Ralph Smith, the 2007 Conference Chairman, issued a challenge in his welcome message – “that all who attend will leave with renewed energy, capacity and resolve to make a positive contribution toward meeting the challenges of our time.”
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Council on Foundations Annual Conference, May 1, 2001
Craig McGarvey, The James Irvine Foundation
From a position of received privilege, how should one behave so that it might be put to productive use as people are learning to get better at their work? This is a central question facing philanthropy, and it figured centrally in preparations for today. How to say something appropriate and helpful under such extraordinary circumstances?
There was the problem that no single foundation's body of work could possibly measure up to being singled out.
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
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.
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.
2009, 31 pages. Grantmakers for Education, 720 SW Washington Street, Suite 605, Portland, OR, 97205, 503-595-2100, www.edfunders.org
http://www.edfunders.org/downloads/GFEReports/
SchoolLeadershipChallenge.pdf
“What are we doing to cultivate new generations of arts activistsartists, arts managers and arts philanthropers?” This questionoften asked and long massagedhas an equal number of answers to the individuals attempting to answer it. Under the broader umbrella of inspiring young people to make a differencethrough the arts or otherwiseDo Something is an organization that is effectively answering that question with meaningful action.
Last fall after the Taos Journey conference, Anne Focke and I got together to (as we say in California) process the event. She gave me a journal for my writing and a copy of a beautiful little chapbook, A Pragmatic Response to Real Circumstances, originally published by the back room, Portland, Oregon.
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.
Is a trend developing that favors drawing foundation leaders from the for-profit sector rather than from philanthropy or the nonprofit sector? If so, does it change senior grantmaking staff's challenges and opportunities? Would a more corporate view of private philanthropy affect how foundations view the arts?