GIA Blog

By Sharnita C. Johnson and Randy Engstrom

When the novel coronavirus pandemic hit, like most people – and especially in my role as co-chair of the GIA Racial Equity Committee, with colleague Randy Engstrom, director at the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture – we agreed we wanted to say something to address the loss of life, ways of life, and the devastation the arts community was experiencing. While we literally work on opposite sides of the country, and in very different environments – Randy a public funder and me at a private foundation – we like most of our funding colleagues, sprang into action to get much needed resources to our grantee partners.

The coronavirus pandemic and the uprisings over police brutality and systemic racism have had a clear impact in communications in the philanthropic field, as a recent survey conducted by the Communications Network and Atlantic 57 has revealed.

Jasmine Wahi, the Holly Block Social Justice Curator at the Bronx Museum, addressed recently in artnet the importance of the role of social justice in museums, specially in the wake of recent Black Lives Matter protests, and why every art institution should have a social justice curator.

For the month of July, GIA’s photo banner features work supported by United States Artists.

As the coronavirus pandemic brought our city to a halt, The New York Community Trust and several philanthropic partners reached out to each other and quickly organized a powerful mobilization of funds to strengthen the city’s safety net.

The 18 lead partners created the NYC COVID-19 Response & Impact Fund to, in part, get urgently needed money to arts nonprofits whose survival was suddenly endangered. The needs across the city were enormous. But, because of our experience with previous catastrophic events such as September 11 and superstorm Sandy, we knew how we could respond: our grantmaking needed to be well-informed, precise, and go to where it would do the most good.

A new report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP), based on a nationally representative survey of nonprofit leaders in May 2020, addresses what is most needed from funders "and what differences in experience are emerging based on characteristics such as organization type and gender of nonprofit leaders."

NDN Collective recently launched the Radical Imagination Grant to support six Indigenous artists/culture bearers of all traditions, mediums and genres, that will be awarded grants of $50,000, according to the website.

Upstart Co-Lab, a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, launched a new coalition that represents $1 billion of impact investing capacity supporting the creative economy, according to the announcement.

The Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture announced a new countywide Cultural Policy that provides direction and guidelines for how the LA County and its departments "will ensure that every resident of LA County has meaningful access to arts and culture."

Belonging in Oakland: A Just City Cultural Fund is a new multi-year program that will fund Oakland cultural practitioners of color to radically reimagine a racially just city, according to the recent announcement.