HiiiWAV · 501(c)(3) Nonprofit
2025
iMPACT
REPORT
Building the conditions for artists to stay
Bosko Kante · Cofounder & President
Founder’s Letter
Building the Conditions
for Artists to Stay
2025 began in service. After wildfires devastated Los Angeles, our team showed up to support relief efforts at the Robert Glasper benefit concert. That moment set the tone for the year. It reminded us that culture is never separate from community care. It is one of the ways communities respond, organize, and heal.
It also sharpened our sense of what HiiiWAV must be in this moment.
For too long, artists have been asked to supply the identity, energy, and imagination that make cities vibrant — while being denied the infrastructure that allows them to stay. They are invited to perform, but not to own. Celebrated in headlines, but excluded from capital. Asked to animate neighborhoods, but left to survive on unstable venues, short-term grants, and systems that were never designed for their long-term prosperity.
HiiiWAV exists to interrupt that pattern.
This year, we moved with even greater intention at the intersection of culture, technology, place, and ownership. We secured $450,000 in multi-year funding from backers who understand that building durable creative infrastructure operates on a fundamentally different timeline than funding a program cycle. We deepened a multi-year partnership with the Kapor Foundation, expanded strategic partnerships with Good Trouble VC and the Akonadi Foundation, and advanced a set of initiatives that all point toward the same goal: building durable conditions for artists to thrive.
Oakland Tech Week made that work visible on a larger stage. Across seven days, more than 4,200 participants moved through 40-plus events powered by a coalition of 30-plus organizations. Founders pitched to investors. Students, entrepreneurs, and community leaders got hands-on with AI. Artists shared the stage with technologists, policymakers, and researchers. We saw what becomes possible when innovation is rooted in community instead of imposed from above.
But events alone are not enough. Festivals prove demand. They do not solve for permanence.
That is why we continued building the infrastructure Oakland artists have long needed: new venue pathways through Cloud Park and the Frank H. Ogawa Plaza project; stronger fiscal sponsorship and operational support for mission-aligned artists and initiatives; and new models for connecting creative work to capital, civic partnership, and long-term ownership.
It is also why the HiiiWAV 50 Fund matters so much. The prevailing model asks artists to piece together a life from fragments: a small grant here, a gig there, temporary housing, borrowed rehearsal space, uncertain healthcare, and endless administrative labor. We are designing something better. The HiiiWAV 50 Fund is a long-horizon strategy to pair endowment, real estate, and artist-centered governance so that creative people are not forced to choose between their craft and financial stability.
This year also affirmed something we have believed from the beginning: Oakland does not suffer from a lack of talent. It suffers from a lack of aligned infrastructure. The artists are here. The founders are here. The youth are here. The ideas are here. What has been missing is a system that treats culture as an economic engine, public space as community infrastructure, and innovation as something accountable to the people who live here.
To every artist, staff member, partner, civic collaborator, funder, donor, and neighbor who has helped move this vision forward: thank you. Your belief has helped turn possibility into proof. The work ahead is even bigger — deeper place-based infrastructure, stronger artist ownership, more pathways into creative technology, and a broader City of Belonging that keeps wealth, culture, and opportunity rooted in community.
“We are not waiting for permission. We are building the future our artists deserve.”
In Solidarity,
Bosko Kante
Cofounder & President, HiiiWAV
Why Artist Infrastructure Matters Now
Artists are
civic stakeholders
What HiiiWAV is proving is bigger than a successful year of programming. We are making a field-level argument: if cities want a creative economy that is culturally alive, economically inclusive, and resilient in the face of technological change, they must stop treating artists as short-term program participants and start treating them as long-term civic stakeholders.
Artists are often described as the soul of a city. The phrase is true, but incomplete. Artists are also market-makers, narrative shapers, educators, employers, neighborhood animators, early adopters, and translators between sectors that do not naturally speak the same language. They help turn underused places into destinations, anxiety into expression, and emerging tools into culture people can actually feel. Yet the systems built around them rarely reflect that value. Too often the artist economy is organized around scarcity: scarce venue access, scarce flexible capital, scarce administrative support, scarce ownership, scarce time.
HiiiWAV begins from a different assumption: creative people do their best work when stability, experimentation, and community are designed into the system. That means access to fiscal infrastructure. It means rooms where artists, founders, city leaders, and investors can build together. It means public space reimagined as cultural platform. It means real estate, governance, and capital models that allow wealth to remain with the people who generate the culture in the first place.
This matters especially in Oakland. The city sits inside a $40.7 billion East Bay innovation economy supporting more than 150,000 jobs. Yet local artists and founders still face a familiar contradiction: they are close to capital, but far from ownership; surrounded by world-class technology, but too often excluded from shaping how those tools are deployed. The risk is not only displacement of people. It is displacement of imagination. When artists cannot remain in place, cities lose more than talent. They lose memory, experimentation, intergenerational exchange, and the cultural confidence required to build something distinctive.
That is why HiiiWAV has spent this year building across multiple layers at once. We are convening ecosystem actors through Oakland Tech Week and year-round coalition work. We are supporting artist-led ventures and fiscally sponsored projects. We are helping convert civic space into reusable cultural infrastructure through City of Belonging, Cloud Park, and the Frank H. Ogawa Plaza venue project. And we are advancing a bigger thesis through the HiiiWAV 50 Fund: that the future of the creative economy belongs to models grounded in permanence, ownership, and community-controlled capital.
“Stability is not separate from creativity. Stability is a creative input. Time, place, and economic room are among the raw materials of art itself.”
This report is not simply a record of what happened. It is evidence of what becomes possible when artists are treated not as afterthoughts to innovation, but as essential builders of the future.
By the Numbers
Proof Points.
2024 – 2025
Oakland Tech Week
0
Days of Programming
0+
Total Participants
0+
Events
0+
Coalition Organizations
0+
AI Summit Attendees
0
Hackathon Participants
0
Speakers (CR4AI & Related)
0
Startups Pitched to Investors
0
New Initiatives Launched
City of Belonging
0+
Vendors & Artists Supported Annually
0+
Holiday Fest Small Businesses
Fiscal Sponsorship+
0
Active Sponsored Projects
0
National PSA Campaigns
Organization-wide
$0K
Multi-year Funding Secured
Forward-Build Targets
$1.25M
OTW Phase II
Two-year initiative toward $5M platform
6,000+
Annual OTW Participants
By year three
100+
New Startups Supported
Oakland-based, over 5 years
1,000+
Youth & Artists Trained
In AI / creative tech
$10M+
VC & Grant Capital
To Oakland Founders
$50M
Endowment Goal
HiiiWAV 50 Fund — 50 artists sustained
Oakland Tech Week
A Coalition
Made Visible
Oakland Tech Week was not designed as a parade of panels. It was designed as a coalition made visible.
Across seven days, more than 4,200 participants gathered across 40-plus events in downtown venues, neighborhood spaces, campuses, and community sites. That reach mattered, but the deeper achievement was structural: more than 30 organizations stepped into alignment around a shared premise — that Oakland deserves a tech and innovation ecosystem built with communities, not on top of them.
In too many cities, technology arrives as an extractive force. It enters neighborhoods through land pressure, speculative capital, or solutions designed far away from the people expected to live with the consequences. Oakland Tech Week offered a different public narrative. It demonstrated that innovation can be community-rooted, artist-informed, and accountable to racial and economic justice. It brought city and county leadership into the same orbit as major research institutions, philanthropic leaders, venture capital, students, founders, artists, and neighborhood organizers — not as separate audiences, but as participants in a shared civic experiment.
Leaders from Mozilla, Salesforce, Anthropic, and the Global Institute for the Learning Society appeared alongside Mayor Barbara Lee, Kapor leadership, Omidyar Network, the San Francisco Foundation, BLCKVC, Good Trouble Ventures, artists including Cordae and Alphabet Rockers, and a broad ecosystem of local organizers. What emerged was not just a conference schedule. It was a new civic table.
Several moments crystallized what made the week different. “Rise, Reset & Reimagine” and “The Town on AI” centered responsible AI conversations grounded in racial and economic justice. Northeastern’s “From Campus to Career” AI summit drew more than 1,200 attendees across four days, including a 300-person hackathon and 70 speakers, translating abstract conversation into applied learning. The City Hall activation on responsible AI zones linked emerging technology to the practical questions of economic activation and public policy. And HiiiWAV Fest & The Voice Pitch closed the week the only way HiiiWAV could: with live performance, founder pitches, AI demos, and skills-based workshops in music coding, video production, and 3D modeling. Culture and technology were not competing languages. They were working together in public.
The outcomes matter beyond the week itself. Fourteen startups pitched to active investors. Six new initiatives launched. New founder relationships formed with capital providers including Good Trouble Ventures, New Media Ventures, and BLCKVC. Oakland Tech Week reframed what a regional tech gathering can do. It was not a temporary tent erected over someone else’s ecosystem. It was a front door into a year-round strategy: the Oakland Innovation Coalition, a responsible AI hub, and a broader City of Belonging framework that ties workforce, culture, entrepreneurship, and public space together.
A successful event creates attention. A successful platform converts attention into durable capacity. Oakland Tech Week did both. It proved demand, signaled credibility, and gave HiiiWAV and its partners a public stage to show that Oakland’s creative and innovation communities do not need to be introduced to each other. They need coordinated infrastructure that helps them compound each other’s power.
“The future of responsible AI will not be built only in labs, boardrooms, or policy forums. It will also be shaped in neighborhood institutions, artist communities, classrooms, cultural venues, and civic coalitions capable of translating technological change into public value.”
HiiiWAV on the National Stage
E-40’s
Tiny Desk Concert
When E-40 performed his career-spanning NPR Tiny Desk Concert in June 2025 — celebrating the 30th anniversary of In a Major Way — the band behind him was a who’s who of the HiiiWAV ecosystem. Bosko Kante served as music director and vocalist. Kev Choice was on keys. Dame Drummer anchored the rhythm section. Martin Luther, Howard Wiley, Marcus Phillips, Silk-E, and DJ KMP rounded out a lineup drawn from Oakland’s deep bench of artist-innovators.
The performance has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times and covered by Billboard, NPR, NBC Bay Area, and Okayplayer. Bosko filled in for T-Pain’s auto-tuned vocal on “U and Dat.” It was a national stage moment — and it was powered by the same artists who teach at HiiiWAV workshops, pitch at Oakland Tech Week, and build the tools that are reshaping how creative work gets made and owned.
This is what infrastructure produces. Not a single grant outcome, but a community of artists who can hold a world-class stage, build venture-backed technology, mentor the next generation, and shape the national conversation about AI and creative ownership — all at the same time.
Viewed
100K+
Times on YouTube
Fiscal Sponsorship+
The Backstage
Economy
One of the most important pieces of HiiiWAV’s work is also one of the least glamorous. Fiscal sponsorship rarely makes headlines, yet it is among the highest-leverage forms of infrastructure an artist-centered institution can provide.
Mission-aligned artists and emerging initiatives are often ready to do meaningful work long before they have the legal, financial, and administrative structure required to receive grants, process tax-deductible donations, manage compliant reporting, or maintain the back office expected by institutional funders. The traditional answer is to tell each project to build its own nonprofit — or wait. HiiiWAV offers a different answer: shared infrastructure now.
By extending 501(c)(3) status and operational support, HiiiWAV helps artists and community projects open doors that would otherwise remain closed. That support includes the compliance and reporting foundations require, but the deeper value is strategic. Fiscal sponsorship gives creative leaders time back. It reduces administrative drag. It allows them to focus on program design, storytelling, partnership building, and community impact instead of spending all their energy recreating back-office systems from scratch.
HiiiWAV is now pushing this work further through a Fiscal Sponsorship+ model and the launch of Director for Good at directorforgood.org. The idea is simple but important: legal compliance is necessary, but not sufficient. Many projects also need fundraising support, bookkeeping automation, operational guidance, marketing infrastructure, and fractional leadership. By wrapping these functions together, HiiiWAV is helping move artist and nonprofit initiatives from survival mode into strategic growth.
Alphabet Rockers
Grammy-winning ensemble advancing education and culture through music and media. Foundation-ready fiscal sponsorship under HiiiWAV.
Ryan Nicole
Compliant grant administration at scale, with fundraising readiness and donor pathways as her creative and community-facing work grows.
Prospect Band
Fusing hip-hop, jazz, and soul with community empowerment. Comprised of Grammy-winning OSA high school students who performed at both HiiiWAV FEST and Oakland Tech Week.
Sol Affirmation
Structured financial and reporting support enabling the team to grow programs and partnerships with clarity and accountability.
“The back office is also cultural infrastructure. Administration is not bureaucracy for its own sake — it is enabling architecture.”
City of Belonging
Public Space as
Creative Infrastructure
If Oakland Tech Week shows what ecosystem coordination can look like, City of Belonging shows what it means to root that ecosystem in place.
City of Belonging emerged from a clear reality: rising displacement, the loss of food businesses during the pandemic, and a persistent shortage of affordable, flexible space have made it harder for Black and Brown artists, food makers, and cultural workers to build stable businesses in the cities they have helped shape. The answer cannot be limited to temporary programming alone. It has to include the design and control of physical space.
The City of Belonging Initiative (founded 2021, Oakland) combines design, development, cultural strategy, and public programming. Its focus on micro-market spaces, cultural placemaking, and civic infrastructure reflects a larger thesis: overlooked urban spaces can become platforms for creative entrepreneurship, neighborhood trust, and recurring economic activity when they are programmed with intention.
150+
Holiday Fest
Small businesses, culinary pop-ups, music, and immersive experiences
6mo
Frank H. Ogawa Plaza
Civic concert series pilot — programmable, multi-use cultural venue
365
Cloud Park & OSA
Year-round creative programming and community use venue
500+
Hella Juneteenth
Vendors and artists supported annually across all activations
Frank H. Ogawa Plaza
The Frank H. Ogawa Plaza project is especially significant because it turns this philosophy into a civic infrastructure strategy. In collaboration with the City of Oakland, the plaza is being reimagined as a programmable, multi-use cultural venue with ongoing activations, artisan markets, and community programming. Rather than treating public space as empty real estate between buildings, the project treats it as common cultural infrastructure: a place where performance, commerce, gathering, and belonging can reinforce each other.
The six-month civic concert series pilot extends that logic. Consistent monthly activation matters because trust in public space is built through repetition. One event can attract a crowd. Recurring programming changes behavior. It teaches residents, visitors, vendors, and city partners that a plaza can be a living platform for culture and commerce — not just a pass-through zone.
Cloud Park & OSA
Cloud Park follows a related logic. Developed with Oakland School for the Arts and envisioned in memoriam to Angus Cloud, it represents another investment in artist-purpose space: a venue designed not just for occasional spectacle, but for year-round creative programming and community use. Together, Cloud Park and Frank H. Ogawa Plaza begin to answer a question HiiiWAV’s research has surfaced clearly: Oakland does not simply need more festivals. It needs permanent, reusable venue capacity where artists can reliably perform, build audiences, and earn.
Why This Is Thought Leadership
Public space is not only a civic design question. It is a cultural wealth question. Who gets to gather? Who gets to sell? Who gets to perform? When those answers are shaped intentionally, placemaking becomes a practical strategy for keeping culture, commerce, and community power rooted in place. Work connected to Ali Youssefi Square in Sacramento points toward a broader West Coast network — underused civic space reclaimed for community-rooted enterprise.
“Festivals prove demand. Permanent venues convert demand into durable opportunity.”
Reimagining the Creative Economy
The HiiiWAV
50 Fund
Most creative economy systems are designed around episodic rescue. Artists apply to dozens of grants to win one. They assemble a livelihood through temporary gigs, short leases, patchwork services, and heroic amounts of unpaid administrative labor. This model produces extraordinary art in spite of the system, not because of it. It is inefficient for artists, inefficient for funders, and structurally incapable of generating lasting community wealth.
The HiiiWAV 50 Fund is a response to that failure.
At its core, the model pairs a $50 million endowment goal with a real estate backbone designed to sustain 50 Oakland artists over time. Rather than relying exclusively on annual grant cycles, the fund envisions a mix of gifts, donor-advised funds, low-interest loans, venture opportunities, and guarantees. This blended capital stack is meant to do more than fund programs. It is designed to build assets, absorb risk more intelligently, and create a perpetual structure that can support future cohorts.
The artist offer is intentionally concrete. The goal is not merely symbolic support. It is a middle-class creative foundation: approximately $25,000 per year in direct cash support, combined with access to housing, studios, healthcare, and services that together approximate the conditions of a $100,000 middle-class lifestyle. The significance of that offer is not just financial. It gives artists what the current system rarely provides: time, continuity, and the ability to make long-horizon decisions.
$50M
Endowment Goal
Blended capital: gifts, DAFs, low-interest loans, venture, and guarantees
$25K
Annual Direct Support
Plus housing, studios, healthcare ≈ $100K middle-class foundation
50
Oakland Artists
Artists as owners, guided by community governance and Oakland covenants
Ownership Is the Difference
In conventional systems, artists are often treated as tenants in someone else’s development strategy or as grantees within someone else’s institutional framework. HiiiWAV’s model insists on another possibility: artists as owners, guided by community governance and clear covenants that keep wealth rooted in Oakland. This is a structural intervention against cultural extraction. It says that the people who generate cultural value should participate in the asset appreciation, decision-making, and long-term upside created by that value.
Why This Beats Grants Alone
The issue is not whether grants matter — they do. The issue is whether grants alone are enough to create lasting stability. Current arts funding often requires 20 or more applications to yield a single grant. That is not an ecosystem. It is an administrative obstacle course. By contrast, an endowment model spending 4–5% annually can support artists more sustainably, while blended finance and loan guarantees reduce waste and increase long-term efficiency. Same money, less friction. Same commitment to culture, but with a structure that creates permanence instead of repeated precarity.
The Oakland Art House
The flagship site would anchor the fund through live-work lofts, venues, studios, kitchens, entrepreneurship programming, and earned-income activity. The Bellevue Club concept sharpens that vision further: a historic site transformed into an artist-owned cultural sanctuary where resident creatives co-own the building, curate performances, and generate revenue through events, dining, membership, and incubation. The goal is not simply to house artists. It is to create an engine of community-powered cultural production and economic participation.
“Oakland’s artists do not need another landlord for their talent. They need equity in the places and institutions their work makes possible.”
Financials
Investing in Infrastructure,
Not Just Programming
HiiiWAV’s financial trajectory reflects the strategic shift from a program-centered organization to an infrastructure builder.
2024 Actuals
$650K
Total Revenue
$631K
Total Expenses
81%
To Programs
2024 Expense Allocation
Three-Year Revenue Outlook
| Source | 2025 | 2026 | 2027 | 3-Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Non-Profits & Foundations | $296K | $795K | $1.3M | $2.4M |
| Individuals | $190K | $595K | $890K | $1.7M |
| Corporate | $28K | $194K | $204K | $426K |
| Marks Foundation | $100K | $100K | $100K | $300K |
| Earned | $63K | $45K | $72K | $180K |
| Government | $3K | $35K | $60K | $98K |
| Total | $679K | $1.8M | $2.6M | $5.0M |
Three-Year Expense Outlook
| Category | 2025 | 2026 | 2027 | 3-Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 Fund | $0K | $500K | $1.0M | $1.5M |
| Oakland Tech Week | $164K | $400K | $500K | $1.1M |
| LOOP | $143K | $250K | $300K | $693K |
| HiiiWAV FEST | $97K | $100K | $100K | $297K |
| Youth | $34K | $68K | $120K | $222K |
| Code Vibes | $0K | $50K | $100K | $150K |
| All People Power | $0K | $20K | $20K | $40K |
| Admin | $46K | $86K | $90K | $222K |
| Fundraising | $29K | $107K | $119K | $255K |
| Total Expenses | $513K | $1.6M | $2.3M | $4.4M |
| Change in Net Assets | $166K | $183K | $237K | $586K |
What the Numbers Show
In 2024, HiiiWAV operated on $650K in total revenue — directing 81% to programs — and closed the year with positive net revenue. The three-year outlook projects growth from $679K in 2025 to $2.6M by 2027, driven by foundation support (47%), individual giving (33%), and a growing corporate base (8%). Programs account for 89% of planned spending, with the two largest investments — the HiiiWAV 50 Fund (34%) and Oakland Tech Week (24%) — reflecting the organization’s strategic pivot toward infrastructure and ecosystem building. The budget projects positive net assets in every year, with cumulative growth of $586K over three years.
$650K
2024
$679K
2025
$1.8M
2026
$2.6M
2027
What Comes Next
Converting Proof Points
into Platforms
The strongest signal from 2025 is that HiiiWAV’s work is entering a new phase. The next chapter is not about doing more of the same. It is about converting proof points into platforms.
Oakland Tech Week 2026
Will expand beyond a single-week convening into a year-round ecosystem anchored by Code Vibes, new hackathons, AI workshops, and deeper collaboration across the Oakland Innovation Coalition. The next phase is framed as a $1.25 million two-year initiative toward a $5 million long-term platform for Oakland's creative and tech future.
Director for Good
Will formalize an area of work that has long existed informally: helping community-rooted organizations operate with greater rigor, confidence, and shared capacity. When one neighborhood organization becomes more operationally sound, the entire ecosystem becomes stronger.
Cloud Park & Frank H. Ogawa Plaza
Will push forward the place-based strategy, creating more permanent, accessible sites for live music, community gathering, food entrepreneurship, and cultural commerce in the heart of Oakland.
The HiiiWAV 50 Fund
Remains the long-horizon north star. If Tech Week is the front door, fiscal sponsorship is the operating backbone, and civic placemaking is the spatial platform, then the fund is the ownership structure that keeps the whole ecosystem rooted in community over time.
How to Join This Work
This is the future HiiiWAV is inviting partners to help build: a city where artists can live, work, experiment, organize, teach, perform, build companies, influence technology, and participate in the upside they create.
Give to expand artist-centered infrastructure. Lend to help unlock place-based and real-estate-backed projects. Invest in ventures and vehicles that keep cultural value rooted in community. Partner with us to create public, institutional, and private pathways that artists can actually use.
Gift Table
HiiiWAV’s three-year plan requires $5 million to fully build the infrastructure Oakland’s creative economy needs. We expect the majority of this funding to come from a small number of committed partners. Here is what each level of support makes possible:
| 3-Year Commitment | Annual | Gifts | What It Funds |
|---|---|---|---|
| $1,000,000 | $333K/yr | 2 | Anchor the HiiiWAV 50 Fund — endowment seed and first real estate acquisition toward permanent artist live-work infrastructure |
| $500,000 | $167K/yr | 2 | Build Oakland Tech Week into a year-round platform — the $1.25M Phase II initiative |
| $250,000 | $83K/yr | 3 | Scale place-based infrastructure — Cloud Park, Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, and civic concert series |
| $125,000 | $42K/yr | 3 | Expand Fiscal Sponsorship+ and Director for Good — backbone operations for artists and community projects |
| $50,000 | $17K/yr | 5 | Fund AFRO AI cohorts, youth programs, and artist stipends — next generation of Oakland's creative tech founders |
| $10K–$25K | — | Many | Sustain LOOP, community workshops, and artist residencies — year-round programming |
15+ partners = $4.375M = 88% of the $5M goal from committed relationships. The remaining 12% comes from earned revenue, corporate support, government sources, and broad-based individual giving. This is not a wish list — it is an investment table. Each level is tied to a specific infrastructure outcome that compounds over time.
Supporters & Champions
Thank You.
Thank you for helping prove that Oakland’s creative future is worth building at infrastructure scale. Every donor, partner, artist, volunteer, civic collaborator, and institutional ally named in this report has contributed to more than a year of programming. You have helped make visible a larger possibility: that artist-centered systems can shape how cities grow.
Lead Partners
Foundation & Institutional Support
Alameda County · Full Spectrum Capital · Liberated Futures Fund / Strategy Squad · Marks Family Foundation · Make It Bay
Coalition & Program Partners
Mozilla · Salesforce · Anthropic · Northeastern University · Omidyar Network · San Francisco Foundation · BLCKVC · New Media Ventures · Oakland School for the Arts · City of Belonging Initiative
And our growing community of champions.
The question is not
whether Oakland has talent.
The question is whether Oakland
will build systems worthy of it.
Give. Lend. Invest. Partner. Help build a city where artists can live, work, experiment, and participate in the upside they create.
Ways to Give
HiiiWAV is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. All donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.