Member Reports

The 2001 Summer Music and Art Institute for Teachers was presented through a collaboration among Cleveland State University, Young Audiences of Cleveland, Cleveland Opera, the Cleveland Orchestra, and ICARE (the Initiative for Cultural Arts in Education, a program currently housed at the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture). The Institute was the first such collaboration by this diverse group of organizations and programs. The featured keynote speakers were Cleveland Municipal School District CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett and Elliot W.

At the Fund for Folk Culture (FFC), we have been working with Laurel Jones and Morrie Warshawski of the Bay Consulting Group (BCG) to survey the range of private support for the folk and traditional arts and investigate opportunities for increased private support in this cultural sector.

Although most grantmakers get involved in program development, it is rare to have the chance to build an entire foundation giving program from the ground up. However, that was exactly the challenge Olga Garay encountered three years ago as the first program director for the arts hired by the newly established Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF). The New York-based foundation was created in 1996 as part of Ms. Duke's estate, whose family wealth came from her father's tobacco company and Duke Power.

At the annual GIA conference last fall, a group of twenty or so participants gathered together for a roundtable session devoted to funding individual immigrant and traditional artists. Organized by staff or board members of the Bush Foundation and the Flintridge Foundation, the roundtable session provided one of the first opportunities for foundation program officers engaged in this type of support to share information and to identify common concerns and strategies to meet them. And, indeed, common concerns and themes did emerge in the discussion.

The Minnesota Regional Arts Councils (RACs) system is one of a kind. Established in 1977 by the Minnesota State Legislature, the Regional Arts Councils work in partnership with the Minnesota State Arts Board to share responsibility for equitably distributing legislative arts funding throughout the state. The result of this system is decentralized decision- making for providing arts grants, establishing programs, and providing services.

In a past report on challenges facing San Francisco Bay Area arts nonprofits (Reader, Vol. 11, No. 2), I wrote at length about space. Many nonprofits had been forced to seek new office, rehearsal, and storage space due to a steep rise in Bay Area real estate costs fueled by demand from a dot-com economy for start-up locations. The situation seems to have eased somewhat, in part due to funder- and municipally-driven programs as well as to a general downturn in the economy.

The Americans with Disabilities Act has been an important piece of legislation, opening doors to opportunities and enabling people with disabilities to gain access to employment, homes and quality of life. Since the passing of the ADA in 1990, the National Endowment for the Arts has been holding conferences with regional arts organizations to encourage access to the arts.

CLEA: Consortium for the Liberal Education of Artists

Here's a simple recipe for something magical: take a group of artists and educators with an unusual (and an unusually passionate) sense of mission, bring them to the exotic conference facilities of The Howard Gilman Foundation's White Oak Plantation in Florida, mix well. Then stand back to see what happens.

Arts in Education

Sitting around tables at a conference center last May, we each joined five other participants in imagining and illustrating possibilities for artists who work in community arts programs for youth. We were part of a group of around thirty people convened as a working group first in San Jose, California in May 2000 and again in October in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Our aim was to explore how to build understanding and action toward the sustainable involvement of artists and arts professionals in youth and community development.