Social Justice

Each year, Eastern State Penitentiary, which was built as a punishing fortress in 1829 outside Philadelphia, gets hundreds of visitors to explore its grounds. At some point, tackling the site's history, as The New York Times reported, was not enough and addressing mass incarceration as a crisis in the United States was the answer.

The Highlander Research and Education Center, a civil rights center in Tennessee founded in 1932, stated that a fire that burned its main office last Friday may have been intentionally set, after a “symbol connected to the white power movement” was found spray-painted in the parking lot next to the rubble of the building, as The New York Times reported.

Mid-America Arts Alliance (M-AAA) announced Interchange, a new pilot program created to strengthen communities and individual artists within the organization's region by supporting artist-led projects focused on social impact.

Successful cultural organizations masterfully manage contributed and earned income. This income mix can include corporate grants, endowment income, foundation grants, government grants, individual donations, membership fees, ticket sales, and unrelated business income (National Endowment for the Arts 2012). Although Alicia Schatteman and Ben Bingle (2017) have suggested that government funding is the most stable of these sources of income, foundations have played a significant role in the development of the US cultural sector (Renz 1994; Negley 2017).

The door is heavy. I don’t remember if it is steel or wood, but it takes effort to open. We are a small group of four. A few more will join our group shortly. I lead the way inside. They said not to wear blue. I keep it simple — a black dress and gray pants that come just above my ankle. And black boots. My usual.

The Uncertainty of Place

The Pittsburgh Foundation and New Voices for Reproductive Justice launched recently the Social Justice Rapid Response Fund, a new grantmaking program aimed at providing support for activists and civic organizations in underserved communities across Allegheny County, in the southwest of Pennsylvania, reported NEXTpittsburgh.

The Art in Resistance Fellowship, established by artists and changemakers "to simultaneously support artists and movements for social change at a time when there is a profound need to lift up beauty, solidarity, and resistance" announced the awarding of its first fellowship to Dignidad Rebelde, graphic arts collaboration between Oakland-based artists Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes.

The backlash against R&B singer R. Kelly following the six-part documentary Surviving R. Kelly, 20 years of accusations against him for sexually assaulting minors, and his arrest on charges of sexually abusing girls as young as 13, have sparked an uproar that seems to signal "that #MeToo has finally returned to black girls," point out Salamishah Tillet and Scheherazade Tillet, co-founders of A Long Walk Home, a nonprofit that uses art to empower young people to end violence against girls and women, in a recent opinion piece in The New York Times.

Understanding where our values and beliefs come from is a key drive for people committed to social change, according to a recent blog post by Julienne Kaleta and Joanna Carrasco, Living Cities coordinators.