Support Cultural Organizing in Climate Justice Movements!

The Houston Climate Justice Museum is a community art museum and cultural center cultivating decolonial imagination and collective transformation for the climate justice movement through participatory art-making, cultural storytelling, and critical design.

Deeply rooted in the Gulf South, HCJM advances art as a meaningful, essential tool to politicize, activate, and deepen our collective understandings of climate justice to help people embed fossil-free practices into their daily lives. Ultimately, we believe arts and culture can lead to collective shifts in our ways of living with the earth and more than human beings.

Since starting in 2021, HCJM has worked with dozens of community partners and local artists to highlight the diverse realities of climate injustice, with a track record of platforming primarily artists of color and LGBTQ+ artists to reflect the disparate impacts of the climate emergency. In that time, we have received project-based grants to support our Northeast Greenways, Neighbor-to-Neighbor, Creosote Stories Oral Histories, and other specific community programs. But, like many nonprofits, we are in the difficult position of spending our limited operating support on the programs that truly advance our mission and fulfill our commitments to grassroots communities.

A list of programs that we have self-funded from our operating funds include:

• Organizer-in-Residence program
• Artist-in-Community program
• Free the Land Print Lab including printers & materials
• Cane River Gardens heat mitigation & site improvements
• Skill-shares and popular education at Cane River Gardens
• Climate justice research for upcoming exhibitions
• Participation in ongoing grassroots organizing

We can't sustain these activities without your support.

As federal agencies are cracking down on climate justice groups, our funders have significantly scaled back their support for grassroots climate justice work. On top of that, we do not take money from fossil fuel or other extractive industries. In Houston, funders whose power comes directly from fossil fuel industries accounts for a majority of available arts and culture funding, leaving us with few options. All of this means that your support helps keep our work independent and accountable to our community.

This giving season, we are asking for your support to meet an initial fundraising goal of $15,000 to cover a portion of our staff time and general operating funds to bridge gaps for 2027 self-funded projects.