Carmen Graciela Díaz's Blog

After the state of Florida dropped its funding to only $2.65 million for all arts organizations statewide (a dramatic decrease from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs’ recommendation of more than $41.6 million), a Tampa foundation seeks to sustain local arts organizations as they're facing catastrophic effects from the cuts in funding.

Neighborhood Funders Group (NFG) and the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions recently launched a leadership fellowship for CEOs of progressive philanthropic institutions. The fellowship is best suited for philanthropic institutions that already support racial equity and powerbuilding and want to go deeper by building a strong peer group and aligning more towards equity and impact.

Native American organizations and causes have a crucial role in Indigenous communities but are chronically underfunded, according to a recent report of the First Nations Development Institute in partnership with Frontline Solutions.

Arts and cultural organizations in the United States are well-distributed across the country, serving communities both poor and affluent, rural and urban, not just on the coasts and not just in major metropolitan markets, states the National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) introducing its 2018 most vibrant arts communities in America index.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a $3.5 million grant to Northwestern University's Center for the Scientific Studies in the Arts, a collaborative partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago to investigate and conserve art. The center has worked to uncover hidden details in paintings by Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and László Moholy-Nagy.

"Racial equity isn't something we do because it's a nice thing to do. It's the core issue out of which everything else we do flows." La June Montgomery Tabron, president and CEO of W.K. Kellogg Foundation, shared that idea in an interview, in which she emphasized how racial equity is a crucial part of the transformation needed to improve the United States.

For the month of August, GIA’s photo banner features work supported by the Walton Family Foundation.

"Why do you need a cultural equity statement?" "Isn’t a mission statement enough?" Those are the questions Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer, executive director of the Queens Council on the Arts (QCA), used to introduce a post in which she lays out how and why QCA developed its cultural equity statement.

A new report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP), titled Nonprofit Diversity Efforts: Current Practices and the Role of Foundations, shares nonprofit leaders’ views on their diversity pursuits, how their foundation funders are interacting with or supporting them in this area, and how foundations are involved in the diversity efforts of grantees.

Ten months after Hurricane Maria's devastation in Puerto Rico, Lin Manuel Miranda, award-winning composer, lyricist, and actor, his family, and Jeffrey Seller, producer of the Broadway hit Hamilton, have partnered with the Flamboyan Foundation to create the Flamboyan Arts Fund, as an effort to preserve the arts in the island.