Social Justice

"We have to find business structures that meaningfully place people first and upend the practice of concentrating decision-making power and money in the hands of administrative leadership while undercompensating and disenfranchising the majority of workers," wrote Arianna Gass and Daniel Park on a worker cooperative.

The Pittsburgh Foundation, in collaboration with The Opportunity Fund, is seeking submissions from local artists striving for social justice solutions in recently available funding for the grant initiative “Exposure: An Artists Program.”

The “Fix Team” at Grist, an independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future, brought together Anjali Nath Upadhyay, a philosopher and political scientist at Liberation Spring, and facilitator Gibrán Rivera in what Rivera described as an experiment called "Where Shift Happens: A Narrative and Cultural Power Mini-School."

Farhad Ebrahimi, founder and president of the Chorus Foundation in Boston, MA, writes for The Forge on the subject of private philanthropy's future, and the structural reforms that are needed:

Philanthropy as it’s conventionally understood is the product of racial capitalism. As a result, I see progressive — or even radical — private philanthropy as, at best, a transitional form. If we seek to support transformational work, then we ourselves must be open to transformation. I like to think of this as a “just transition” for the philanthropic sector: we must directly challenge the conditions that produced the wealth inequality that allowed for private philanthropy in the first place.

An article in Chalkbeat discusses efforts that have "attempted to ban critical race theory, the academic framework that examines how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism."

The Communicative Arts Academy, "a vital hub for a community largely excluded from Los Angeles’s cultural institutions," is at the center of this New York Times Style Magazine article.

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United States Artists and the Rainin Foundation hosted a virtual gathering of the inaugural Rainin Fellows: Margo Hall, Rodrigo Reyes, Amara Tabor-Smith, and Saqib Keval with Jocelyn Jackson of the People’s Kitchen Collective.

Inside Philanthropy checks in with leaders in the arts funding sector to see how the space has changed in response to calls to fight systemic racism and what remains to be done.

March 2021, 121 pages. Grantmakers in the Arts, 522 Courtlandt Avenue, 1st Floor, Bronx, NY 10451.https://art.coop/.