Abigail's Blog

Paul Brest, president of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is the current guest blogger on the GIA Talk Back blog, a forum designed for member remarks and repartee. His post on general operating support begins:

In 2004, I worked with Independent Sector to draft a statement, unanimously endorsed by its Board of Directors, that called on funders (1) to opt for general operating support when the goals of the two organizations are “substantially aligned,” and (2) to pay their fair share of administrative and fundraising costs for projects.

Please join us tomorrow, June 21, at 2:00 EST/11:00 PST for Arts Education | Common Core: What Are the Possibilities for the Arts?, a web-based presentation by Julie Fry of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Richard Kessler of The Center for Arts Education.

Starting today, Paul Brest, president of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, will be the guest blogger on the GIA Talk Back blog! Read his initial post on general operating support and project overhead funding and join the conversation here.

Earlier this month, Theatre Bay Area released The Tangled Web: Social Media in the Arts, a survey of 207 international arts organizations on their use of social media. Reviewing the report on his blog New Beans, Clayton Lord makes the following, logical-to-me assessment:

What I find fascinating in these results (and let’s be honest, they’re really top-line, and don’t (by design) go into much depth on the reasoning behind the decisions made by these organizations) is the various spectrums of depth vs. breadth depending on the organization.

From a June 12 post on Barry's Blog:

I wonder how many tickets are sold in the aggregate to arts events in a given week across the whole country? In a month? Over the course of a whole year? Is that data available anywhere? Can we even make an educated guess? It must be a lot of people (tickets), and a substantial amount of money in the aggregate, despite not being what it once was or what it ought to be.

Please join us next Tuesday, June 21, at 2:00 EST/11:00 PST for Arts Education | Common Core: What Are the Possibilities for the Arts?, a web-based presentation by Julie Fry of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Richard Kessler of The Center for Arts Education.

Next Monday, June 20th, Paul Brest, president of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, will be starting a conversation about general operating support on GIA's Talk Back blog.

Overheard this morning on my way to work, a story about Governor Brownback's defunding of the Kansas Arts Commission and a variety of perspectives on public (and private) arts funding. Listen here.

On ARTSblog, Randy Cohen provides brief commentary and an Americans for the Arts estimate on the number of national arts organizations to lose their tax-exempt status. Lists of organizations (arts and all others) by state are available here.

From the Associated Press, as reported on NPR:

The Internal Revenue Service said Wednesday that 275,000 organizations have lost their tax-exempt status because they failed to file required annual reports for three straight years.