GIA Blog

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded recently Pitzer College a five-year $1.1 million grant to develop a Claremont Colleges-wide Critical Justice Education (CJE) program. The program will foster social change through the power of prison education and educate Claremont students and incarcerated individuals.

“The board meeting is not going well. (...) To the consternation of some board members, the executive director suggests that increasing staff diversity is a top priority.” One exasperated member says to the executive director, “You want to spend your time on that? We have so many more-pressing problems!”

In light of challenging times, Grant Oliphant, president of The Heinz Endowments, examines the role of the courageous leader and the power to make change happen within the philanthropic field and our own culture.

Stories can make us connect in unsuspected ways. A piece by the Stanford Social Innovation Review makes the case for the power of stories to make, prop up, and bring down systems.

The Mellon Public Scholars Program at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), which introduces graduate students in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to the intellectual and practical aspects of identifying, addressing, and collaborating with the public through their scholarship, received support for the next three years from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Surdna Foundation has announced that Don Chen will serve as the new president of the foundation. Chen currently leads the Just Cities and Regions team at the Ford Foundation and has been with the foundation since 2008.

As the term creative placemaking is increasingly known in arts and culture, community development, and urban planning, a new white paper released by Kresge Foundation explores the value of the field and what it needs to flourish.

In light of demographic changes and disparity of staff in museums, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) recently launched a pilot internship program to engage undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds and make the staff of these institutions more diverse.

On Tuesday, August 21, Grantmakers in the Arts will host “Real and Not Real: The history of racialization in the United States,” a webinar by Race Forward, which will serve as foundational for future GIA Racial Equity in Arts Philanthropy workshops.

The nation’s oldest women’s foundation, Ms. Foundation for Women, announced recently its new strategic plan, which centers its grantmaking and advocacy structure to invest intentionally in women and girls of color as a means to create social, cultural, and economic equity for all genders.