Community Foundation

"Without getting on a soapbox, I would say that dancing is as much a calling as it is anything else. Don't think of it as a career. You're stupid if you do. You've got to have something burning in your gut that you want to express."

Ensembles are marked by a sustained commitment to collaboration..... The ensemble process allows for the development of a distinctive artistic vision and language unique to all artists involved.

— excerpt from the Flintridge Foundation theater mission

When the Council on Foundations meets in Toronto this April, GIA members in attendance will have the chance to meet a fledgling affinity group of Canadian arts funders that is putting together the 1st Canadian Arts Funders Forum.

The Animating Democracy National Exchange on Art and Civic Dialogue
Flint, Michigan, October 9-12, 2003

2002, 127 pages. The Center for an Urban Future, New York, NY, 212-479-3344, www.nycfuture.org.

What can evaluation accomplish for grantmakers and grantees? What roles should each play in the design and execution of the evaluation process? Recent briefings from The Conservation Company and the Neighborhood Funders Group examine these questions from different vantage points.

Evaluation: The Good News for Funders
Andrew Mott

2003, 15 pages. The Urban Institute/Wallace Foundation, www.wallacefoundation.org or www.urban.org

Many grantmakers express a heightened interest in learning more about cultural participation. Research about who participates, what motivates people to participate and the barriers to participation provides valuable data to cultural organizations and funders seeking to broaden, deepen, and diversify audiences for these offerings.

2002, 71 pages. RMC Research Corporation in partnership with the Pew Charitable Trusts. Available through the Center for Arts and Culture, Suite 500, 819 Seventy St., N.W., Washington, DC 20001, 202-783-4498.

Each of the following Web sites is located somewhere on a continuum between the state of the union and the state of the arts.

The Web is a particularly effective medium for creating visual diagrams of events and practices from daily life. According to Paul Miller, one site's creator, we live in a "world of uncertainty." Each of the following sites, in its own way, diagrams an aspect of our uncertain world.

The first site delineates the historical context for current Web projects.

Sitting across the broad desk from David Bergholz, in an office that is clearly being packed up as he pre-pares to retire after fifteen years as president and CEO of the George Gund Foundation, there is a poignant juxtaposition that is very hard to miss. Just outside his office's large, eighteenth floor windows is a magnificent view of the industrial might that made Cleveland a player in years past; huge barges moving under steel bridges that cross an impossibly crooked river. The pewter river flanked by smoking chimneys and orderly cones of slag and salt and iron ore.