GIA Blog

"The way the charitable tax deduction is set up, lower-income Americans can’t really take advantage of it. Unless you earn a lot of money, it makes no financial sense to do your taxes in a way that lets you claim the charitable deduction," states an article in Vox.

The Arts and Activism (A&A) ColLABoration, a pilot project funded jointly by The CrossCurrents and Compton Foundations to support the work of artists in partnership with organizers and activist organizations, announced five projects that were awarded $30,000 to engage in arts-integrated organizing through themes of democracy, power, and freedom in the United States.

An article in Forbes offers ideas on approaches a resource-constrained endowment or foundation could take to develop a sustainable investing program.

Boots Riley, the Oakland filmmaker, musician, and activist who wrote and directed the satire Sorry to Bother You believes in making art "that makes people understand that they have the power to change things…that’s what you can do with narrative.”

Last year, 2018, was a milestone year for Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA). We relocated our operations from Seattle to The Bronx, and we had a new President & CEO in Eddie Torres, with a new team eager to build on the work of our predecessors. We had a unique opportunity to take stock of EVERYTHING that we were doing.

Marcus Walton, the new president and CEO of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO), previous co-director of Racial Equity Initiatives (REI) at Borealis Philanthropy, reflected recently on some of the learnings from his work at Borealis that he hopes to bring with him to GEO.

Corporate leaders, explains an article in Harvard Business Review, "need to focus on diversity and inclusion efforts that take an intersectional approach to identify barriers that women of color face, due to the impact of their race and gender."

"As more and more cultural philanthropists face scrutiny over the sources of their wealth, the economic scaffolding supporting American museums is being tested, and artists are facing difficult questions about complicity in the system," details a recent article in Artsy.

Films like Roma, A Fantastic Woman, and Spotlight and Ava DuVernay’s scripted series When They See Us were produced by Participant Media, a production company founded "on the mission of using visual storytelling to amplify social issues and to spur equitable social change," as a recent article at the Stanford Social Innovation Review points out.

Ford, Hewlett, MacArthur, Open Society, and Packard, five of America’s wealthiest foundations, pledge "to do more to help grantees pay for rent, decent wages, technology, and other overhead," The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported.