Advocacy and Public Policy

When I started DJing back in the early '70s, it was just something that we were doing for fun. I came from “the people's choice,” from the street. If the people like you, they will support you and your work will speak for itself. The parties I gave happened to catch on. They became a rite of passage for young people in the Bronx. Then the younger generation came in and started putting their spin on what I had started. I set down the blueprint, and all the architects started adding on this level and that level. Pretty soon, before we even knew it, it had started to evolve.

Re-imagining Orchestras: A forthright report on the mixed results of one foundation's efforts

Stan Hutton

New Year's Day, 1980, found Arlene Goldbard living in Washington, D.C. monitoring and reporting on our nation's de facto cultural policy. The fact that Arlene was doing this says a lot about the leadership role that many of us were counting on the federal government to play in leveling the field so that our many U.S. cultures would have an equal chance to express themselves, to develop, and, inevitably, to cross-pollinate. It was a substantial and beautiful vision then, and remains so today.

Artist Rene Yung's presentation of this paper generated lively discussion at a forum of the Arts Loan Fund of Northern California Grantmakers, in October 2006. It was written just as Arlene Goldbard's new book, New Creative Community, was published. Although Yung refers to an earlier publication (Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, by Don Adams and Gold-bard, 2001), she touches on many of the same themes discussed by the authors of "The Art of Social Imagination" (page 27 in this Reader) and reveals how the ideas have been adopted by an artist in practice.

When we visit our physicians, we naturally assume they bring a bundle of knowledge and insight to the meeting. For one thing, we expect them to bring a broad and nuanced understanding of human physiology, and how its many interconnecting systems (circulatory, respiratory, muscle, nervous, lymphatic, and so on) influence our health and well being. We also expect that they know how and where to look for indicators of our health (taking our temperature, testing our blood pressure, checking our blood for chemical balances).

Over the past forty years, several hundred legal frameworks have been established for cooperative action by governments on ecological issues — treaties such as the Biodiversity Convention, the Climate Change Convention, the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species, and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. How do these relate to art?

Outreach

The Metropolitan Denver Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD) is a new member of GIA. It is a six-county regional public funding agency, formed ten years ago this coming November. It was created at a time when much public funding was being challenged, if not actively cut back. The formation of the district and its continuing success have been models for a number of other communities.

The Seventh Generation Fund for Indian Development, Inc. (SGF) was founded in 1977 "as an intermediary Native American foundation and advocacy organization dedicated to promoting and maintaining the uniqueness of Native Peoples and our nations." More than a regranting organization, SGF provides not only grants but also advocacy, leadership training, management support, training, and technical assistance to Native community-based projects in the continental United States, Alaska, Hawai'i, Canada, and South and Central America. SGF is a new member of GIA.

To Protect the Powerless in the Digital Age
An Open Letter to Foundations: To Protect the Interests of the Powerless in the Digital Age, Communications Researchers Need Your Support

The "open letter" has a number of signers.
August 12, 1998. 33 pages. The Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy, 818 18th Street, N.W. Suite 810, Washington, D.C. 20006, 202-887-0301, forum[at]civilrightsforum.org.

I still remember my first sight of New York. It was really another city when I was born—where I was born. We looked down over the Park Avenue streetcar tracks. It was Park Avenue, but I didn't know what Park Avenue meant downtown. The Park Avenue I grew up on, which is still standing, is dark and dirty. No one would dream of opening up a Tiffany's on that Park Avenue, and when you go downtown you discover that you are literally in the white world. It is rich—or at least it looks rich. It is clean—because they collect the garbage downtown. There are doormen.