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Purpose Pathways Program: Cultureworker Development
The Purpose Pathways Program is URE’s cultureworker development program, creating pathways for Black Trans and Gender Nonconforming (BTGNC) artists, organizers, and creative practitioners to access paid project-based work through contract opportunities while developing the skills, relationships, and experience needed to build toward sustainable careers.
Purpose Pathways is designed especially for BTGNC cultureworkers who enter production and creative work as working professionals who may not have access to traditional internships, apprenticeships, or early-career opportunities often connected to college and academic pathways. Rather than requiring people to step away from professional life to “gain experience,” the program creates opportunities to earn, learn, and build simultaneously through meaningful, paid, project-based work.
We believe people should run systems; systems should not run people. Too often, creative workers are expected to adapt themselves to rigid systems, perform unpaid labor to gain experience, or choose between meaningful work and economic sustainability. Collective Wisdom creates another pathway by recognizing the expertise people already carry through creative practice, organizing, lived experience, community relationships, and everyday problem-solving.
Creating Pathways for BTGNC Cultureworkers to Build Purpose-Driven Work
How It Works
URE connects BTGNC cultureworkers with paid commissions that align with their skills, interests, experience, and aspirations. Current commission opportunities include:
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Creative & Cultural: Events, workshops, theatre and event production, community programming, project development.
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Organizational Strategy: Strategic plans and program design
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Communications: Organizational strategic communications plans, communications and marketing support, social media strategy development and execution.
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Digital: Website strategy, web design, and UX development.
We look beyond traditional job titles to identify transferable skills. A poet may bring storytelling and communications expertise; an organizer may bring project management and partnership skills; a performer may be an experienced facilitator; a community caretaker may bring relationship-building and conflict navigation skills.
Mentorship & Skill Development
URE will connect participants to aligned mentors for each project area. When appropriate, commissions can also create opportunities for participants to develop new skills through mentorship, collaboration, shadowing, and working alongside more experienced practitioners.
From Gig Work to Purpose-Driven Work
Purpose Pathways is designed to create a bridge between project-based work and longer-term professional sustainability. Each commission can become an opportunity to earn, learn, build a portfolio, expand relationships, develop transferable skills, and move toward the kind of work a cultureworker wants to create.
The program is rooted in URE’s E.N.O.U.G.H. Method:
Expertise — recognizing the knowledge we already carry.
Novice — remaining open to learning.
Origination — creating new ways of doing and being.
Understanding — paying attention to how systems and environments work.
Guidance — learning through reciprocal relationships.
Health — building sustainable ways of working.
We believe purpose-driven work begins with recognizing that we are already enough.
Purpose Pathways helps culture workers identify, hone, and wield what they already know while creating pathways to learn and strive towards what comes next.
