About

Supporting artists by cultivating their creativity and sharing their creations with the world.

To fulfill our mission, FreshGrass supports artists in two primary ways:

1. Cultivating creativity. We offer a variety of direct funding programs to assist artists in the creative process. These include grants, awards, commissions, residences at our newly-formed Human Imagination Institute (HII), and living wages from our Artists-at-Work (AAW) initiative. To date, we have funded hundreds of artists with over $3 million in direct gifts.

2. Sharing creations with the world. We operate our collective roots ecosystem that both provides a critical network of platforms connecting artists and fans and, more generally, amplifies many artistic voices that might otherwise have difficulty being heard. The ecosystem includes our Freshgrass festivals, the roots music quarterly journal and website No Depression, the streaming radio station Folk Alley, and Studio 9, a performance venue and state of the art recording studio featuring Meyer Sound Constellation and Space Map systems. When taken together, these businesses represent a formidable cultural community of over 2 million readers, listeners and/or customers, and an extended reach through social media of well over 7 million more people. 

Along with being an organization committed to supporting creativity, we also consider FreshGrass to be a form of creative expression in and of itself. As such, building on our own vision of a balanced society, we strive to connect what we do to the natural world and to the collective force by adhering to sustainability and equality in pursuit of our mission. We do this by following two essential principles:

1. Stay close to the earth. We are making our organization sustainable and carbon neutral and have begun a series of core initiatives to achieve this, including: eliminating single-use plastic at our festivals and events, and utilizing only compostable food products; producing merchandise that is only made from either recycled or certified organic materials; planting a tree for every attendee at each of our festivals (we now have a Freshgrass forest of over 17k trees strong and growing each year); printing all of our journals only with 100% recycled paper; and shipping all of our products using only compostable packaging. We will continue to expand these efforts as we evolve and grow.

2. Everybody in, nobody out. FreshGrass is committed to creating spaces for everyone and anyone to create and experience transformative art through amplifying the voices of artists making change in the world, locally, nationally, or internationally. Our goal is to continue to develop a diverse generation of creative artists and musicians whose perspectives will help to shape how art functions in society, as we move forward together into the exciting unknown of the future.