GIA Blog

In a letter, the board of directors of Grantmakers in the Arts requested that Congress support appropriations of $167.50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities respectively, as well as $262 million for the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and $480 million for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Funders are redefining philanthropic giving in education, focusing increasingly on advancing education equity, according to a new report from Grantmakers in Education.

In his most recent Nonprofit with Balls blog post, Vu Le states that the more privilege people have, the more likely they are to complain about the lack of solutions proposed. He calls it "solutions privilege,” "the privilege of expecting solutions that would align with one’s worldview and not challenge one’s privilege."

Each year, Eastern State Penitentiary, which was built as a punishing fortress in 1829 outside Philadelphia, gets hundreds of visitors to explore its grounds. At some point, tackling the site's history, as The New York Times reported, was not enough and addressing mass incarceration as a crisis in the United States was the answer.

Sherece Y. West-Scantlebury, president and CEO of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, shares in an article published in Stanford Social Innovation Review how the foundation she leads embarked on a path to transform its endowment and achieve racial equity.

“Why not put money in the hands of artists to spark projects that would inspire public imagination?”

That's the question the Barr Foundation and the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) asked as the Creative City program began in 2015 and there was a clear interest for more arts in Boston, write in a post San San Wong, director of Barr Foundation's Arts & Creativity and GIA board member, and Cathy Edwards, executive director of New England Foundation for the Arts.

The Highlander Research and Education Center, a civil rights center in Tennessee founded in 1932, stated that a fire that burned its main office last Friday may have been intentionally set, after a “symbol connected to the white power movement” was found spray-painted in the parking lot next to the rubble of the building, as The New York Times reported.

Brion Gill (better known as Lady Brion), activist and spoken-word artist, led a walking tour of Baltimore that was part of the application process "to create what would be the first Maryland-designated arts and entertainment district dedicated to black arts and culture, in a city that happens to be two-thirds black," as Next City reports.

Mid-America Arts Alliance (M-AAA) announced Interchange, a new pilot program created to strengthen communities and individual artists within the organization's region by supporting artist-led projects focused on social impact.

An initiative to prevent funding groups that promote hatred was recently launched by Amalgamated Foundation and its partners. The "Hate Is Not Charitable" campaign is calling for Donor Advised Funds (DAF) providers "to exercise their legal discretion over grants recommended by their donors and adopt pro-active policies to ensure that funds do not flow to organizations that promote hatred."