New resources and forums inspired this effort to digest significant readings in cultural participation. Researchers at the Rand Corporation, for example, have been compiling a comprehensive literature review of readings in cultural participation and audience development for the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Fund. The review will soon be available on the World Wide Web and will expand on the helpful bibliography previously created by Becky Pettit and Paul DiMaggio.
Search
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.
There are an abundance of theories — and even more clichés — about why the arts should be in young people's lives. However, academically rigorous research that demonstrates the power of the arts is scarce. This article summarizes a decade of research by a team of anthropologists in after-school programs identified by young people themselves as high quality. The researchers found common characteristics that made these programs successful, whether their focus was academic, sport, community service, or the arts. The balance of these characteristics differs among programs, though.
Typically when businesses decide to support the arts they do so through a grant-giving mechanism or through a program that places employees as volunteers and consultants in arts organizations. But, I've noticed a different kind of interaction between the profit-making and not-for-profit art worlds in recent years. Some business people have set up foundations dedicated to improving the ethical and cultural context in which their own professions practice.
Currently they hold almost $70 million in assets. With some luck and hard work, they hope in ten years to increase that amount ten-fold to over $750 million. They can be found east and west, north and south. They are modest and ambitious. They are large and they are small. And, most importantly, they are changing and challenging the very nature of public funding of the arts nationwide.
In June 1998 the New York Regional Association of Grantmakers held a forum on "Conflicting Visions of Philanthropy" and I was invited to place the recent criticism of the field of philanthropy in historical perspective. [See page 44 for a short report on the session as a whole.] My objective at the forum, and in this revision of those remarks, is to put the problem in bold historical relief and to provide a context for understanding the long tradition of criticism of foundations and philanthropy. In doing so, I want to make five basic points.
1.
Classical musics are comparatively rare; they seem to need for their existence not only a leisured class able to command a quantity of surplus resources but also a situation where that class is to some degree isolated from the majority of the people and possesses the social power to represent its own tastes as superior.
The past year has brought forward several thoughtful investigations into the future of nonprofit leadership. Among other commentaries, Investing in Leadership by Betsy Hubbard (Volume 1) and Kathleen P. Enright (Volume 2) — published by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations — and Daring to Lead, 2006, by Jeanne Bell, Richard Moyers, and Timothy Wolfred — published by CompassPoint and the Meyer Foundation — are thoughtful and meaty.
Grantmakers in the Arts has been in existence for a brief two decades, and yet even within the ranks of long-time GIA conference attendees and the veterans who are among GIA's leaders today, there is no common recollection of the organization's prehistory and the moment of its founding. History generally belongs to the domain of the humanities rather than the arts, but nonetheless it is slightly embarrassing that a professional arts philanthropy organization, which has come to exercise substantial influence it its field, has no record of its founding.
As arts funders, we often perceive our capacity to direct financial resources to worthy arts organizations as the most valuable tool at our disposal. That's probably correct and, indeed, as it should be. After all, most of our institutions have been established by donors for the core purpose of grantmaking, and the law mandates that we award grants for public benefit.