Just societies cannot grow in toxic soil. To build regenerative communities, we should look to how life flourishes in the natural world, of which we are an inherent part.
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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.
"What should arts advocates say and do now? How can they reconceive their own roles to point to the deeper reasons for arts funding? How can they speak to the moment, rather than repeat tired and failed arguments?" asks Arlene Goldbard in a recent blog post.
Do you think that we are living in a zeitgeist of catalytic change? I have heard the word catalytic used so frequently that I find myself accessorizing moments with this adjective as if it holds the weight of tectonic shifts. It seems to promise the kind of change that either redirects historical systems of oppression toward equity — gradually erasing calcified notions of otherness that fuel supremacist behaviors — or catapults us back into a time where Flintstones-like ideals become presidential norms.
This June, while facing a proposed 2018 budget just large enough to sunset the agency, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Jane Chu began a keynote address at the 2017 Americans for the Arts conference with a simple but timely question, “What if access to the arts was a human right?”
A society’s values are the basis upon which all else is built. These values and the ways they are expressed are a society’s culture. The way a society governs itself cannot be fully democratic without there being clear avenues for the expression of community values, and unless these expressions directly affect the directions society takes. These processes are culture at work.
— Jon Hawkes, The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s Essential Role in Public Planning
What can you do when times are uncertain, and yet a clear opportunity to advance a collective agenda presents itself? Take action.
This article is excerpted from a phone conversation between Anthony Leiserowitz and Alexis Frasz on June 8, 2016.
On May 25, 2016, Grantmakers in the Arts gathered a cross-section of twenty-eight funders from the arts and environmental sectors for the Arts and Environmental Sustainability Thought Leader Forum at the New York Community Trust. Most foundations in attendance were represented by two people: a person from the arts and a person from the environment, each of whom were interested in collaborative work at this intersection. Helicon Collaborative organized and facilitated the session.
In 2008 I wrote Le facteur C (later translated as No Culture, No Future) because I felt an urgent need to respond to a troubling trend: a growing chasm between the art experiences that were being offered by arts professionals and those being sought out by an ever-growing portion of the public. My book argued that for the arts to thrive and to be a force in our everyday lives, the professional arts sector needed to do more and differently to engage people in the arts in meaningful, life-enriching ways.
On June 2, 2015, Alternate ROOTS Executive Director, Carlton Turner, presented the following as a keynote address at the Grantmakers in the Arts Racial Equity Forum in Atlanta, Georgia.
Introduction: Georgia Men
“Black people did not come back from Georgia.”
“A man or woman that had learned that they might be taken south might do anything.”
“A man who had to see his son stand naked before buyers might do anything.”