Public Policy & Advocacy

Grantmakers in the Arts holds public policy and advocacy as one of its core funding focus areas and believes one of the most important roles we can serve in benefitting our members and the arts grantmaking community – maximizing the impact our sector can have toward increasing access to the arts and realizing racial justice through the arts – comes by way of our public policy and advocacy work. In GIA’s vision for the future, foundations have shifted their foci to increasingly include advocacy and public sector policy and practice.

As part of realizing this vision, we provide programs to teach our members about advocacy and lobbying, the difference between the two, and how grantmakers can support both. GIA advocates for lifelong learning through the arts from early childhood through K-12 and into senior years. Knowing that the arts and arts education cannot be provided without artists, we necessarily advocate for economic justice for artists and other workers.

We are committed to invigorate funding and support for arts education within federal policy, and defend that every resident has access to the arts as part of well-rounded, life-long education. Over the past several years, raising the visibility of the arts in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in its legislative form. GIA and Penn Hill Group continue these advocacy efforts around the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), guiding GIA members and their grantees in advocating for new or expanded arts programs at their local schools and districts. Organized since 2012, GIA’s Arts Education Funders Coalition (AEFC) has worked to address identified needs in comprehensive arts education and to strengthen communication and networking among arts education funders.

The AEFC includes members from Americans for the Arts, Arts Education Partnership, Center for Cultural Innovation, The George Gund Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Wallace Foundation, among others. Advised by a committee of Coalition members, GIA engaged the services of Washington, D.C.-based Penn Hill Group, a firm with education policy expertise and experience working with diverse education groups to research, develop, and promote educational policy strategies.

Most recently, GIA worked with Representative Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) on the development of the Arts Education for All Act, the broadest arts education policy bill ever introduced in Congress. In Spring 2021, GIA influenced the U.S. Department of Education to highlight the importance of equitable access to arts and culture when determining how to reopen schools. Additionally, GIA emphasized the need to make explicit how this access was racialized prior to the pandemic. Addressing this inequity was essential to effective reopening and remains essential to the adequate provision of comprehensive, well-rounded education.

GIA advocates and lobbies for lifelong learning. GIA is delighted that, in 2020, Congress passed the Supporting Older Americans Act including our recommendations that the Administration on Aging include the arts in the issues to be identified and addressed and be included among supportive services for older Americans.

GIA continues to advocate and lobby for economic justice for workers, including artists. GIA has successfully lobbied to include arts-related provisions in the Child Care for Working Families Act, which proposes to better help low-income families pay for childcare and expand high-quality state preschool options. GIA advocated for AmeriCorps to make national volunteer service more accessible by offering an increase in living allowances. We have also called for arts grantmakers to advocate for portable benefits for workers and has released a call for our stakeholders to endorse the Portable Benefits for Independent Workers Pilot Program Act. GIA advocates for changing public policies to allow people with disabilities, including artists, to secure greater resources for their work without being rendered ineligible for public supports and is endorsing the re-introduced SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act. The bill raises the limits on assets people with disabilities can hold before being disqualified from public benefits while also indexing those limits to inflation.

GIA is realizing our vision is through the GIA Cultural Policy Learning Series and Action Lab, which focuses on such issues as racial equity & transformational practice in the public sector, translating between sectors and planning toward action.

GIA is eager to continue informing the field’s support for advocacy, to advocate for national policies that enhance lifelong access to the transformative power of arts and culture that create economic justice for artists and other workers.

May 31, 2008 by giarts-ts-admin

2007, 86 pages. The Center for Arts Education, 14 Penn Plaza, 225 West 34th Street, NY, NY 10122, www.cae-nyc.org

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May 31, 2008 by giarts-ts-admin

2007, 9 Pages. The NEA Foundation for the Improvement of Education, 1201 Sixteenth Street NW, Washington, DC 20036, (202) 822-7840, www.neafoundation.org
PDF online: www.neafoundation.org

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May 31, 2008 by giarts-ts-admin

Arts and education grantmakers at an historic gathering in Santa Fe in October of 2007 agreed on the need to forge a new vision for public education in the United States and to collectively explore how the arts can help shape and realize that vision.

Convened by Grantmakers in the Arts and Grantmakers for Education, more than 100 foundation representatives met formally for the first time under the aegis of their two affinity organizations to debate and discuss the role of the arts in education.

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May 31, 2008 by giarts-ts-admin
This article was originally printed in Ford Reports, No. 2, 2007. Reprinted by permission.
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August 31, 2007 by giarts-ts-admin

2006, 124 pages. The H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Download pdf: www.heinz.cmu.edu

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August 31, 2007 by giarts-ts-admin

2007, 24 pages. SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Avenue, Menlo Park, CA 94025, 650-859-2000, www.sri.com

Download pdf: www.hewlett.org

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August 31, 2007 by giarts-ts-admin
Another project underway for historian Jim Smith, author of the preceding “A Profession of Philanthropy,” is a new piece, commissioned by the Aspen Institute, that examines the ways that foundation giving to arts and culture is fundamentally different from giving to other fields. We coaxed Jim to contribute a brief preview of this line of inquiry. Excerpts from this nascent work in progress have been woven together by Jim and Anne Focke into this brief, provocative piece.
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August 31, 2007 by giarts-ts-admin
Last year AEA Consulting developed the working paper “Critical Issues Facing the Arts in California” for the James Irvine Foundation. Since its release, the report has generated extensive conversations and responses, both within and beyond California. GIA invited Adrian Ellis, principal of AEA Consulting, to offer further thoughts on the current state of the arts in the United States.
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August 31, 2007 by giarts-ts-admin
In the weekend leading into the 2007 Taos Journey conference, members of Grantmakers in the Arts and Grantmakers for Education will spend two days together in Santa Fe seeking better understanding of one another's priorities in arts and education—finding common ground. In the spirit of building this bridge between education and the arts, we sought an educator rather than an artist, a practitioner rather than a researcher, to write about arts education.
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