Alternative Economies

From Toledo Museum of Art: The Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) has committed to invest $1 million in the new Inclusive Creative Economy Strategy launched by Upstart Co-Lab, a nonprofit impact investing leader that connects capital with creative people and companies in the creative industries delivering both social impact and financial return. This Strategy is the first of its kind in the U.S. 

From Upstart Co-Lab: The “creator economy” is the online ecosystem of platforms, products and services that enable independent content creators to make their work, build their audiences, monetize their ideas, and manage their careers. Technology is transforming how creative work is produced, distributed, compensated, and enjoyed — while simultaneously expanding who gets to tell their stories and who sees their own experiences represented online. Upstart Co-Lab believes impact investors can play a role to ensure the values of diversity, equity, inclusion and access are prioritized in this rapidly growing sector.

The latest in a series of deep dives into key creative industries, this report looks at a fast-growing segment of Upstart Co-Lab’s pipeline of impact investment opportunities in the U.S. creative economy.

This week on the NEA Art Works podcast, they discuss, "investing in the creative economy from two perspectives." The first, Laura Callanan, founding partner of Upstart Co-Lab, and then Sheoyki Jones, founding program manager of Creative Industries.

“Philanthropists apparently wanted to help arts and culture organizations that were hurt by canceled performances, classes and fund raising events, which caused a loss of revenue,” Fidelity Charitable said. Summarizing support as, “Donors gave $351 million more in 2021 than in 2020 to arts and cultural organizations.”

Last month, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, along with Omidyar Network, announced more than $40 million in grants to support the establishment of multidisciplinary academic centers dedicated to reimagining the relationships among markets, governments, and people. "At a time when conventional economic prescriptions are failing and democratic governance is threatened around the world, scholars at leading academic institutions will investigate how economies should work in the 21st century and the aims they should serve," the Foundation stated in their announcement.

Zakiya Harris is in the process of group of co-founding BlacSpace Cooperative, organizations led by Black women in Oakland working to create a business development ecosystem to uplift the city's Black arts community. Harris - a cultural architect who grew up in East Oakland and has worked for more than two decades on projects that explore the intersections of art, activism, and entrepreneurship - says, "We, as a collective community, recognized that we were at a critical moment, and we could leverage the opportunity of the pandemic and the uprising toward a cultural reset."

"Conventional banking hasn't worked for businesses owned by people of color. But a new network is designed to get money flowing fairly to BIPOC economies." Common Future’s CEO, Rodney Foxworth, speaks with Yes! Magazine about their strategy to disrupt traditional lending models, which are neither racially neutral nor adequate for BIPOC communities or businesses.

Artist Kevin Beasley was invited to create an artwork in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. "Instead, he bought land, cleared it, and began to plant a garden," writes Siddhartha Mitter in the New York Times. "By now, many local faces were familiar to him; others were not, and he listened intently to their suggestions, and also to their doubts and cautions."

Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) just released Solidarity Not Charity: Arts & Culture Grantmaking in the Solidarity Economy, a report that explores how the grantmaking community can support culture-workers and artists through an increasingly just economy.