GIA Blog

Forecast Public Art announced the Public Art for Racial Justice Fund to, “provide much needed guidance, coaching and technical assistance to artists and communities as they undertake the complex task of confronting racial inequities...”

From the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation:

In the first episode of a three-part podcast series by Grantmakers in the Arts, DDCF Program Director for the Arts Maurine Knighton spoke about the impetus behind the Racial Equity Coding Project, which aims to gather data around racial equity funding practices to illustrate a more nuanced and accurate accounting of grantmaking efforts to advance racial equity. The Equity Coding Project began with a culmination of research led by DDCF with Callahan Consulting for the Arts and provides funders with an opportunity to examine and refine their own coding practices, as well as to adopt new data collection practices for the future.

President Biden paid a rare visit to Marín Elementary School in North Philadelphia, a program that received funding from the American Rescue Plan. ArtistYear teaching artist fellow Coco Allred reflected on her experience of having the American leader come to the classroom.

Dr. Manuel Pastor was the featured guest on the Bioneers’ podcast episode Building the Solidarity Economy: Awakening to Our Mutuality and Shifting the Terrain of Power. The distinguished Professor discussed, “how shocks to the system are precipitating a great awakening and growing movements to transform the economy to our economy.”

Memphis Music Initiative (MMI) recently announced the launch of "Call & Response: The Sound of Black Arts Revolution," a campaign and "a call to funders in the creative youth development nonprofit space to do better by the Black and brown leaders who give so much of themselves to their communities, and the young people they serve. Black Pay Matters. Black Legacy Matters. Black Rest Matters," according to the announcement in late March.

“When we fight pipelines, when we fight oil projects, when we fight all of the extractive development that harms our mother, we don’t do that just for ourselves,” Krystal Two Bulls says, director of the LANDBACK Campaign within the Indigenous advocacy organization NDN Collective in Grist. Elaborating, “We do that so we can all actually have an earth to live on in the future. So that future generations that aren’t even born yet have an earth to come to.”

"For decades, arts and music education in California has been dying a slow death in many schools, strangled by budget cuts amid an ongoing emphasis on core subjects like reading and math and test scores as the measure of student success," reports Louis Freedberg in EdSource.

“Some of the changes that we instituted during the pandemic were things that we were actually thinking about before,” said Rashad Cobb, community engagement program officer at the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation. He summarized, “These weren’t necessarily new ideas that we had never thought (of) before, but maybe the pace at which we would’ve implemented these ideas was sped up by the pandemic.”

The San Antonio Area Foundation is a community foundation serving the region through grants, programs, scholarships and training aimed at closing the opportunity gap for San Antonio area residents. They are committed to trust-based philanthropy and to advancing racial equity, bringing together people, organizations, and resources to address key issues affecting diverse communities ranging from San Antonio’s densely populated urban neighborhoods — the largest Latinx-majority city in the United States — to surrounding rural areas.

“Philanthropists apparently wanted to help arts and culture organizations that were hurt by canceled performances, classes and fund raising events, which caused a loss of revenue,” Fidelity Charitable said. Summarizing support as, “Donors gave $351 million more in 2021 than in 2020 to arts and cultural organizations.”