San Diego Dance Initiative

The San Diego Dance Community Initiative is a community-driven effort to strengthen, connect, and sustain San Diego’s diverse dance ecosystem. Developed through extensive listening sessions, town halls, and research led by dance leaders like Zaquia Salinas in partnership with San Diego ART Matters, the Initiative responds to long-standing challenges facing the dance sector — including fragmentation, limited resources, lack of centralized services and communications, and inequitable access to opportunities.

Building on the community’s many strengths, this dance initiative seeks to engage dancers, choreographers, educators, administrators, presenters, enthusiasts, and supporters across all genres and geographies. Its goal is to develop shared, community-led solutions that build capacity, foster equity, grow audiences, and improve sustainability for dance artists and organizations.

The goal of the initiative is to create a dedicated dance service organization serving as a central hub for advocacy, information-sharing, professional development, networking, and resource coordination.