commercially – for anyone who needs a dose of hope in these trying times.

The participating artists by far represent 20 countries – from India to South Africa, and from Bulgaria to Colombia, and include prominent names such as UK-based Kyle Platts, Barcelona-based Rozalina Burkova and NYC-based Amber Vittoria.

The campaign that started as an invite-only initiative, today opens for submissions to creatives worldwide. We just issued a call to artists around the world to create and share new artworks that give people hope during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

If you would like to participate, please drop your email here, and we’ll be in touch. 

Next month, we will publish these and hundreds of other works on their upcoming platform for free socially engaged art, that will also allow noncommercial adaptation by nonprofits and activists. Stay tuned for more info!

For Spring of Hope, Fine Acts partnered with hope-based comms, a new global initiative for change-makers who want to modernise the way nonprofits talk, based on the idea that people need hope if they are to engage in social change activism or have empathy for others. 

All participating artists were asked to read for inspiration the guide on hope based communications that looks at hope as a strategy for social change.

Both we and hope-based believe that exercising creativity is one of the most effective ways to make people empowered and hopeful, which is an important counter to the feelings of anxiety and powerlessness that can come with life under lockdown. 

Oh, and the campaign has already been featured in Mashable and shared by the Obama Foundation!

Our fourth SPRINTS marks 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall

Illustration: Ena Jurov for Fine Acts

12 artists from 12 European countries took part in our international SPRINTS to redraw the notions of democracy and freedom as we see them today, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Тhe illustrations depict both the progress and challenges facing even long-standing democracies.

Pictures: Mihail Novakov

All creative works produced during SPRINTS are shown at our dedicated pop-up exhibitions, and then made available online through a Creative Commons license on TheAmmo.org, allowing activists and nonprofits from around the world to use them to make their work or campaigns more visible.

Throughout history the intersection between art and activism has played a crucial role in various social movements by spreading the word and igniting people to action. Visual content continues to be of utmost importance for giving visibility and engaging support, and the foundry helps nonprofits that lack the capacity and resources to create it.

The artists who teamed up for this project are Anja Slibar (SLOVENIA), Anna Katalin Lovrity (HUNGARY), Boris Pramatarov (BULGARIA), Ena Jurov (CROATIA), Ján Vajsábel (SLOVAKIA), Juste Urbonavičiūtė a.k.a Kissi Ussuki (LITHUANIA), Maya Sumbadze (GEORGIA), Nvard Yerkanian (ARMENIA), Paul Virlan (ROMANIA), Stefan Mosebach (GERMANY), Varvara Perekrest (UKRAINE) and Zane Zlemesa (LATVIA). See all their works here.

Download the zine with all developed works here.

The fourth edition of SPRINTS was supported by the US Embassy in Bulgaria and Goethe-Institut Bulgarien, with the general support of Open Society Foundations and Sigrid Rausing Trust.

Our third SPRINTS tackles freedom of expression

Artwork by Atanas Giew for Fine Acts

In less than a year, we’ve organized three editions of SPRINTS, our weekend-long creative bootcamp exploring the intersection of human rights and visual arts. It is part of Fine Acts' laboratories for human rights innovation and is fuelled by our concept of #playtivisim – the need for multidisciplinary play in activism.

In this edition, we gave 11 artists 48 hours to take a hard look at the topic of freedom of expression, focusing on press freedom, hate speech and trust in the media. 

Photos: Radina Gancheva

In SPRINTS, visual artists produce artworks, that range from posters and postcards to GIFs and videos. Take a look at the latest batch of works here.

All creative works produced during SPRINTS are  shown at our dedicated pop-up exhibitions, and then made available online through a Creative Commons license on TheAmmo.org, allowing activists and nonprofits from around the world to use them to make their work or campaigns more visible. Powerful visual content not only drives coverage but also fosters empathy and pushes engagement.

Artists who participated in SPRINTS 3.0:

Aleksandra Georgieva, Atanas Giew, Daniela Yankova, Ilian Iliev, Ivaylo Nedkov, Jana Dobreva, Kostadin Kokalanov, Mila Lozanova, Rositsa Raleva, Teodor Georgiev, Vasil Germanov.

The third edition of SPRINTS was supported by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation Southeast Europe, Goethe-Institut, with the general support of Open Society Foundations. The event would also not be possible without the Association of European Journalists, Cohones Beer, Trastena Wines, Skaptobara, TimeHeroes, and our hosts at KO-OP and Cosmos Coworking Camp.

We launch our second SPRINTS on LGBTQ+ issues

Photo: Mihail Novakov

We ended May with a bang with our second edition of SPRINTS, a weekend-long creative bootcamp exploring the intersection of human rights and visual arts. It’s part of our Fine Acts Laboratories where we play and experiment with how we can improve our human rights talk. 

SPRINTS 2.0 focused on LGBT+ rights, specifically exploring issues around homophobia and coming out (see exhibition gallery). We will hold more thematic events by the end of 2019 on issues covering freedom of speech and more.

Photo: Yana Lozeva

Photo: Mihail Novakov

Powerful visual content not only drives coverage but also fosters empathy and pushes engagement. But NGOs and activists often lack the capacity and resources to make their work or campaigns visible. SPRINTS supports campaigners across the world with compelling visual works that can be used and adapted.

In SPRINTS, visual artists have just 48 hours to produce artworks that range from posters and postcards to GIFs and videos. The works are then presented at a pop-up exhibition and made available online on The Ammo, our free vault with carefully curated socially engaged visual content, open to anyone to use or adapt non commercially.

Participants in SPRINTS 2.0:

Radina Gancheva, Vesselina Nikolaeva – photographers; Sevda Semer – visual artist; Aglika Spassova, Yasen Zgurovski, Teo Georgiev, Teodor Genov – illustrators; Ilian Iliev, Viktoria Nesheva – graphic designers; Elizaveta Angelova  – typographer; Zhelez Atanasov and Vladi Gerasimov – videomakers.

The second edition of Fine Acts Sprints would not be possible without our partners Friedrich Naumann Foundation Southeast Europe and the general support of Open Society Foundations. The event was also supported by GLAS Foundation, Cosmos Coworking Camp, TimeHeroes, Trastena Wines, Finlandia Vodka, Ailyak Beer.

We launch a crowdfunding campaign for Vagina Matters

To mark the International Day of Action on Women's Health, Fine Acts launches a fundraising campaign to create the first illustrated book on sexual health for girls in Bulgaria.

All children in Bulgaria suffer from the lack of sexual education - according to data released by the Ombudsman of the Republic of Bulgaria in 2017, only 10% of the schools have such classes. Bulgaria, together with Romania, has the highest rates of unwanted pregnancies among girls aged 15-19 in the EU (sources: WHO, UNPD).

The female body, menstruation, sex and sexual health issues continue to be taboo topics in Bulgaria. The Vagina Matters book explores important topics like the body and women’s attitudes towards it, menstruation, sex, sexual health, and much more. It provides information in an easy to understand way, using illustrations created by the artists Borislava Karadzhova (Borislava Willnevermadeit) and Mihaela Karadzhova (Stalker Since 1993).

The book breaks down harmful myths and stereotypes, offers practical advice and encourages girls to be curious about their own bodies and talk about sexual health issues.

Anyone can support the book through our campaign on Indiegogo, an international platform for raising artistic and entrepreneurial initiatives. The amount collected will cover the cost of publishing and the book’s distribution.

More info here: www.vaginamatters.org

Our global ACT Labs kick off at New York City

Credit: Ian Douglas

ACT Labs x NYC kicked off in May by the New York Live Arts, a movement-focused arts organization, Fine Acts and the National Alliance of Mental Illness.

Eight pairs of carefully selected and matched fellows, an artist and a technologist, took part in the hack-art-thon to prototype projects that raise awareness or contribute to a concrete solution for Breaking The Stigma around Mental Health Problems.

According to a 2016 survey conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly one in five U.S. adults lives with a mental illness. This number doesn’t include those of who work in the military, are under age, incarcerated, or homeless. Often, these are the communities that are the most disproportionately affected. The stigma surrounding mental illness often prevents us from seeking the help we may need, or from reaching out to someone we know to be suffering. Removing the stigma and the layers of silence that surround mental illness is urgent and important.

The winning team will receive $5000 in grant funding to continue developing the project. Other prizes include year-long mentorship and support, artist residencies, opportunities to present their work and more.

Find out more the project ideas at actlabs.co. Interested in running your own ACT Labs? Wondering how to use art and tech for solving human rights issues? Apply now!