GIA Blog

Tattered Cover and Philanthropy Colorado hosted a panel with five of Colorado's foundation executives, including GIA Board of Directors alumni Gary Steuer, for a discussion about the state of philanthropy and the increased priority of equity and opportunity in their organizations' grantmaking partnerships.

In dialogue with “Backlash: A Sharp Right Turn by a Philanthropy Member Organization,” an excellent piece from Phil Buchanan, president of Center for Effective Philanthropy, I offer this continuation of my more recent President’s Blog post.

In a recent editorial, Widewalls discusses how the art world has reacted to the ongoing civil unrest in the United States, following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.

Christine Yoon, senior program officer, Arts, at the Wallace Foundation sat down with Imagine This Podcast to discuss “navigating culture shifts in the workplace, the philanthropic community's shifts over the last year, leadership development in nonprofits, managing uncertainty, and more.”

HueArts NYC, a map, online directory, report, and hub for New York City’s arts entities that have been created by and center Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and all People of Color, will be completed and publicly released in December 2021.

In a recent letter, members of the Arts Education Council of Americans for the Arts state "AFTA has much work yet to do to repair the harm caused — most directly to BIPOC-led arts and culture organizations — by decades of gatekeeping and resource-hoarding, spearheaded by their senior leadership."

Farhad Ebrahimi, founder and president of the Chorus Foundation in Boston, MA, writes for The Forge on the subject of private philanthropy's future, and the structural reforms that are needed:

Philanthropy as it’s conventionally understood is the product of racial capitalism. As a result, I see progressive — or even radical — private philanthropy as, at best, a transitional form. If we seek to support transformational work, then we ourselves must be open to transformation. I like to think of this as a “just transition” for the philanthropic sector: we must directly challenge the conditions that produced the wealth inequality that allowed for private philanthropy in the first place.

For the Mellon Foundation's 2020 annual report, the foundation's president Elizabeth Alexander reflects on how Mellon moved through the past year's challenges due "to the institutional analysis in which we already had been engaged, examining and reframing our mission and values within a new strategic direction and rigorously clarifying which problems we were trying to solve with our grantmaking."

For the month of July, GIA’s photo banner features work supported by Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona.

An article in Chalkbeat discusses efforts that have "attempted to ban critical race theory, the academic framework that examines how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism."