FELLOW SPOTLIGHT: COCO ROSENBERG
2024-2025 Advocacy & Organizing Fellows at Creative Sector Day at the State House.
The Advocacy & Organizing Fellowship is a stipended, year-long advocacy leadership development cohort for artivists, creative workers, and emerging cultural leaders to gain the advocacy capacity necessary to achieve an equitable, inclusive, and vibrant creative sector for all in Massachusetts.
Each fellow identifies a cultural policy or creative community issue that they are passionate about changing through grassroots organizing and political advocacy, before spending their fellowship year working with MASSCreative staff and trainers to incubate strategies to shift these issues.
MASSCreative is proud to feature 2024-2025 Advocacy & Organizing Fellow, coco rosenberg. coco is using their fellowship to conceptualize a Youth Cultural Advisory Council in Massachusetts.
The Advocacy & Organizing Fellowship is possible thanks to support from the Barr Foundation.
REFLECTION FROM COCO:
As a young person, I was deeply shaped by spaces that invited me to be creative, to vision, to engage with the world, and to connect with others. Those early experiences instilled in me a lifelong belief that the arts and spaces for youth and community voices are essential to building the world we dream of. Drawing inspiration from Robin D. G. Kelley’s ideas of Freedom Dreaming and bell hooks’ framing of teaching as a practice of freedom, I have come to see my work as an artist and educator as part of a larger commitment to collective radical imagination and liberation. Over the years, whether in classrooms, studios, or community spaces, I’ve sought to create environments where creativity, belonging, and bold visioning flourish. Entering this fellowship, I was curious about how to weave together my skills in facilitation, curriculum design, and community building with my passion for intergenerational creativity and public art.
Policy work has always intimidated me. For over 15 years, I’ve been involved in community organizing and mutual aid- supporting campaigns, helping at marches as a marshal or legal observer, and building ritual spaces for resistance and care. Yet I rarely found myself stepping directly into the realm of policy: giving testimony, shaping campaigns, or addressing systems head-on. The complexity of processes, the language, the pace of change within systems, and the weight of it all often felt overwhelming. The MASSCreative Advocacy & Organizing Fellowship has been a bridge for me—a way to connect what I already know and love with the tools and confidence to move into new territory. It has allowed me to imagine not only how I can support campaigns, but also how I might initiate and carry forward projects that tie cultural work directly to advocacy. While I may not become a policymaker myself, I have deepened my understanding of the systems that shape our communities and how to leverage that knowledge for change
Through the fellowship, I have begun shaping a vision for a Youth Cultural Advisory Council. While it centers youth, it is also rooted in my deep belief in intergenerational community input. As someone who also works with elders, I know that the most vibrant public cultural life is built with the richness of our communities' wisdom across age, ability, and identity. My vision for the Council is threefold: a cohort experience that builds the skills and leadership of young people; a mechanism for youth and communities to have a seat at the table with the Boston Arts Commission; and a space for collective play, participation, and dreaming about what our public spaces can be.
I am still in the early stages of shaping this program, in a time when our communities are facing ongoing uncertainty and change, often tied to shifting policies and cultural priorities. But I am hopeful. In the months ahead, I plan to host listening sessions and hands-on workshops that invite community members to share their dreams and co-create what this initiative might become. I believe deeply that a better world is on its way and that it is one that we are building together. This fellowship has given me tools, connections, and courage to step into that work, and I am grateful to be part of a community of brilliant, passionate creatives who are also carrying their visions forward. My hope is that, through this project, I can contribute one small piece toward making more space for all of our voices to shape the cultural future of Boston together.
Stay Connected:
Website: cocorosenberg.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/corine-rosenberg-ed-m-367b2989
Instagram: @justcocohere
