GIA’s summits and workshops are one- or two-day convenings for funders to gather to learn about and discuss issues critical to the field. Forums offer an opportunity for peer learning and open discussion on best practices and future action, while workshops led by experts in the field offer deep-dive training for grantmakers to help improve practices and outcomes.
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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.
“Community Empowerment through Justice, Art, and Leadership” is the new grantmaking model of The Field Foundation of Illinois. President Angelique Power announced the change in a letter to the field on Monday describing steps the foundation took to evaluate its work with feedback from nonprofits and peer foundations, undergo racial equity training, and assess the needs of the Chicago area. The result of these efforts is a new grantmaking model which redefines the foundation’s program areas and funding guidelines and coincides with the launch of its new application process.
The stated goal in Grantmakers in the Arts’ statement of purpose on racial equity in arts philanthropy is “to increase arts funding for ALAANA* (African, Latino/a, Asian, Arab, and Native American) artists, arts organizations, children, and adults.” This webinar will feature programs by two public funders — one from Canada and one from the US — and one private funder that each direct their funding support to artists and arts organizations from historically underfunded identity groups within their geographic focus areas.
In the latest issue of the GIA Reader, Caroline and Tony Grant of Sustainable Arts Foundation write about their efforts to examine and change its grantmaking practices with a racial equity lens. In 2016, the foundation announced its commitment to award at least half of its grants to artists of color. Read “I Once Was Blind: Acknowledging Race in Granting to Individuals.”
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
Recently, Caroline served on the jury of a government arts council. Among the forms she had to fill out were the standard nondiscrimination forms required of any vendor doing business in this city. It gave her pause, as one individual, to agree that her “firm” would not discriminate against “its employees” on the basis of “Race, color, creed, religion, national origin, ancestry, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity (transgender status), domestic partner status, marital status, disability, AIDS/HIV status, height, weight.”
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Conference Guiding Principles and Practices (.pdf, 70Kb)
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GIA President & CEO Position Profile (196Kb)
About Grantmakers in the Arts
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.

