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Americans for the Arts announced Diving into Racial Equity: The MAP Fund’s Exploration, a case study that delves into the MAP Fund's racial equity in arts and culture grantmaking, its efforts to change practices toward this goal, and how it has activated the framework "Aesthetic Perspectives", to help mitigate bias in proposal review.

Media companies, both legacy and new ones, "still don’t accurately reflect the reality of this country amid our shifting demographics," writes Farai Chideya, program officer in the Creativity and Expressions team at the Ford Foundation, in a recent article.

For the months of December and January, GIA’s photo banner features work supported by 4Culture.

As a multi-disciplinary public development authority, 4Culture represents a unique model of funding, tackling “culture” via a four-pronged approach: arts, heritage, preservation, and public art. Chartered by the King County Council in Washington State, the agency invests public dollars into the area’s cultural ecosystem, which is home to Seattle, that state’s largest city.

Cultural organizations are increasingly being called upon to refuse funding that their critics regard as ethically questionable, such as private prisons, tear gas, opioids, environmentally damaging sources of energy, etc.

Humans inherently process change as loss, and there is a foundation for this. Change is loss of the past. And, change imposed upon us from without is especially painful, as so many in the cultural world are learning. The only way out of this pain is to be the leaders of it.

Ben Hecht, president & CEO of Living Cities, a collective of 19 of the world’s wealthiest philanthropic and financial institutions, writes in The Chronicle of Philanthropy of their journey "to embed racial equity in our culture, which means becoming more accountable to the communities we serve and addressing the root causes of inequality."

As we come to the final issue of the Reader in this thirtieth year of publication, Frances, Carmen, and I have been reflecting upon the question of impact. Presenting this to the field of arts and culture funders is perhaps something obvious, however an important part of this exploration for us was to really understand, from multiple perspectives, how the Reader evolved into its current iteration and what influences helped shape these evolutions.

I am honored to have this opportunity to interview Gary Steuer, president and CEO of the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation. Gary is a respected colleague, a member of Grantmakers in the Arts’ board of directors, and co-chair of the GIA Denver Conference Planning Committee for the upcoming annual conference. I am pleased to note that Bonfils-Stanton has been embracing equity in their support of Denver’s nonprofit community, including its arts organizations.

Consider downloading RE-Tool so you can follow along as you read this article. Many of the topics in this article refer directly to RE-Tool, including specific page references.

For the past decade, landmark research has begun proving what many creatives have long known: the arts have an equity problem. And it is widespread. Despite cultural phenomena like the hit Broadway musical Hamilton, asymmetries are ubiquitous in the production and consumption of the arts.

It takes some courage to come to a conference of funders and tell them what they do wrong. In no uncertain terms. Especially if you are an organization that could use their money.

But there was a lot of that at the Tuesday morning panel titled: Expressions for Justice: Grantmaking in the arts for systems change. The exchange was open, and maybe the most direct of the entire GIA conference.