The Art + Hope initiative encompasses a collection of interrelated projects established by the Foundation in collaboration with Louise Blouin Media, and is founded on the Foundation’s core ethos that art and culture are powerful tools for enacting social change and cultural dialogue. Aligned with the ongoing Culture Beyond Borders series at the Foundation, Art + Hope includes vital projects in Africa, such as the January 2009 initiative Five Days in Gulu. Organized in partnership with artist Ross Bleckner and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the program brought art-based therapy to former child soldiers. Other programs have included Waging Peace, which hosted an exhibition at the Foundation’s gallery in November 2009 of drawings by children displaced by genocide in Africa; educational initiatives such as West Side Stories, and the Foundation’s lecture series and Music and the Brain workshops. Art + Hope is dedicated to a cross-disciplinary use of the arts as a means to greater understanding of social and cultural challenges facing a globalized world.

The LINK Project is a collaboration between the Foundation, a Google engineer, and Wikipedia to create a search engine and database, specifically for the world’s global development agencies and NGOs, that aims to maximize information sharing while minimizing overlap of development efforts.

The Louise Blouin Foundation has a 45,000 square-foot museum space in London that exhibits works by artists from around the world and hosts lecture series and special events that aim to promote and encourage global dialogue about culture, trade and human rights.