GIA Blog

Lisa Pilar Cowan, vice president of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, shared recently how the foundation has started to take action in light of the ongoing impact of the coronavirus "to reflect where we are – off a cliff."

"As a woman of color leading a nonprofit, I am no stranger to mansplaining," shares Sarah Iddrissu, executive director of E4E-Boston, in an article in Educators for Excellence that stresses that nonprofits need women of color in leadership and the need to disrupt the structural barriers to their advancement.

COVID-19 is hitting investment portfolios with "a series of plunges in asset values not seen since the market meltdown of 2008," Debra Moniz, director of administration and finance at the Cedar Tree Foundation, writes in Exponent Philanthropy.

Both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate passed the “Families First Coronavirus Response Act” a bill that "has strong implications for the artist residency network," as the Alliance of Artists Communities noted recently.

In moments when the COVID-19 virus is part of our daily conversations, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, in partnership with the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), launched recently a new program for emergency medical grants, artnet reported.

Grantmakers in the Arts is sharing resources and guidance on COVID-19 (coronavirus disease) and encouraging grantmakers to support their grantees by treating their funding flexibly in these difficult and rapidly shifting circumstances.

Under New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, the city's first black woman mayor, the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp. (NOTMC), hopes it will be able to provide grants to cultural organizations, nola.com reported recently.

Aligning practice with values: that idea lead the way as the Meyer Foundation redesigned its grants process to be more equitable and inclusive.

"Corporate leaders would be better served if they stopped trying to justify diversity with profit margins and stock charts—a mentality that can ultimately hurt the very groups these policies are meant to help (more on that in a moment)—and instead embrace diversity because it is the right thing to do."

Ahead of the 2020 election, as LA Weekly reported, the organization For Freedoms -originally founded as an “arts-centric super PAC” in 2016 by Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman- is launching its first For Freedoms Congress (FFCon), a series of discussions and events "bringing together activists, artists and everyday citizens to not only talk about the issues affecting them, but to actually strategize collective action."