FELLOW SPOTLIGHT: SUNNY ALLIS
Artwork from All Together Now!
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, and then spends 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, Sunny Allis. Sunny is using their fellowship to develop a gender-inclusive, multimedia kid’s TV show and organize an art and storytelling workshop in Western Massachusetts for queer and trans youth with the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth / Safe Schools Program.
The Advocacy & Organizing Fellowship is possible thanks to support from the Barr Foundation.
REFLECTION FROM SUNNY:
All Together Now! is a gender-inclusive, multimedia kid’s TV show I am currently developing. It’s
about a neighborhood of people who share their stories, skills and resources with each other to
create community projects out of recycled materials. All Together Now! shows a diverse,
gender-expansive community of people living authentic, joyful lives, while teaching kids how to
build their own projects with repurposed materials–empowering them to imagine and build the
world they want to live in.
All Together Now! can be a vehicle for advocacy and policy development that supports queer
and trans youth in relationship to the arts. It can help start conversations amongst teachers,
state officials, and families as a step towards building an ecosystem in Massachusetts schools
and communities that are safer and more gender-inclusive, while centering creativity and
imaginative world-building. It can also help shift the culture around LGBTQ+ youth through
representation, developing greater empathy and understanding across the state.
I am organizing an art and storytelling workshop in Western Massachusetts for queer and trans
youth with the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth / Safe Schools Program. The Safe
Schools Program creates curriculum to help schools provide for LGBTQ-inclusive lessons.
These resources range from hour-long discussions to multi-day lessons, and will help students
value the contributions of LGBTQ people and understand their place in history, literature, and
other fields. The goal of the workshop will be to create and develop stories and artwork by queer
and trans youth that can be turned into animated segments on All Together Now! These
segments can uplift the voices of queer and trans youth, helping to create greater
representation.
The MASSCreative Advocacy & Organizing Fellowship has given me several foundational tools
to think strategically about my project from a policy standpoint. Learning about coalition building
has been particularly inspiring for me in considering the expansive directions my project can
take through different partnerships. It has also been very inspiring to be part of such a dynamic,
supportive cohort of creatives working across a variety of important topics. I am learning from all
of them in addition to the workshops, and feel grateful to be in community with them.
Stay Connected:
Instagram: @allis.sunny
Website: sunnyallis.com
