Purpose

Back in 2006, marketing entrepreneur Lisa Schultz launched TheWhole9.com – a place for creative people to meet online and showcase their work. About that time, MySpace was sold for a few hundred million, and word around the water cooler was that someday we’d sell TheWhole9.com for a bunch of money and use that money to change the world.

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Creativity

 

In 2010, we opened The Whole 9 Gallery in Culver City’s Arts District, and inspired by Pep Bonet’s photos of Sierra Leone’s amputee soccer team, launched The Peace Project, and short of a few hundred million dollars, got to work.

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Community Action

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Since then, The Peace Project has inspired tens of thousands of artists, donors, corporations, service businesses, art patrons and others in 70 countries on six continents to donate art, money, resources and time which have helped The Peace Project transform tens of thousands of lives in West Africa, the Philippines, the Middle East, and right here in the United States. Combining innovative ideas with creative thinking and bold actions, our projects are designed to inspire donors and beneficiaries to believe that change is possible, and then devise ways for them to join hands and invest the financial and human resources to create that change.

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Transformation

 

When COVID hit in 2020, we quickly converted The Whole 9 Gallery into a food distribution site and sent a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food home with our neighbors. This inspired us to transform the gallery into Gratitude Market where we sell artisanal goods and specialty foods from around the world — all with one purpose — to build community, spread love, and positively touch as people as we can locally and worldwide.