Before Free Spirit Community Arts + Media, Free Spirit Media grew out of a collaboration in 2000 with friends and teaching artists Jeff McCarter and Jesse Miller at Street Level Media in collaboration with a founding group of young people from the West Side of Chicago. Beginning as a single filmmaking class focused on basketball broadcasting, Free Spirit, officially established in May 2001, steadily grew into a multi-site media arts education organization partnering with hundreds of youth over its first decade.

Formative partnerships included a pilot telecast with Chicago Access Network Television (CAN TV) at the Garfield Park Golden Dome, which led to the launch of the HoopsHIGH youth sports broadcasting program at Westinghouse Career Academy in the winter of 2000-2001. McCarter and Miller were then joined by Rafie Fields, a Westinghouse and Columbia College Chicago alum, and together, they developed Free Spirit’s first cohort of 15 young filmmakers. The success and investment made by young people through the HoopsHIGH program led to the expansion of programs, specifically into the realms of journalism, photography, and documentary and narrative filmmaking.

Following profound environmental shifts in 2020—the COVID-19 pandemic, the global impact of the extrajudicial murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and subsequent racial justice reckonings—Free Spirit underwent its own period of transition beginning with an executive leadership change. This led to an intentional organizational transformation designed to honor Free Spirit’s historical commitment to young artists while forging an intentional path forward with a recommitment to youth agency, organizational equity, and creative intergenerational community.