The Center for Art and Public Life has hosted the Impact Awards each year giving the students an opportunity to receive funding and mentorship for their impact project.

The Center for Art and Public Life invites CCA students to apply for the 2026 Impact Awards, an annual opportunity to receive funding, mentorship, and support for bold, justice driven creative projects.

This year’s theme Designing Tomorrow, Disrupting Today recognizes that shaping a more just and livable world requires both radical imagination and immediate action. We live in a time of converging crises: climate collapse, widening inequality, technological acceleration, displacement, and threats to basic human rights. But within this uncertainty lies an opportunity: to use creative practice not just to respond but to reimagine and reconfigure what’s possible.

We’re seeking proposals that ask hard questions and offer hopeful, courageous interventions. What systems need to be dismantled? What futures can be co-created through art, design, and community-led experimentation? How can your work intervene in today’s broken structures while charting new paths forward?

Proposals may address issues such as abolition and restorative justice, Indigenous sovereignty, climate futures, algorithmic bias, queer and trans liberation, housing justice, collective healing, or any other area where your creative practice meets urgent social need. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches and projects at any stage of development (from early concept to community) collaborative implementation.

Whether your work lives in a gallery, the streets, the screen, or the classroom, the Impact Awards are here to help you deepen your process, connect with mentors, and make meaningful change.

Let’s build the future - together, and now.

2026 Award Opportunities:

Community Impact Recipient of $10,000

Exceptional Innovator Recipient of $5,000

Outstanding Startup Recipient of $2,500

2026 Impact Awards Upcoming Events:

April 10th Workshop for Finalist

April 17th Impact Juror Interviews

April 21st Impact Award Finalist Announced

The Bay Area has long been one of the world's most vital hubs for artists, designers, and makers, and CCA has been a cornerstone of that community for over a century. The closure of our school is just one piece of a larger trend that is destabilizing generations of artists and designers. However, even prior to its announced closure, the community at CCA has been experiencing fractures—department silos and bureaucratic barriers that have kept students, faculty, and alumni from truly connecting across disciplines. Our goal is to strengthen our corner of the art and design world, so that those connections can ripple outward, reclaiming space and reversing the trend of decline. We must lay the groundwork now so that when CCA closes next year, an independent community infrastructure is securely in place and we are well prepared to thrive. Our proposed approach is two-fold. First, we have formed Third Space—a club dedicated to bringing disciplines together through intentional, in-person gatherings to make and learn together. Second, we are building CCAConnect—an independent digital home for alumni and faculty to share events, discover each other's work, and keep in touch via a community Discord. To help ground our community in our shared history, we have built an immersive, interactive archive experience drawing on the library's CCA/C collection as well as a living archive where community members can share memories of their time at CCA. Now is the time to create what’s next for our community.

This project expands an initiative that places Harm Reduction Boxes and resources directly into environments where overdoses are happening like bars, music venues, and community gathering spaces. The boxes use design as direct intervention, empowering people to act in critical moments and ultimately help save lives. To date, I have installed 22 harm reduction boxes across San Francisco. Each box contains Narcan, fentanyl test strips, and clear, accessible instructions, making it possible for anyone to respond in an emergency, not just trained professionals. By placing these tools in visible, shared spaces, it shifts harm reduction from something usually hidden into something collective and immediate. The boxes are designed as a beacon for conversation and make life-saving resources feel accessible and reassuring. More importantly, Narcan from these boxes has been used to reverse overdoses, demonstrating their critical potential. Coverage from KQED highlighted my story, “There to Save a Life” and the growing need for accessible interventions like this in everyday social environments. Demand for the box continues to grow, with over 20 additional establishments currently requesting installations. Funding will support building more boxes while continuing to expand access to more essential resources in our community spaces. Additional support will also allow for key improvements, including more durable materials, new partnerships, and development of a compact version adaptable to a wider range in third spaces. I look

Love Lives in SF, is a public arts non-profit rooted in accessibility, and radical kindness, using free, public art programming to strengthen local communities and revitalize the streets of San Francisco spotlighting civic pride and engagement. Love Lives in SF celebrates the resilience, joy, and care rooted in San Francisco's diverse communities, and in response to rising national hostility toward queer, trans, and immigrant populations, the campaign uses participatory art, storytelling, and community partnerships to amplify messages of love, civic pride, and radical joy.

LLSF programming amplifies the talent of local artists connecting them with their community and fostering spaces for creative community-engagement, hosting free creative workshops including screen-printing, clay sculpting, paper craft, corn-husk bouquet making, henna, Film Festivals, Art Walks, and more!

LLSF partners with local businesses, government offices, local artists, schools, local clubs, teachers, non-profits, galleries, and more to prove that creativity is essential to a vibrant thriving community and honor San Francisco’s legacy as a creative haven for artists and marginalized communities.

Echarse Flores arises from the need for accessible Latino art healing spaces in the Bay Area, focusing on community building and connection through crafting with native crops. This project is a living art-healing initiative that activates public and Latino-centered art spaces. By making culturally rooted crafts accessible, I teach Latinos of all ages how to create flowers from corn husks—a crop native to Latin America with deep roots in Latin cuisine and culture.

Participants are encouraged to give their flowers to someone or contribute them to a collaborative sculpture built from flowers crafted in the Bay Area.

The Echarse Flores project aims to serve the Bay Area, where demand for these workshops continues to grow from an urgent need for free art programs for Latinos, especially as we witness our communities and spaces disappearing. Everyone deserves their flowers, and we create them in uniquely meaningful ways.

My series of workshops has collaborated with Et Al. Gallery, California College Of The Arts Exhibitions, Union Square Alliance, Love Lives In San Francisco, Sterne School Middle, Leonard R. Flynn Elementary, The San Jose Museum Of Quilts and Textiles, and Berkeley Frontera Student Organization.

The generational impact of anti-immigration policies in the Bay Area underscores the urgency of sustaining spaces where families and friends can gather, teach, and learn from one another. My workshops have already served and empowered my local community, and with adequate resources and funding, I aim to continue and expand this initiative to sustain these vital healing art spaces.

Iʼm Sofia Nuñez-Morales and this project is important to me because it promotes the body's ability to heal itself, allowing my loved ones and me to embrace life fully. My sister has Multiple Sclerosis MS, her diagnosis came too late to recover full mobility. She is one of over 15 million Americans diagnosed with an autoimmune conditions² — 63% of them women. The best bet for people with autoimmune conditions is prevention of inflammation worsening and exciting research that links autoimmune detection to gut microbiome dysregulation¹ could help with prevention of countless autoimmune conditions. Autoimmune diagnosis takes 3 months to years, which happened to my sister. Currently, no gut biome monitoring devices exist in clinical use — leaving patients without any way of detecting conditions early. My teammate Ashna Damani and I have conducted primary and secondary research with patients and clinical practitioners to understand this gap. We present Gutsy, a brand that uses sensors to expand understanding of the gut microbiome in real time. The gut is crucial to autoimmune inflammation. Gutsy empowers people to act — with or without expensive care. We are exploring wearables and at-home testing devices that translate bio-fluids like flatulence, saliva, and sweat into actionable guidance: what foods, stressors, and exposures are triggering inflammation — making that insight continuous, affordable, and realtime. With CAPL support, we will develop our first working prototype and deepen my technical research through hands-on computational and hardware education.

Porikathamo (Infrastructure), is an ongoing collaborative Nakshi-Kantha quilt sculpture that honors the 1,138 lives lost in the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse due to a structural failure and unsafe working conditions. The memorial, made of embroideries by women from my ancestral village in Jashore, Bangladesh, my family in Southern California, and my local community, reflects on the Bangladeshi garment industry, which is 80% women. In 2025, the United States imported 8.2 billion dollars’ worth of Bangladeshi textiles making it our shared responsibility to understand the cultural histories and labor behind them. Sections of the quilt are composed of embroideries sent to me by the women, into which I stitch the names of those who died in the collapse. The remaining Nakshi Kantha embroideries are created in community workshops across California. Originating in rural Bengal, Nakshi Kantha quilts were traditionally made by mothers during the monsoon season to protect their children from the cold and evil eye. Teaching this practice honors the textile identity behind the garments that supply much of our clothing. In each workshop, participants embroider a flower placed along the quilt’s hem, echoing the act of laying flowers at a memorial. Through this process, we collectively mourn lives lost using a protective, traditional craft. I plan to expand this project by creating a second memorial dedicated to the 2025 Mirpur garment factory fire. Through collaboration, I will continue community workshops and support a micro economy in my village through commissioned embroideries that bridge the gap between laborer and consumer.

Get Home Safe is a community-informed safety companion for women walking alone in urban environments. While most navigation platforms are built to optimize speed and convenience, they overlook a quieter, more urgent reality: the invisible choreography of risk that women perform every day. Which street is lit? Which block still feels alive? Which shortcut is worth the uncertainty? Too often, safety is left to instinct, intuition, and luck. Drawing from public data such as crime incident reports, streetlight outage logs, and time-based environmental conditions, Get Home Safe reimagines navigation through the lens of care. Instead of simply offering the fastest route, it generates route confidence scores that help users choose the path that feels safer, more visible, and more supported. The system extends beyond mapping alone, pairing route guidance with discreet protective features such as a live call simulator, silent SOS access, and a community reporting layer where users can anonymously mark unsafe conditions, recurring harassment zones, or broken infrastructure. Over time, these contributions form a living map of collective safety knowledge. At its core, this project responds to a structural imbalance: women are expected to adapt to unsafe public space rather than public space adapting to women’s safety. Get Home Safe reframes safety as a civic right, not a private burden. In the spirit of Designing Tomorrow, Disrupting Today, it offers both an immediate intervention and a longer vision, imagining cities where navigation is shaped not only by efficiency, but by dignity, visibility, and collective care.

Air is the most personal thing in your life. It is inside your body right now, in your office, your bedroom, your commute which is shaping your HRV, accelerating cellular aging, triggering inflammation, and disrupting your recovery. And yet it is entirely unmeasured by every health product that exists today.

Ether is the first air intelligence platform designed at the intersection of biometric science and public sensemaking. EtherSense, our wearable device, acts as a sensory bridge, reading biometrics (HRV, SpO₂, skin temperature) alongside environmental signals (PM2.5, CO₂, VOCs, pollen) in real time.

We believe that data alone is noise; it requires the clarity of art to drive change. EtherOS fuses both data streams into a single Environmental Coherence Score — personalized to your biology, not a population average. Ether, our AI agent, captures what the air is doing to your body right now and prescribes a specific action: open the window, move the run indoors, activate the purifier. Not a prediction of tomorrow. A decision for right now. We are targeting California first — a state where 90% of residents breathe unhealthy air annually, where wildfire seasons have made air anxiety visceral, and our vision extends beyond the individual. By empowering the world's most health-literate consumers to track their air, we are building a bottom-up map of environmental health.

Ether sits at the unclaimed intersection of three markets: biohacking ($202B by2035), preventive health technology, and climate health. We are not competing inside an existing category. We are creating one — ‘air biohacking’ — and naming it before anyone else can.

Our near star: give individuals the tool to be proactive about their air.

Our north star: a world where no one suffers a health outcome that cleaner, smarter air could have prevented.

The fashion and textile industry produces staggering amounts of waste while exploiting labor and natural resources across the globe. Most of what gets discarded, including millions of yards of high-quality cotton bed linens cycled out of hotels every year, ends up in landfills or is exported overseas to be burned or dumped. The recycling options that do exist are resourceintensive, breaking fabrics down into raw fiber before rebuilding them from scratch. We believe there is a better way. Sova is a design-driven venture that repurposes discarded hotel linens into premium handcrafted bags. We source 100% cotton sheets that hotels discard after as little as four to six months of use — material that is still high quality, uniform, and abundant. Rather than breaking this fabric down, we work with it as it is: cutting, layering, dyeing, and quilting multiple sheets together into structured, expressive pieces where the material's history becomes part of the design. Our layered construction technique was born from necessity, single sheets aren't strong enough for bags, but evolved into a signature aesthetic where texture, depth, and material variation are celebrated rather than hidden. Each bag carries the story of its transformation. This project is grounded in three months of research including interviews with over a dozen industry experts, five collaborative design sessions with potential customers, consumer surveys, prototyping, and financial modeling. We have secured our first hotel supplier in San Francisco and are preparing to produce our first bags in the coming weeks. Sova is not just building a product. We are building a proof of concept for a more just and intentional way of making things, using design to turn a broken system into a beautiful one.

The CAPL Impact Awards celebrates creativity in advocating for equality, human rights, and social justice, especially in a time when personal freedoms are at risk. With the shifting political climate surrounding the U.S. Presidential election, activism alone may not be enough to drive change. Now, more than ever, we need new, innovative ways to cultivate empathy and understanding for differences and address urgent social issues. This year, we are looking for student projects that explore these challenges through social health design, including but not limited to gender equity, LGBTQ+ inclusivity, transgender rights, disability rights, and immigrant inclusion.

We seek art, design, and social entrepreneurship projects that fosters change, sparks dialogue, and promotes empathy to contribute to the well-being and harmony of society. Does your project tackle one of these key issues? Is it created to inspire action and provoke meaningful change? Whether through visual art, design, interactive projects, or digital media, we welcome all creative forms that promote knowledge, perspective, and understanding.

The Impact Awards offer an opportunity to further develop projects with support through funding, feedback, and mentorship. Whether you have identified a community partner or are just beginning with an idea, we are here to help you grow your idea. Apply for mentorship, brainstorming sessions, and partnership opportunities today. Help shape a more compassionate world where creativity fuels lasting impact.

Soft Matter is a design intervention aimed at rethinking the way materials can foster empathy, comfort, and human agency. By repurposing materials, including packaging beans, bubble wrap, scrap foam, and other waste materials, this project challenges the conventional, rigid design practices that often shape public spaces. Through soft, tactile elements, Soft Matter seeks to create environments that promote emotional well-being and inclusivity, encouraging individuals to form deeper connections with their surroundings. The project will feature a range of soft interventions, such as seating installations, cushions, and public art pieces, each designed to be interactive and inviting. These objects will evoke comfort and warmth, providing a stark contrast to the harsh, often impersonal nature of typical urban design. The use of recycled materials highlights sustainability, transforming waste into purposeful, inclusive design elements that prioritize comfort and connection. By reimagining materials as tools for human interaction, Soft Matter redefines public spaces as places of emotional engagement, where the design encourages reflection and personal connection. The ultimate goal is to create public environments that place empathy, human agency, and inclusivity at their core, sparking conversations about the potential of design to cultivate a more compassionate and just world.

Last year, a self-portrait project became an unexpected journey of self-discovery and radical acceptance. What began as an exploration of the relationship between myself and the camera evolved into profound personal transformation and an essay in Art Journal Open reflecting on the process. Now, I wish to share this powerful experience with others. I am seeking funding to extend this opportunity to Black women of diverse backgrounds, ages, and body types. Eleven participants across the United States—ranging from mid-30s to 80s—will form the inaugural workshop cohort. Each participant will receive a Polaroid camera, five packs of black and white film, self-portraiture tips, and reflective prompts. The process involves participants working through each film pack by specific deadlines, followed by group reflection sessions. This cycle repeats five times, fostering both personal exploration and community building. Upon completion, I'll conduct individual interviews, help select images for publishing, and facilitate a final group reflection. My previous work, Black in Denver, demonstrates my commitment to social practice projects centered on selfhood and community. This initiative feels particularly timely especially in light of the rise in authoritarianism and our current political climate. The enthusiastic response from participants to this project also confirms its resonance. Funding will support the pilot program, necessary supplies, artist sustenance, and lay groundwork for future cohorts and safe spaces where Black women can challenge limiting narratives and embrace self-love. While potentially culminating in a book or exhibition, the project's primary focus remains personal transformation and empowerment within a communal setting.

Non Alien Box is a mobile public art project that reclaims decommissioned newspaper boxes across San Francisco to share absurd, often invisible stories of non alien residents navigating the U.S. job market. Drawing from lived experience, the project exposes labor inequities shaped by visa restrictions—low wages, prolonged internships, and narrow employment paths—and uses humor and design to spark public reflection. Building on its first installation, Non Alien Box is an ever expanding project which includes an ongoing collection of stories and the creation of custom-designed “job ads” for those in need. Through collaborative workshops, we continue to help individuals from immigrant and precarious labor communities translate their personal stories into visual language, then distribute them via transformed newspaper boxes. Each box serves as a decentralized platform for underrepresented voices. It is an art object in gallery settings. It also is a functional, camouflaged communication tool in public space. As we gradually occupying more sites, this project will weave a visible network of presence, survival, and belonging across the urban landscape.