As a new administration enters our nation’s White House, it is timely to reflect on the way that private philanthropy and public foundations joined forces to step into the gap when federal funding for the arts was dramatically reduced in the early 1990s.
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On March 2, 2016, Grantmakers in the Arts held the invitational Thought Leader Forum on Artists in Community Settings at the Regional Arts Commission, Saint Louis, Missouri. The gathering involved nineteen funders, seven presenters from the field, and GIA staff and board observers. Eric Booth of Everyday Arts, Inc., facilitated and presented at the forum.
For several years my brother, Alex Laing, principal clarinetist for the Phoenix Symphony, and I, senior program officer at the Heinz Endowments, have been having often intense conversations, where my brother probed the thinking behind Heinz Endowments’ grantmaking that placed an emphasis on African and African diasporic culture, distressed neighborhoods, and teaching artists. Heinz Endowments, having taken the advice of Anasa Troutman of the consulting firm Lion and Butterfly, has begun to call this work transformative arts education.
Enriching our culture and engaging diverse and underserved communities, small arts organizations pop up, flourish, and sometimes flounder, mostly under the philanthropic radar. They often foster artistic expressions not adequately served by larger organizations.
The following essay was jointly commissioned by Grantmakers in the Arts for its 2002 annual conference and by the Funders' Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities as one in its series of Translation Papers.
Introduction