GIA Reader (2000-present)

Cheese and crackers in the boardroom? Standard fare.

Puppetry and handwriting analysis? Not so much. Nonetheless, there was a line out the door of the boardroom at the Marriott Hotel in Los Angeles, where the Council on Foundations’ annual conference was taking place. Conferees awaited their personalized encounter with the LA-based arts group the Machine Project, which was also offering mind-reading workshops, cheese music, and concerts of Renaissance lute and vocal music.

On October 12–13, 2012, a consortium of arts and social justice organizations hosted the Arts & Social Change symposium in Seattle. With inspiration, participation, learning, and community building as pillars, the goals of the event were to:

• inspire action and activism; to motivate for change
• have dialogue; make recommendations for systemic and social change
• gain new awareness; to listen, participate, communicate, share, and engage
• meet, to connect and build relationships with other networks beyond the symposium

The cameraman eases his viewers into the glacial wild of Iceland as we breathe to collect ourselves from severe storm news coverage. Suddenly we are in freezing water wading barefoot between chunks of floating ice with the photographer James Balog. He must capture this hunk of ice transfused with light, as an ocean wave is giving it a spectacular spraying.

An Online Conversation

A new level of debate about equity began when the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) released its report Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change: High Impact Strategies for Philanthropy, by Holly Sidford, at the October 2011 GIA conference in San Francisco.

About four years ago I attended an extraordinary meeting in Philadelphia. Susan Nelson, principal of Technical Development Corporation (TDC), was presenting the draft of Getting Beyond Breakeven to the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and many other stakeholders associated with the work.