On behalf of GIA’s team and our membership, I am writing this blog post as a response to Quanice Floyd’s recently shared article, The Failure of Arts Organizations to Move Toward Racial Equity. First, to Quanice – Grantmakers in the Arts hears you. Your statement offered our community the opportunity and charge to reflect deeply, specifically about power.
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This session shared findings from a partnership between GIA and the Cultural Strategies Council and the National Accelerator for Cultural Innovation to explore how non-arts funders can transform their practice to advance racial justice via cultural expression and the arts.
As another systems practitioner aspiring to transformational systems change (from the public health sector and local government), I greatly appreciated and enjoyed the breadth and sharpness of this panel’s expertise and analysis. First was the reminder by Kiley Arroyo of the Cultural Strategies Council that transformational change involves engaging multiple levers at once—at the foundational level, that of “deep culture” or paradigm change. What happens when we start by decentering the Western, settler colonial, extractive worldview? What happens when we start with a different story?
In a recent series of blog posts entitled The Future We Want, I laid out findings from a number of recent studies of how the grantmaking community has responded to the events of 2020, including the pandemic and the movement for Black lives. Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) has conducted a survey of recent and upcoming changes in arts grantmaking practices, receiving 142 responses, a response rate of over 50% of our members.
The world is in the midst of a historic moment with our changing our practices in order to function during the pandemic and embracing the movement for racial justice. This is a time of great opportunity, as long as we recognize and embrace it. At the start of April I shared a letter calling for us to build deep resilience in our field.
“Black media—and my expertise is in Black media—is an endangered species. If there’s not a wholesale investment in reviving and supporting and providing resources to Black-owned media, it will go away.”
An article in Nonprofit Quarterly discusses President Donald Trump’s Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping, explains "how the EO and related actions of the government are bigger and far worse—and why nonprofits need to pay attention."
Appendix C: Committee Sound-bytes, Impetus
Deep Context: My approach to data is “deep context”; I see value in understanding what is beneath the data. I think context is what helps determine future courses of action, which result in systemic solutions.
This piece by Inside Philanthropy's Mike Scutari sheds light on how Bonfils-Stanton Foundation "boosted annual support for arts organizations serving communities of color by 670% since 2013."
For the month of October, GIA’s photo banner features work supported by the Wallace Foundation.
The full transcript of this podcast is published below.
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