ACCA was formed as a committee within the collective movement of collaboration in the wake of the Eaton Fire through the Eaton Fire Collaborative (EFC) and the Collaboratory. 

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Two threads run through all of our work: Imagination and Equity.

 

Imagination is labor.

 

It is not escape, wishful thinking, or waiting for inspiration. It is the alert*, deliberate work of entering a reality beyond our own experience. It asks us to see through someone else’s eyes, to understand what has not happened to us, and to picture conditions that do not yet exist.

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That work matters because rebuilding Altadena cannot mean simply restoring what was here before. We have to decide what needs to be carried forward, what needs to change, and what kind of place we want to make together.

Artists practice this kind of imagining all the time. We make the invisible visible. We give form to what is difficult to name. We test possibilities before they become plans. ACCA believes this work belongs at the center of recovery.

 

Equity means acknowledging that disasters don’t discriminate but disaster recovery processes do.

 

We pay attention to who is heard, who has access, who gets paid, who is asked to do the work, and who gets to shape what happens next. We know that people experience disaster differently, and that recovery can deepen inequality when resources and decisions remain in the same hands.

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Equity requires more than inviting people into a process designed without them. It means sharing power, removing barriers, and changing the process itself.

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Imagination without equity becomes fantasy.

Equity without imagination leaves us trapped inside the world as it already is.

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Together, these commitments shape our three core values:

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CARE

We lead with compassion, honesty, humility, and mutual respect. Care means listening closely and showing up. It includes service because our work should meet real needs. It includes authenticity because people should be able to speak from their own experience and arrive as themselves.

 

COMMUNITY 

We build belonging through collaboration and mutual aid. Community is more than proximity, networking, or agreement. It is reciprocity, responsibility, and the understanding that our lives are messy, wonderful, and inexorably bound up with one another. 

 

We share knowledge, tools, space, labor, relationships, food, ideas, affection and whatever else we have. We work in partnership because no artist, organization, or neighborhood can rebuild a creative ecosystem alone. 

 

STEWARDSHIP

We protect and carry forward Altadena’s creative life. That means caring for its artists, stories, histories, gathering places, traditions, experiments, memories, and weirdness. It means protecting what has survived while making room for what has not yet been perceived and invented.

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We are not interested in preserving Altadena as an artifact. We want its culture to remain alive: rooted in its history, responsive to the present, and held by the people who make it and the ground beneath their feet.