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Cultivate

Anchor Infrastructures: Building field capacity and strengthening inclusive collaborations and leadership to drive systems transformations.

Seed stabilized the organizations. Cultivate builds the infrastructure.
Grow transfers the future.

Cultivate (2026–2028) is the strategic evolution from stabilizing organizations to strengthening the field. 

This is the middle chapter of Sunrise, the bridge between the breadth of Seed (2023-2025) and the final transition of Grow (2029-2030). Cultivate is where JBMF shifts from resourcing individual people and organizations to strengthening the connective tissue that will carry the Valley beyond our sunset. It is where JBMF moves from supporting leaders to building the systems those leaders need to thrive. 

Cultivate aims to:
  • Strengthen anchor field infrastructures that partners identified as essential
  • Grow a deeper, more durable bench of funders committed to the Central Valley
  • Maintain responsive, human-centered funding
  • Shift the narrative of the Central Valley, positioning it as a region of leadership, innovation, and civic imagination

How We Got Here:

The Central Valley — and the nation — has been navigating a period of profound uncertainty. Amidst the federal landscape, priorities, public funding streams, and philanthropic strategies have shifted dramatically. Investments in local news, multilingual learners, public education, and community infrastructure have expanded and contracted in rapid succession, creating real instability for the leaders working closest to communities.

These shifts are not abstract. They show up as:

  • The dissolution of public systems meant to inform and protect communities
  • Federal funding clawbacks that destabilize long-standing programs
  • Rising anti-immigrant sentiment and harmful narratives
  • Inconsistent philanthropic attention to the Valley
  • Increased burnout among leaders carrying disproportionate responsibility

Nowhere is this volatility felt more acutely than in the Central Valley. Local leaders are navigating political shifts, disinvestment, and community needs simultaneously, often without the preexisting shared infrastructure, the regional coordination, or the philanthropic groundswell that other parts of the state have relied on for decades.

At the same time, something powerful is happening: The connective relationships seeded — and activated —over the sunrise have evolved into field infrastructure. Leaders from journalism, education, youth, culture, and immigrant-serving organizations are moving toward collective strategy. 

“The problem is the illusion of separation. This illusion of separation is how supremacy operates: a belief in hierarchical systems that one group has more power or privilege over another group when, in reality, all of us are essential and necessary.”
Jamillah Hasan-Oliver

Founder & Executive Director. BreakBox Thought Collective

During early Sunrise planning, JBMF anticipated investing in a small set of “anchor organizations.” Through Seed, it became clear that no single organization, in any sector, could or should carry the full weight of the region’s civic infrastructure. What emerged instead were anchor infrastructures: the shared systems, relationships, and connective capacities that allow multiple partners to move together with stability and purpose.

Though these infrastructures are not new, our understanding of them have shifted. What began as separate grants has organically become the early architecture of field infrastructure in the Central Valley, the beginnings of a coordinated civic ecosystem.

Field-building research is clear: durable infrastructure, not individual programs, is what drives population-level change (Farnham et al., 2020). Partners echoed this, naming a consistent set of connective capacities the region needs to thrive: policy advocacy, narrative power, shared services, cross-county convening, and long-term funder alignment.

From this coherence, interdependent infrastructures have emerged as the backbones of a multiracial, multilingual democracy in the Central Valley:

  • Sustainable local journalism as the information and narrative backbone
  • Multilingual learner policy and narrative power as the educational and cultural backbone
  • People-centered nonprofit field-building as the leadership and operational backbone

Through human-centered grantmaking, an approach grounded in trust, relationship building, and responsive partnership, we have been part of creating a civic ecosystem that is ready for deeper alignment. Cultivate builds on that readiness. It focuses our investments on the infrastructures that leaders, our board, and staff all agree and have named as essential: sustainable journalism, multilingual learner power, and nonprofit field-building and leadership.

It prepares the ground for Grow, where JBMF will transfer stewardship, document shared learning, and support long-term ownership by Valley leaders. Cultivate is sets the stage to steward in the next generation of civic life in the Central Valley.

We launched pilot Cultivate grants—Central Valley Journalism Collaborative, Breakbox Thought Collective, and Northern California Grantmakers—to iterate alongside partners in service of informing our Cultivate anchor infrastructure approach. In early Cultivate, we launched the first anchor infrastructure grant to the Central Valley Multilingual Consortium.

Central Valley Journalism Collaborative (CVJC)

Local news is civic infrastructure, and its decline has left many communities without reliable information or representation. California's Central Valley is home to 7.5 million people, yet it remains one of the state's most under-covered regions. The Central Valley Journalism Collaborative was created to address this gap. CVJC is building a nonprofit model for community-powered journalism rooted in public service, collaboration, and long-term sustainability. As part of that, CVJC fosters deep relationships and infrastructure that enhance organizational capacity, community trust, and sustainable funding so local journalism remains a lasting civic resource in the Valley. Its work also contributes to a growing national movement toward community-owned models for local news.
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BreakBox Thought Collective

Rooted in Fresno, BreakBox Thought Collective is building a community-centered model where healing, creativity, storytelling, and civic leadership reinforce one another. It has created a "third space" where young people, artists, families, educators, organizers, and cultural practitioners come together to imagine and build futures grounded in collective power. BreakBox's work is an investment in community infrastructure; It connects healing, storytelling, creative leadership, and civic participation. It reflects a vision of democracy where community wellbeing, cultural expression, and local leadership are interconnected.
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Northern California Grantmakers

Northern California Grantmakers is striving to grow philanthropic engagement in the Central Valley – a philanthropic desert – by elevating local assets and by developing tools that showcase the nonprofit landscape. This work includes deepening relationships with philanthropic partners already rooted in the Valley, strengthening funder collaboratives, and exploring new engagements. By bringing NCG's programs and convenings directly into the Central Valley, they are building the conditions that make it easier for funders from outside the region to get involved in trust-based ways that genuinely support the nonprofits across the Valley.
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Central Valley Multilingual Consortium

Anchored by the Central Valley Multilingual Consortium and partners such as Californians Together, PIQE, Teach Plus, GO Public Schools, and cultural and youth organizations, this infrastructure is the coordinated backbone for multilingual learners across the Valley. Functioning as both a policy and a storytelling engine, it links school districts, youth leaders, journalists, bilingual storytellers, cultural practitioners, and parent organizers. It strengthens family influence in public systems and challenges harmful narratives that treat multilingual learners as deficits rather than assets. It also serves as a regional shield by building narrative power against misinformation – especially when multilingual communities face political or cultural backlash. Undergirding this work, partners are creating the spaces for healing, rest, and community care that sustain leadership and deepen trust across the region.
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