GIA Blog

The preconference session on “Culture at the Intersection of Race, Space and Place” has my worlds colliding this Sunday morning in downtown Oakland. In the spirit of storytelling—as panelists Roberto Bedoya and Favianna Rodriguez modeled—I am both a longtime Oakland resident, a current local government employee (in the county public health department), and a prior chronicler of race, space and place as a journalist at ColorLines.com.

Not only in the United States these political times are divisive. But, as Hilary Pearson, president of Philanthropic Foundations Canada (PFC) says, "funders of civil society organizations can risk more to work with them to support experiments, pilots, new ways to figure out and test approaches and to reinforce inclusion and engagement."

Nia King interviews queer and trans artists of color about their lives and their work for her podcast We Want the Airwaves. In 2014, she self-published her first collection of interviews, Queer & Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives, with co-editors Jessica Glennon-Zukoff and Terra Mikalson. She self-published Queer & Trans Artists of Color, Volume 2, edited by Elena Rose, in 2016. She is currently working on Queer & Trans Artists of Color, Volume 3. Nia’s freelance reporting and comics have appeared at Colorlines.com and the East Bay Express.

Tram Nguyen currently works as a management analyst leading housing and health equity policy at Alameda County Public Health Department. She was the executive editor of ColorLines magazine from 2001-2007, and has worked for racial equity through multiple initiatives, including authoring the book We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities After 9/11 (Beacon, 2004). Tram holds a Masters in Public Policy from UC Berkeley’s Goldman School.

A new report says a growing number of funders are responding to demands that they be more accountable, transparent, and collaborative through participatory grantmaking.

Lara Davis is an artist, arts administrator, and creative strategist working at the intersection of culture, public education, and social justice. She is the arts education manager for Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture, and is part of the Visionary Justice StoryLab. Lara co-chairs A.R.E. (Artists for Racial Equity) Network, a National Guild for Community Arts Education network for artists and administrators of color and serves on the National Advisory Committee for the Teaching Artists Guild. She is a 2017-2018 Marshall Memorial Fellow, received the Guild’s 2017 Service Award, and is a 2015 recipient of the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leader Award.

Grantmakers in the Arts is pleased to have three bloggers covering the 2018 Conference in Oakland. Lara Davis (Seattle Office of Arts & Culture), Tram Nguyen (author, editor, and advocate for just and equitable policy), and Nia King (author, producer, cartoonist, podcaster, and public speaker), will be posting their comments and reactions beginning Sunday, October 21. We hope you enjoy their observations and that you join this conversation.

The leadership of America’s nonprofit sector isn’t very diverse, as American Nonprofit Academy emphasizes, but among other organizations working to change that reality is the African American Board Leadership Institute (AABLI).

An interesting and critical eye on philanthropy can come from different perspectives and that is what “Liberate Philanthropy,” a blog series, published on Medium, precisely does.

Americans continue to be highly engaged in the arts and believe the arts promote personal well-being, that they help us understand other cultures, that they are essential to a well-rounded education, and that government has an important role in funding the arts, according to Americans Speak Out About the Arts in 2018, a research Americans for the Arts recently released.