Readings

I was privileged to have facilitated GIA’s Funder Forum on Arts in Medicine this past February in Orlando, Florida. In that role, I had the opportunity to listen to and learn from the gathered practitioners and funders. Since then, I have reflected on what for me was an exceptional day of sharing and exchange that I think benefited both the participants and the growing arts-in-medicine field. Here is some of what emerged.

One of the key issues of our time is health care. We know that it is complicated because of its vast scale of services and intimate reach into every life, family, and community in this country. The search for access to high-quality health care for millions of Americans is often difficult. Medical advances of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries have extended the life span, cured pandemic diseases like polio, and have made it possible to manage chronic illnesses once debilitating.

Two years ago, I had breakfast with a colleague — very nice guy who has helped build the social, or “impact,” investing sector. I shared my ideas about how to connect impact investing with the arts.

To him, investing in the arts meant buying a Picasso or a Van Gogh, collecting art objects. He agreed there was a market for fine art. But impact investing in the arts? He was dead against it.

As a new administration enters our nation’s White House, it is timely to reflect on the way that private philanthropy and public foundations joined forces to step into the gap when federal funding for the arts was dramatically reduced in the early 1990s.

As our country prepares for a Trump presidency, the issue of economic revitalization in rural American has much more urgency than eight months ago when I started collecting data for this work. Here is a sampling of headlines from coverage by the New York Times of the economic decline in the rust belt, or more specifically, coal country and Appalachian towns: “Trump’s Promises Will Be Hard to Keep, but Coal Country Has Faith” (Nov. 28, 2016); “A Bleak Outlook for Trump’s Promises to Coal Miners” (Nov.

What can you do when times are uncertain, and yet a clear opportunity to advance a collective agenda presents itself? Take action.

The League of American Orchestras’ upcoming national conference in Detroit falls just days before the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Detroit uprising, the largest urban disruption in America since the Civil War. According to Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) president Anne Parsons, the 1967 riot was the context for the orchestra’s fellowship program for African American musicians.

Story matters, and we are at a pivotal moment in which there is a growing understanding that narratives that move hearts and minds are critical. Those of us who work at the intersection of the arts and social justice have known this for some time — in the words of Jeff Chang, “cultural change precedes political change” — but it has become apparent to many others that without compelling storytelling, policy platforms do not stick.