Abigail's Blog

Rick Wartzman's latest post for Bloomberg Businessweek, here, is a summary of recent writing on funding nonprofit overhead synthesized with his own outlook on the "charitable challenge." Provocative and opinionated, it is worth a read.

Yet another relevant blog I didn't know I should know about: Nonprofit Tech 2.0: A Social Media Guide for Nonprofits. The linked-to post is a survey of the growing array of fundraising websites available to nonprofits and donors. These sites both facilitate giving and help spread the word about a nonprofit's mission and actions.

A new month, a new slide show of member-supported projects on the GIA website! Our June featured member is ArtsMemphis, which has been serving local arts organizations and school arts education programs in Memphis, TN for over 50 years. Our gratitude to Julia McDonald at ArtsMemphis for collaborating with GIA staff on the photo selection.

We will be featuring a different GIA member each month—and we welcome and encourage submissions. If your organization would like to provide photographs, please contact Abigail Guay at (206) 624-2312.

Diane Ragsdale's May 20 Private Sector post begins, "People have been talking about the blurring line between the commercial and nonprofit arts sectors (and related mission/market tradeoffs) for decades...." and finishes here. Spend some time with the comments for more perspectives on this blurring.

Aaron Koblin began his March 2011 TED Talk by stating: "So I think data can actually make us more human." And then he presented several technology-based, crowd-sourced projects that perfectly prove his point.

Watch him here. He is contagiously interested (and interesting) and has a knack for letting things be the right amount of funny for the right amount of time.

CSArt, a new program of the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, is based on the CSA-inspired (Community Supported Agriculture) model of community-based artist support pioneered by Springboard for the Arts. Cambridge Center is the latest organization to embrace Springboard's open-source-so-go-ahead-and-reproduce-me model, which mimics financial investment in a community farm (with returns in the form of periodically delivered boxes of locally grown, organic produce or, in this case, locally produced art).

Alexis McGill Johnson completes her two-week tour as a guest writer on GIA's Talk Back blog with Black Male: Re-Imagined, a post on unconscious bias, its outcomes, and the work American Values Institute is doing to re-imagine perceptions of black men as they relate to public policy and discourse.

The Games for Change 8th Annual Festival will be in New York, June 20-22, at NYU's Skirball Center. Often referred to as “the Sundance of Video Games,” the Festival is the biggest gaming event in New York City. It brings together leaders from government, corporations, civil society, media, academia, foundations, and the gaming industry to explore the increasing real-world impact of digital games as an agent for social change. The Festival is also a showcase for some of the most innovative new games in production.

Looking to lay some groundwork for the technology track at the Grantmakers in the Arts 2011 Conference in San Francisco? Rhizome, a nonprofit affiliate of the New Museum, is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.

Grantmakers in the Arts is pleased to announce expanded web services to members, including a members-only web portal, launched in January 2011, offering access to an online directory of members and member organizations. Additional features include a simple and effective set of collaborative tools allowing members the ability to create online user groups for managing specific projects, as well as the ongoing activities of GIA member groups.