Celebrate Roberto Bedoya's Legacy and Retirement!

Please join us in celebrating and honoring our beloved Roberto Bedoya's decades of fierce work—his beautiful heart, passion and generous love—through this retirement transition fund.

Roberto’s leadership helped us all understand how belonging contributes to building healthy, pluralistic democracies of shared space and access to the commons and public resources. He has expanded our definitions of who belongs in the cultural and government sectors, and shown us how imagination and love can shape public policy.

Roberto is retiring in October 2024 from his role as Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland and a lifetime of work in the arts and culture sector.

Let us gift him the resources for time and abundance to reflect, rest, read, and ruminate on what good trouble he wants to get into next!

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This fundraiser is organized by many of Roberto's colleagues and friends whose work and lives have been transformed through knowing him. We will present Roberto with the fund on October 9 at the end of the Grantmakers in the Arts conference. It's a surprise!

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Roberto Bedoya is the Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland where he shepherded the City's Cultural Plan, "Belonging in Oakland". Throughout his career he has consistently supported artist-centered cultural practices and advocated for expansive definitions of inclusion and belonging in the cultural sector. His essays “Creative Placemaking and the Politics of Belonging and Dis-Belonging”, “Spatial Justice: Rasquachification, Race and the City” and “Poetics and Praxis of a City in Relation" have reframed cultural policy to shed light on exclusionary practices and decision making. He is the recipient of the United States Artists 2021 Berresford Prize given annually to a cultural practitioner who has contributed significantly to the advancement, well-being, and care of artists in society.