Racial Equity Community of Practice for Experienced Practitioners Workshop: September 2021

Pro-BIPOC Arts Funding Community of Practice

Workshop Resources

• Agenda
• Slides

Please come to the workshop with questions and idea for points of intervention in your organization/agency/field that you may develop into an experiment (download the experiment template here) that you would like to develop and test. This could be a current program, practice or organizational/agency policy. These considerations could include development or re-design of tools such as requests-for-proposals, application, evaluation criteria for grants, etc.

Grantmakers in the Arts’ and Hillombo’s Pro-BIPOC Arts Funding Community of Practice Workshop will focus on your developing an experiment over the course of the 4 workshop modules. The goal of the experiment will be to change, evolve or advance your organization or agency’s practices to be pro-BIPOC and to organize other colleagues to collaborate with you in doing so. You will work on this experiment in dialogue with your peers and on your own throughout our 4 weeks together. You will then execute the experiment subsequent to the workshop.

Materials to review in preparation

• The Theory Behind the Practice: A Brief Introduction to the Adaptive Leadership FrameworkThis is an essential text as it describes leadership, the importance of organizing others toward change and the importance of treating those change efforts as emotionally resonant, iterative experiments.
• This brief summary of The Theory Behind the Practice: A Brief Introduction to the Adaptive Leadership Framework
• Knowing What to Do Will Never Be Enough by Farhad Ebrahimi is as essential as the text above as it explicitly focuses on grantmaking.
• The other essential introductory text will be: White Privilege in the Arts: the Tip of the Iceberg? This text links to succinct explanations of the Adaptive Leadership frame, the Critical Race Theory frame, and Racial Capitalism, among others.
• If you have not previously participated in Grantmakers in the Arts’ grounding Racial Equity in Arts Funding workshop, please prepare for the workshop by watching this webinar. We recommend viewing from a laptop or desktop computer.
• Grantmakers in the Arts’ Racial Equity Theory of Transformation
• Donella Meadows’ Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
• Please watch the video Seeing Whole Systems, a presentation by Nicky Case. The section from 15:00 – 26:00 addresses feedback loops as tools to address complex systems, which are elements of Donella Meadows’ leverage points. The section from 4:50 – 8:00 addresses systemic interventions. The section from 8:00 – 15:00 addresses visualization of complex systems.

Related texts

• Critical Race Theory: The Bridge: Critical Theory: Critical Race Theory
• Broad overview of Adaptive Leadership: Cambridge Leadership Associates | Adaptive Leadership
• Power Moves, by National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy

Workshop Facilitators

Nadia Elokdah

Vice President & Director of Programs, Grantmakers in the Arts

Nadia Elokdah is an urbanist, designer, and cultural producer. She currently serves as deputy director and director of programs for Grantmakers in the Arts. Most recently she served as special projects manager with the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and she coordinated and co-authored the City’s Monuments Commission and CreateNYC, the first-ever comprehensive cultural plan for NYC in 2017. In this role, she coordinated and led hundreds of engagements with a broad cross-section of the peoples, communities, and stakeholders city-wide. Elokdah is a trained architect and design strategist, researcher, professor, and published author. She holds a Master of Arts in Theories of Urban Practice from Parsons The New School for Design and a Bachelors of Architecture from Temple University.

Justin Laing

President & CEO, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations

Before starting Hillombo in 2017, Justin worked as a Senior Program Officer of Arts & Culture at The Heinz Endowments for more than a decade. His work focused on small and midsized arts organizations, out of school time arts education and Black arts organizations, with a particular interest in participatory grantmaking. He came to philanthropy having worked for ten years as the Assistant Director of Nego Gato, Inc, an Afro Brazilian Music, Dance, and Martial Arts company where he taught, performed and ran the day-to-day operations. Justin has a BA in Black Studies from the University of Pittsburgh and a Masters Degree in Public Management from Carnegie Mellon University. Justin serves as the co-chair of ArtsinHD, an arts planning and creation process in Pittsburgh’s Hill District to support the neighborhood’s master plan and mark the neighborhood as a place for liberatory Black culture. Justin is the son of Susan and Clarence Laing, the father of Kufere, Etana and Adeyemi Laing, and a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity.

Edwin Torres

President & CEO, Grantmakers in the Arts

Edwin Torres joined Grantmakers in the Arts as president & CEO in October 2017. Torres served on the GIA board of directors from 2011 through 2016. He most recently served as deputy commissioner of cultural affairs for New York City, where he worked on elements of the city’s long-term sustainability plan, a study of and efforts to support the diversity of the city’s cultural organizations and the city’s first cultural plan. Prior to joining the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, he was a program officer with The Rockefeller Foundation, where he worked on the foundation’s support for arts and culture, jobs access, and resilience. He has also served in the dean’s office at Parsons the New School for Design, on the arts and culture team at The Ford Foundation as well as on the staff of the Bronx Council on the Arts. He holds a Master of Arts in Art History from Hunter College and a Master of Science in Management from The New School.

Guest Speaker

Aaron Dorfman

President and CEO, National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy

Aaron Dorfman is president and CEO of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), a research and advocacy organization that works to ensure America’s grantmakers and wealthy donors are responsive to the needs of those with the least wealth, opportunity and power. Dorfman, a thoughtful critic, frequently speaks and writes about the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion in philanthropy, the benefits of funding advocacy and community organizing, and the need for greater accountability and transparency in the philanthropic sector. Before joining NCRP in 2007, Dorfman served for 15 years as a community organizer with two national organizing networks, spearheading grassroots campaigns on a variety of issues. He holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Carleton College, a master’s degree in philanthropic studies from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University and serves on the boards of Capital & Main, The Center for Popular Democracy and re:power.