GIA Blog

A new playbook from LISC and Next City, Equitable Pathways to Small Business Recovery: An All-Hands Approach, offers a framework for paving equitable pathways to small business success, and lays out concrete strategies for supporting capital access, small business capacity, and commercial real estate with specific emphasis for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) -led or -owned small businesses.

This week’s NEA podcast is featuring NEA Chair Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson. Chair Jackson is no stranger to the Arts Endowment having had a great deal of first-hand experience with the agency as she has served on the National Council on the Arts since 2013. She comes to the position of chair with years of experience in comprehensive community building that focuses on the centrality of the arts. Chair Jackson shares her thoughts about the arts, an artful life, and the Arts Endowment at this time of reopening, rethinking, and reimagining the arts landscape.

Last week, 412 New York City-based arts entities founded, led, and serving Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and all People of Color (POC) called for leaders of NYC’s cultural community to create a $100M fund to support POC-led arts entities and to address gaps in cultural equity across the city. The call comes as the group launches HueArts NYC, the only citywide effort to bring greater cultural equity, visibility, and support to all POC cultural institutions and initiatives across NYC’s five boroughs.

"In a sentence: The dance funding ecosystem is small compared to other performing arts, and the impacts of the pandemic on top of decades of declining public funding mean a growing role for philanthropy," reports Inside Philanthropy in their State of American Philanthropy report.

Black Philanthropy Circle, a fund at the Baltimore Community Foundation, has been launched to focus on charitable giving to nonprofits that directly support Black people and communities in the Baltimore area.

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has announced nearly $1 million in grant funding through its Creative Inflections program, a first-of-its-kind initiative to support leading jazz artists and presenting organizations in innovative collaborations that enable artists to take creative risks and expand the genre’s listenership by attracting younger and more diverse audiences.

"The Open Society Foundations are proud to announce their Justice Rising Awards, a new investment in leaders working towards racial justice and equality in the Black community in the United States," according to the press release. "The 16 awardees from across the country are being recognized for their long-term contributions to advancing change in their communities, tireless commitment to civil rights, and capacity to inspire, innovate, and mobilize people despite considerable odds."

"It is too early to determine whether the waves of protests of recent years as part of the Black Lives Matter movement will actually constitute a 'racial reckoning' (as the media dubbed it) or not, but awareness of the role of systemic inequality and structural racism appears to be at or near its historical peak, especially among White Americans. This means that the aperture for meaningful policy change has opened," writes Stephen Menedian in an essay on the Othering & Belonging Institute blog.

Zakiya Harris is in the process of group of co-founding BlacSpace Cooperative, organizations led by Black women in Oakland working to create a business development ecosystem to uplift the city's Black arts community. Harris - a cultural architect who grew up in East Oakland and has worked for more than two decades on projects that explore the intersections of art, activism, and entrepreneurship - says, "We, as a collective community, recognized that we were at a critical moment, and we could leverage the opportunity of the pandemic and the uprising toward a cultural reset."

"When I think of the phrase 'You’re always a day late and a dollar short,' I also think about resilience—the ability to recover from or adjust easily to, despite hard luck or change," writes Helanius J. Wilkins in a poignant essay published in the National Performance Network (NPN) blog. "One of my earliest lessons about resilience came through observing my father."