GIA Blog

Ben Hecht, president & CEO of Living Cities, a collective of 19 of the world’s wealthiest philanthropic and financial institutions, writes in The Chronicle of Philanthropy of their journey "to embed racial equity in our culture, which means becoming more accountable to the communities we serve and addressing the root causes of inequality."

"All funders across the philanthropic spectrum should work to ensure that the projects we fund are made accessible to people with disabilities," states in a recent post Rachel Pardoe, program officer for Older Adults and People with Disabilities at The New York Community Trust.

For the month of November, GIA’s photo banner features work supported by Iowa Arts Council.

To expand its contemporary art department, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) has hired Jessica Bell Brown and Leila Grothe as associate curators. They are joining a growing team of female curators at BMA led by chief curator Asma Naeem and fortified by senior research and programming curator Katy Siegel, reported Culture Type.

New York City’s P.S. 55 Benjamin Franklin, the pre-K to fifth grade public school in the Bronx recently announced a partnership with the nonprofit hip-hop outreach Windows of Hip-Hop and luxury watchmaker Bulova "to build the first-ever recording studio within a New York school, along with creating a hip-hop curriculum," Fast Company reports.

On Monday, October 28, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Dignity in Aging Act. This bill would reauthorize – Congress speak for updating/changing an existing law – the Older Americans Act (OAA). This law represents the primary dedicated federal funding to support seniors through home and community-based services. The bill passed by the House includes the same expanded cultural and arts focus successfully sought by GIA when the U.S.

Two foundations, Kresge and the Oregon Community Foundation, that are testing equitable evaluation shared some of their experiences in a recent webinar on advancing equitable evaluation offered by the Associations Advancing Equitable Evaluation Practices.

The Open Society Foundations announced recently the launch of its Culture and Art program, which "seeks to advance diverse artistic practices and strengthen locally-led cultural spaces around the world through grantmaking, capacity building, and convening power."

Affordable housing for artists.

This topic is a hard one for me. I’m too invested. I know too much. I have had too many people close to me lose their housing and simultaneously, lose the place where they create art. For one of my friends, when he lost his home and his space to create art, he not long after, lost his life. Colin Ward, a fixture of Denver’s Do-It-Yourself arts community, died by suicide on February 1st, 2018, fourteen months after he was evicted from his home, the internationally-recognized art space, Rhinoceropolis. After the surprise eviction, Colin’s life was never the same; many of us close to him saw a direct connection between his displacement and his death.

It takes some courage to come to a conference of funders and tell them what they do wrong. In no uncertain terms. Especially if you are an organization that could use their money.

But there was a lot of that at the Tuesday morning panel titled: Expressions for Justice: Grantmaking in the arts for systems change. The exchange was open, and maybe the most direct of the entire GIA conference.