Founded in 1997, ACTA has developed the infrastructure to offer programs and services supporting the diverse traditional cultural expressions of California’s traditional arts field. As a statewide arts organization, we have long-standing relationships with community collaborators cultivated through a steady development of grantmaking to culture bearers, a robust Arts in Corrections program, and public programs that increase community wellbeing and health equity.

Our Apprenticeship Program offers $5,000 contracts to mentor artists for 1-on-1 training of apprentices, contributing to cultural and artistic knowledge transmission. The Living Cultures Grant Program supports pathways that nurture, sustain, and engage participants in traditional arts, with grants of $7,500 to individuals and $10,000 to California-based nonprofits, fiscal sponsors, and Tribal Nations. As the CAC administering organization for Folk & Traditional Arts since 2022, making larger and individual grants to traditional artists possible for the first time.

Our work as an intermediary involves regranting from government and foundations to individuals and organizations, as well as providing those entities with capacity building, training, technical assistance, convening, and field-building activities. Grounding our programs is field research, documentation, publications, and creating/maintaining a vast, unparalleled archive. This work may involve participatory cultural asset mapping, and program design and curation, which actively engages the community.

ACTA also works at the intersection of traditional arts, health equity, and social change by addressing education, mental health, displacement, and prevention through our Building Healthy Communities and La Cultura Cura programs. Sounds of California is a collaborative recording, composing, and community engagement initiative, inviting locals to participate in field recordings, analysis, and soundscape celebrations.

Our Art Breaks In program brings traditional arts to incarcerated individuals in 11 state prisons and to recently incarcerated participants in reentry sites in Los Angeles and the Antelope Valley—supporting cultural restoration in some of California’s most vulnerable communities.