Search

The opportunities to connect communities through culture and to use that cultural engagement to educate one another are simultaneously compelling and challenging to cultural foundations and philanthropists. Recent reports and research provide strong arguments and preliminary insights into ways that culture can advance engagement across boundaries, both geographic and societal. But the most challenging efforts may be those intended to connect the United States to Muslim populations abroad.

We live in a world of "widespread hostility toward the United States and its policies."1 This antipathy is not limited to the countries and peoples that are directly affected by the U.S. "war on terror" and its attendant pol-icies, but includes many of our former allies and fellow democracies. A friend who just returned from a year in Spain reports that she spent a significant amount of time and energy convincing people she met there that the U.S.

I am pleased to report on a new initiative to be launched in November 2003. I first got wind of this proposal at an event in Canada House in London where the organizers were sounding out representatives of the arts-on-television community as to their interest and enthusiasm for an annual gathering to be held in different places around the world. This is an initiative of the Banff Television Foundation based in Alberta, Canada and enjoys the support of IMZ (The International Music Zentrum, in Vienna), U.S. Independents (a Washington, D.C.

A Report on the Ford Foundation Initiative
Edited by Mindy Levine

1999, 64 pages. Developed by New England Foundation for the Arts, edited and published by Arts International, ISBN 0-9676467-0-7, 212-674-9744