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The Hill-Snowdon Foundation, General Service Foundation, Jesse Smith Noyes Foundation, the Whitman Institute and other partners have announced the 2nd round of the Defending the Dream Fund.  The Defending the Dream Fund was launched in April 2017 to help fund grassroots community organizing groups address a variety of new and urgent threats related to Trump era policies or practices … Continue reading Defending the Dream Fund Supports Community Organizing in the Trump Era →

GIA board member Jaime Dempsey has been honored with the 2017 Emerging Leader Award from the Center for the Future of Arizona in recognition of her work as a public servant. Dempsey will become the executive director of the Arizona Commission on the Arts in August 2017 after serving eleven years as deputy director.

Read the announcement.

A recent article in the Nonprofit Quarterly: I urge you to take advantage of any advocacy opportunities to lobby your state and federal lawmakers. As a board member of an organization that serves populations who were greatly impacted by our state budget impasse, a statewide emergency, and proposed threats from Washington, I continuously ask myself, … Continue reading How Nonprofit Board Members Can Be Effective Advocates in Troubled Times →

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

The primary thread in my professional life over the past thirty years has been an attempt to understand, engage, and foster innovation and creativity in professional practice, public service, and the arts. For fifteen years or so I worked with foundations as a teacher, trainer, and advisor, focusing on strategic grant making, innovation in philanthropy, portfolio development, and program evaluation.

In many ways, it has been a heartening year for champions of the literary arts.

I pulled my car out of the driveway and parked in front of my neighbors’ house across the street. A few moments later, my friend, Marvin Morales, a thirty-one-year-old Guatemalan PhD student in biology at the University of Florida, opened the door. His right arm hung across his shirtless torso in a navy-blue sling. Across his collarbone there was a rectangular piece of gauze. I asked Marvin how he was feeling. Not good, he said. The pain in his shoulder had kept him up most of the night.

I was privileged to have facilitated GIA’s Funder Forum on Arts in Medicine this past February in Orlando, Florida. In that role, I had the opportunity to listen to and learn from the gathered practitioners and funders. Since then, I have reflected on what for me was an exceptional day of sharing and exchange that I think benefited both the participants and the growing arts-in-medicine field. Here is some of what emerged.

One of the key issues of our time is health care. We know that it is complicated because of its vast scale of services and intimate reach into every life, family, and community in this country. The search for access to high-quality health care for millions of Americans is often difficult. Medical advances of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries have extended the life span, cured pandemic diseases like polio, and have made it possible to manage chronic illnesses once debilitating.

Healthcare is in the headlines and on the minds of every community funder and planner. Join Patricia Lambert from University of Oregon’s arts management program and Jill Sonke, director of University of Florida’s Center for the Arts in Medicine, who will share their experiences working with artists and healthcare professionals to support successful arts-in-medicine programs.