Arts and Community Development

Can you explain, in simple terms, how you or someone you know is changed by listening to music, watching a dance performance, looking at an artwork, or writing in a journal? I’d be hard pressed to manage a coherent response.

It’s not easy to talk about how art transforms or how we are different because of it. Many who work in the arts, including those of us who do so because of our belief in the transformative power of art, lack a vernacular for communicating its impacts.

2005, 18 pages. Neighborhood Funders Group, 1301 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036, 202-833-4690, www.nfg.org

Download PDF: www.nfg.org/publications/nfg_25_years.pdf

This brief report documents the work of this organization and the growth of the community development field in philanthropy since 1980.

The Southern California Tribal Chairmen's Association, using a three-year grant from Hewlett Packard in 2001, has created the Tribal Digital Village (TDV). Using a high-performance wireless backbone, the TDV project delivers wireless broadband to community centers, fire stations, sheriff substations, Tribal administration buildings, and Tribal libraries in-and-around eighteen tribal reservations. This long-distance, point-to-point, wireless system is ideally suited to the geographically diverse area that required coverage.

2005, 32 pages. Cultural Initiatives Silicon Valley , 1153 Lincoln Avenue, Suite I, San Jose

"We have a term in our language called gW3dZadad— it is a form of wealth. It's the wealth of knowledge of culture of our peoples, our laws, our ceremonies, our songs, of the names of our ancestors...Our ancestors live today as long as we pass it down to our children.”
Bruce subiyay Miller, Community Spirit Award recipient

Emily Dickinson couldn't have found a more perfect way to describe how so many artists and artist advocates approach the world.¹  It is tempting to give ourselves over to the rare work that fires our inspiration, and shut the door on everything else. It is often only in nurturing isolation and fringe communities that new ideas find their full flower. But there is a danger in the isolation.

August 2004, 14 pages. The Urban Institute, 2100 M Street NW, Washington, DC, 20037, 202-833-7200, www.urban.org

Download pdf: www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/311043_Arts_Nonarts.pdf

March 2003, 126 pages. The Richard Driehaus Foundation, 203 N. Wabash Ave., Suite 1800, Chicago, IL 60601, and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 140 S. Dearborn Street, Suite 1100, Chicago, IL, 60603

Download pdf: http://www.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7BB0386CE3-8B29-4162-8098-E466FB856794%7D/SMALL_BUDGET_ARTS_ACTIVITIES.PDF

2004, 20 pages, with accompanying DVD. La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94750, 510-849-2568, www.lapena.org

As Tia Oros Peters so eloquently states in her essay that follows, there is no particular word for art in the thousands of Indigenous languages of the world. While there are hundreds of Native American languages, the same holds true; Native Americans do not and cannot separate the importance of art and culture from everyday life. It is one goal of GIA's Indigenous People's Network to bring this important way of life to the fore of grantmakers' thinking.