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The GIA Library is an information hub that includes articles, research reports, and other materials covering a wide variety of topics relevant to the arts and arts funding. These resources are made available free to members and non-members of GIA. Users can search by keyword or browse by category for materials to use in research and self-directed learning. Current arts philanthropy news items are available separately in our news feed - News from the Field.

Puget Sound Funders Act Together

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.
—Managing Director, large performing arts group

Introduction

Why Arts?... Why Arts!

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.

How Can the Arts Become Central?

In the past two years, several prominent foundations at national, regional, and local levels have appointed new presidents. Such leadership transitions are likely to increase in the years ahead in keeping with the larger generational shift in the nonprofit sector. Very few of the new foundation leaders are likely to come from the arts sector, and many will have had little direct experience with our field.

What Is Civil Society?

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.

What Do We Mean by Art, Artists, Culture, and Industry?

As we, individually or collectively, set out to make a case for the many ways the arts have relevance in today's world of economic turmoil and change, it's helpful to be clear what we mean by terms like “art,” “culture,” and “industry” and also to understand what the same terms might mean to others. The words we use are telling. Their use has a history that says much about where the work we call “art” resides in our collective lives from one period to the next.

Arguments for Cultural Democracy and Community Cultural Development

The following piece is excerpted from the second of a two-part article written for the Community Arts Network, “The New New Deal.” Part one, published in December 2008, was titled, “the New New Deal: Public Service Jobs for Artists.” It described some of the things artists could do with public-service jobs. This excerpt is from part two, published February 24, 2009, “A New WPA for Artists: How and Why.” In this excerpt, Goldbard takes up the question of “why,” what are all the good reasons to support a new WPA for artists.

read:write

2008, 64 pages. Arts Council England, 14 Great Peter Street, London SW1P 3NQ, UK, 0845-300-6590, www.artscouncil.org.uk

http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/documents/publications/
phpvMEmeh.pdf

Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody

2008, 327 pages.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.
— Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1849 French critic and writer

Culture and Community Revitalization: A Collaboration

Between 2006 and 2008, the Social Impact of the Arts Project, a research group at the University of Pennsylvania (SIAP), collaborated with The Reinvestment Fund (TRF), a community development financial institution, on an investigation of the creative sector's potential contribution to neighborhood economic and community development.

Minding the Gaps

Jaime Cortez was an arts and culture fellow at the San Francisco Foundation for two years. At the end of his fellowship, he and the other outgoing fellows were asked to read a prepared farewell statement to the board and staff of the foundation. Following is his closing presentation, given on July 9, 2008.