Fair Funding Access

For the past several years, the Arts Program at the Doris Duke Foundation (DDF), with Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA), and Callahan Consulting for the Arts (CCA) has been leading Fair Funding Access (FFA), a project to develop and test a system for measuring the fairness of its grantmaking by participating arts funders. In 2025-2026, FFA, including the process used to implement it, will move from a project of DDF to an initiative housed at GIA and managed with CCA that serves its grantmaker members.  This page describes FFA’s evolution and goals and announces a new opportunity for a select group of GIA members to participate.  

The goals of FFA are for funders to: 

  • Move from general impressions of progress to concrete data about the degree to which our grant portfolios are making progress in advancing fair access to funding.
  • Augment our grants data with an agreed-upon set of measures of fair funding access, as developed by peers.
  • Take ownership of our data and our story of addressing fair funding access.
  • Eventually, consider setting goals related to fair funding access to which we can hold ourselves and our field accountable. 

Over the years it has existed, FFA has evolved and expanded. Over several years, Doris Duke Foundation developed the FFA Framework by working with a larger cohort of funders, mostly foundations, to measure the fairness and effectiveness of their arts grants in meeting their stated goals. Originally, racial disparities were the main source of content for the framework, but the flexible design can be adapted to other funder priorities or interest areas. 

In 2022, GIA introduced the project through this blog. GIA invited participating funders to described the experience of participating in the project Cohort in this podcast  with Susan Feder (Mellon Foundation), Adam Fong (William & Flora Hewlett Foundation), and Maurine Knighton (Doris Duke Foundation); and this podcast  with Eleanor Savage (Jerome Foundation), and Tiffany Wilhelm (Opportunity Fund). and this blog post. 

Participating grantmakers shared the results of the FFA cohort during a breakout session at GIA’s conference in October 2024. They explained the fairness measurement process and the Framework. 

To Participate in FFA

GIA looks forward to broadening our members’ participation in FFA into the future. In 2025-2026, we will grow FFA from a measurement framework alone into a forum to discuss the challenges of grantmaking in the current environment and ways that FFA and the framework can offer support. In 2025-2026, working with DDF and CCA, a larger group of funders will be offered the opportunity to join a cohort that—together—will consider and process changing contexts, share ideas, solve problems and use a shared measurement framework.

For more information on collaborating with your peer grantmakers as part of this project, please join GIA’s Fair Funding Access webinar on August 12 from 2-3:30pm ET. 

Grantmakers will be required to complete an intake process (deadline September 10, 2025).  To learn about it, visit the FFA Intake Overview on CCA's website.  

Please email fair@forthearts.org for more information.