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.

October 26, 2010 by giarts-ts-admin

In 2007, with the Bush administration’s aggressive foreign policy looming large in the world’s perception of the United States, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation expanded its arts research agenda to include a major in-house project aimed at shedding light on the recent history of public and private support for international arts and cultural exchange as an instrument of public diplomacy.

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August 10, 2010 by giarts-ts-admin

GrantCraft, The Ford Foundation, 320 East 43rd Street New York, NY 10017, (212) 573-4879, www.grantcraft.org

Download the full .pdf of this document.

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May 28, 2010 by Abigail

March 2010, 68 pages. Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media, 2406 Fairmount Ave, Baltimore, MD, 21244, 410-675-4024, www.gfem.org

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March 23, 2010 by Abigail

2009, 328 pages, ISBN 978-0295989358. University of Washington Press, PO Box 50096, Seattle, WA, 98145, 800-537-5487, www.washington.edu/uwpress

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March 9, 2010 by Abigail

2009, 12 pages. WolfBrown, 808A Oak Street, San Francisco, CA 94117, 415-796-3060, www.wolfbrown.com

“Creative capital is the network of understandings, values, activities, and relationships that individuals, organizations, and communities develop when they share what earlier generations have imagined and when they, in turn, generate and pass on what they imagine.”

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February 25, 2010 by Abigail

January 2010, 21 pages. Fine Arts Fund, 20 East Central Parkway, Suite 200, Cincinnati, OH, 45202, 513-871-2787, www.fineartsfund.org

Supporters of the arts have struggled to develop a national conversation that makes the case for robust, ongoing public support for the arts; but public spending on the arts is too often criticized as an example of wasteful government spending or a misguided government intrusion into an area where it does not belong.

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February 24, 2010 by giarts-ts-admin

Speech delivered at the Council on Foundations Family Foundation Conference, February 2, 2010, San Diego

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February 24, 2010 by Abigail

October 2009, 105 pages. PennPraxis, 409 Durham Wing, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 10003, 215-573-8719, www.design.upenn.edu/pennpraxis

Download at: http://issuu.com/pennpraxis/docs/report_publicart

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December 23, 2009 by Steve

ARTWorks for Kids, part of the Hunt Alternatives Fund, garners sustained private and public support of arts organizations in Eastern Massachusetts and promotes the arts in classrooms, afterschool programs, and the larger community. This brochure is aimed at arts education advocacy.

Download:

   Making the Policy Case for Public Investment in Youth Arts (564Kb)

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November 22, 2009 by Steve

Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts; Edited by Michael Hutter and David Throsby; Cambridge University Press, 2007, 324 pages

The art that matters to us … is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us that has nothing to do with the price.
— Lewis Hyde
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