Janet's Blog

By Janet Brown from her blog Better Together:

A very smart woman once told me there are two motivating factors in the world: love and fear. I’ve spent the past several years analyzing actions, events, and people under this framework and trying to assess my own motivations in different situations. It holds up.

By Janet Brown from her blog Better Together:

Over the past few years, Grantmakers in the Arts has identified four content areas that reflect core values and are the basis for much of our work. They are:

• Arts education
• Racial equity in philanthropy
• Financial health of the nonprofit arts sector (capitalization)
• Support for individual artists

By Janet Brown from her blog Better Together

The phrase “data-driven decision-making” has become popular with funders.  What decisions are being made based on data and how relevant is the data being collected?  Does the data reflect the reality in which we each work and how does it inform our actions? Does data merely answer questions of how funding proved successful based on outcomes, or does it inform how funders should be changing their portfolios, application guidelines and goals based on the successes or failures of the nonprofit arts field? These are the challenges for researchers and practitioners.

By Janet Brown from her blog Better Together

Peter Singer’s Sunday, August 11 New York Times opinion piece entitled “Good Charity, Bad Charity” was a shocker. One would expect something a bit more far-reaching and not quite so simplistic from a bioethicist.

By Janet Brown, from her blog Better Together:

Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) initiated discussions among a group of social justice funders a year ago in an effort to begin to understand structural racism and to analyze how institutionalized racism may affect arts philanthropy.

By Janet Brown from her blog Better Together

I toured Europe for a year in the 80s as general manager of an American musical. It was a crazy tour with a less than experienced producer. I actually encouraged him several times to shut down the tour because we had gaps between bookings and were continually getting advances from future dates to pay current salaries. But, he was the boss and the tour continued. Along the way, I ended up using my own salary (and the production stage manager’s) to keep the company afloat. I left the tour with the producer owing me several thousand dollars. Does this sound like a financially healthy business to you? It wasn’t.

By Janet Brown from her blog Better Together

In my early years as an arts administrator, I remember thinking it was best to keep grant applications simple in order to limit the questions that granters might have. One line I always left blank was “indirect costs.” I did this because it just seemed a good idea to make the application financials less complicated. But how wrong I was.

By Janet Brown from her blog Better Together

“Relevance” and “transparency” are two words I use frequently when talking with staff or board members of grantmaking and nonprofit arts organizations. Both are core values needed to foster arts participation in our communities and prosperity for artists and our organizations. This blog focuses on transparency...financial transparency.

By Janet Brown from her blog Better Together

On May 1^st, I attended a daylong gathering in Washington DC entitled Innovative Crossroads: The Intersection of Creativity, Health and Aging. Supported by MetLife Foundation in collaboration with the National Center for Creative Aging (NCCA), the day was hosted by Grantmakers in Health (GIH) and included health funders as well as members of Grantmakers in the Arts and Grantmakers in Aging. This is a continuation of GIArts work begun with a Thought Leader Forum on Aging a few years ago and collaborative regional workshops planned in conjunction with GIAging and NCCA.

From Janet Brown from her blog Better Together

Grantmakers in the Arts is in the midst of presenting Conversations on Capitalization and Community in five cities over two months so my mind is a bit warped with an excess of nonprofit financial health talk. Making a profit for nonprofits isn’t easy because we fight public perceptions that we should have no profits, funding criteria that punishes profit and a professional norm that encourages any profit be spent on making the product of the nonprofit better.