The Activating Heritage 2025 conference hosted by Chicago Cultural Alliance (CCA) commenced last week at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) on March 31, 2025. A Driehaus Arts and Culture grantee, CCA connects, promotes, and supports its members, which are cultural heritage centers across Chicago. The annual professional development conference brought together CCA members and arts and culture workers from across the Chicago region with meaningful, hands-on capacity-building experiences facilitated by leaders in the field.
The day-long conference included three sessions, each with four panel choices among topics in operations, programming, curation, and marketing. A highlight of the day was a guided tour of UIC’s Rafael Cintrón Ortiz Latino Cultural Center mural: El Despertar de las Américas (The Awakening of the Americas). After the sessions, UIC students had an opportunity to attend workshops about volunteerism as activism and how to engage with their local community centers.
Attending the conference is a great opportunity for cultural institutions that are collections-based to gain knowledge on topics such as the latest technologies for archiving practices, how to center care and consent in storytelling and oral histories, and methods to developing an online presence for audience engagement. The conference is open to nonmembers and provides an opportunity for cultural institutions to connect with one another and with community members.
The Driehaus Foundation attended two panels: Media Relations for Cultural Heritage Institutions and Community Gardening as Heritage Practice and Social Action. Media Relations brought together Reporters Carrie Shepherd from Axios Chicago, Diane Bou Khalil at Borderless Magazine, and Arts and Culture Editor Gwen Ihnat at Block Club Chicago to discuss how cultural institutions can advertise their events and programming at their respective digital prints.
To attend Activating Heritage 2026 or learn more about program offerings, sign up for CCA’s newsletter here.
