Grantmakers in the Arts

Arts Education Increasing in California Schools?
by Tommer

Does new research reveal a surprising trend?

There are two truths arts advocates have long taken for granted:

• Arts education is in decline in public schools.
• When budgets tighten, art is usually the first to get the ax.

Attempting to quantify just how arts education has fared over the past 15 years suggests the reality is a lot more difficult to pin down.

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Diane Ragsdale on the “Arts Cliff”
by Tommer

Diane Ragsdale takes on Michael Kaiser on Jumper.

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Teaching Artists and the Future of the Arts
by Steve

From Nick Rabkin writing for Huffington Post:

When students study the arts, they develop their abilities to be creative, plan, explain their thoughts, work together effectively, build theories, make predictions, create analogies, solve complex problems and assess their own work. These are commonly understood as “21st-century skills.” What's more, a growing body of research has also shown that arts education correlates strongly with basic competencies — literacy and numeracy — and a wide range of other positive outcomes for young people. The bottom line is that children who have more arts education do better in school and in life. Significantly, the correlation happens to be strongest for low-income youth, the students most often failed by our schools.
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Announcing GCIR's New Interactive Data Map!
by Tommer

This easy-to-use, interactive data hub, presented by Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, provides a demographic snapshot of the foreign-born population by county in the United States.

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New Report from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP)
by Tommer

This new report titled “Painting with Broader Strokes: Reassessing the Value of an Arts Degree" authored by SNAAP researchers Danielle Lindemann and Steven J. Tepper of Vanderbilt University and funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, focuses on the career paths of arts graduates and counters prevailing views on the value of a college education.

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Does Size Matter? Find Out Now on the Animating Democracy Blog Salon
by Tommer

Animating Democracy’s blog salon, Does Size Matter?, will run December 3-7. Join 20 leaders in the field as they present diverse perspectives, questions, and ideas about increasing impact by scaling.

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We Thought the L3C Went Away. Looks Like It's Back.
by Tommer

Michael DiFonzo discusses the the LC3 (Low-Profit Limited Liability Corporation)on HowlRound.   Video from a recent conference at Columbia University, L3C and the Arts: Understanding the Potential of Low-Profit Limited Liability Corporations, can also be seen online.

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Looking at Nonprofit Fianance Fund's “Complete Capital” Approach
by Steve

Nonprofit Fianance Fund CEO Antony Bugg-Levine writes for Stanford Social Innovation Review on a new framework for Impact Investing:

The rise of the impact investment movement is poised to unlock substantial new capital for social purpose. Innovative nonprofits are already rethinking the way they do business and are going to heroic lengths to extract maximum impact from every dollar. And increasingly, we have the data and knowledge we need to tackle social ills.

But the ultimate contribution of impact investing, and similar innovations, will not come in the form of interesting investments or channeling grant money more efficiently. Instead, it will come by addressing two fundamental challenges of our moment: How will developed countries sustain a safety net in the wake of macroeconomic and demographic pressures? And how will developing countries ensure that economic growth is more equitably shared?

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