Joint Affinity Groups and its core partners – Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy, Funders for LGBTQ Issues, Association of Black Foundation Executives, Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy, Native Americans in Philanthropy, Hispanics in Philanthropy, and Women’s Funding Network – have transformed their coalition into CHANGE Philanthropy. The coalition works “to raise the level of dialogue and shift practice among funders so that philanthropic dollars are dispersed through equitable practices.”
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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.
A recent article in The Washington Post highlights Canada’s shifting approach to arts funding and how it compares to common approaches in the United States and other Western countries:
As much of the Western world flirts with retrenchment into a nativist crouch, Canada is doubling down on what [Melanie Joly, minister for Canadian Heritage,] describes as the basic “social contract,” which has always included the arts as a fundamental part of the national budget. But she and [Simon Brault, the head of the Canada Council for the Arts,] also stress the need to reform the existing system of cultural funding.
We’d be able to produce work that is much more based on the community’s input, because we wouldn’t be nomadic. We’d have a more stable audience because we’d be more stable.
— performing artist
— performing artist
We want to be a convener of culture and conversation, to open the larger community to interact.
— clergy leader
— clergy leader
During the 1960s, a progressive liberation of the spectator from observer to active participant occurred in the visual and performing arts, which were reciprocally informed by participatory forms of social protest and performance: marches, sit-ins, riots, and so on. Dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin (née Ann Schuman, 1920–), with her San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, was directly involved in these developments, and their experiments soon infiltrated the creative endeavors of her husband, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin (1916–2009).
Understanding and embracing transformational change are ubiquitous in cultural policy circles. Research on dramatic demographic shifts, seismic alterations in technology and audience consumption, and postrecession political realities compel arts leaders to master not only their genre but the sticky notion of change itself. Grantmakers in the Arts' own equity work, EmcArts Community Innovation Labs, and ArtPlace’s placemaking practices are all attempts to recalibrate the arts funding ecosystem to respond and adapt to change.
The 1960s was a time of ferment and creation on so many fronts. In the arts, we note explosive growth in the number of significant professional arts institutions as well as countless locally based arts organizations, from chamber orchestras to theater companies; the birth and growth of culturally specific arts groups and arts centers; the creation of arts groups in support of, and arising from, the civil rights movement; the rapid increase in the number of community arts councils, especially in small cities; the birth of Community Arts Councils, Inc.
Note: In the print edition of the GIA Reader, this piece appeared with a reprint of Claudine Brown’s article “Experience as Research” from the Fall 2013 edition of GIA Reader. You can read that article at www.giarts.org/article/experience-as-research-claudine-brown.
Thursday, August 4, 2:00pm EDT / 11:00am PDT
- Tony Grant, Executive Director, Sustainable Arts Foundation
- Justin Laing, Senior Program Officer, Arts and Culture Program, The Heinz Endowments
- Ebony McKinney, Program Officer, Community Investments, San Francisco Arts Commission
An open letter from Richard Kessler, Dean of the Mannes School of Music and Executive Dean for Performing Arts, the New School and Janet Brown, President and CEO of Grantmakers in the Arts.
In the past few days, a growing controversy within the arts sector has emerged over alleged remarks made by the CEO of the National Association for Music Education (NAfME) at a meeting of arts service organizations convened by the National Endowment for the Arts. As two arts executives who have spent a large part of our careers advocating for equitable access to high quality arts education and as members of the Steering Committee of Grantmakers in the Arts Arts Education Funders Coalition, an effort to enhance and develop arts education policies at the federal level, we are compelled to offer this public letter.