Since 2001, GIA and the Foundation Center have collaborated on an annual “snapshot” of foundation funding for the arts based on grants awarded by a sample of over 1,000 of the largest U.S. foundations. Given the exceptional challenges now facing the country’s foundation and nonprofit communities, we have concluded that the arts field would be better served this year by a broad overview of how foundation giving might fare during the current economic crisis.
Bill Ivey chaired the National Endowment for the Arts from 1998 through 2001, directed the Country Music Foundation from 1971 to 1998, and was twice elected chairman of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He presently serves as founding director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.
Claudine Brown wants us to shore ourselves up with knowledge and examples of how much arts and culture are linked to everything we do. With this in mind, she offers us her own kit bag of reasons for sustaining arts and culture programsand it's a big bag.
Historical data do not mean anything in this situation. There is no blueprint and there is no network. We are doing the best we can with a combination of hard facts and intuition. Every line item is up for grabs; every $1,000 is material. How we feel about it all depends on which newspaper we read that morning.
Many of the feature articles in this issue offer tools for responding to GIA Executive Director Janet Brown's call to speak up, to not sit silently in the back but to stand up and illustrate or make the case for why arts and culture matters.
When presidents and CEOs of foundations try to balance a range of equally justifiable social agendas, where are the arts? Sponsored by GIA, six foundation leaders spent a day and a half together discussing just this topic in the summer of 2008. The relevance of their conversation and the preliminary conclusions they drew are perhaps even more urgent today than they were then, as foundations face increasingly serious questions of priority.
In The Place of the Arts in Multi-focus Foundations, Bruce Sievers writes that the rationale for supporting both the arts and the nonprofit sector as a whole is integrally linked to their capacity to advance pluralism, promote voluntary action, accommodate diversity, and champion individual visions of the public good. “Civil society,” Sievers notes, is increasingly the accepted concept to describe this sphere of social action.