Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

As we welcome 2019, ideas around a more just and fair philanthropic field are inevitable. Dana Kawaoka-Chen, executive director for Justice Funders, says "we need a just transition in philanthropy that redistributes wealth, democratizes power, and shifts economic control to communities. In other words, we must transform our relationship to capital and to our communities."

The Orontes Guitar Quartet are the first group to be brought together in a safe country, in this case, Canada, by the Artist Protection Fund (APF), the New York-based program that supports threatened artists around the world, reported The Globe and Mail.

In a recent blog post for the American Alliance of Museums, Elizabeth Merritt cites the US Census Bureau's projection that the US will be “majority minority” sometime in the 2040s to make the case “that museum audiences do a pretty good job of reflecting American society…in the year 1900.”

Spelman College received recently a $5.4 million grant from the Walton Family Foundation to establish the Atlanta University Center Collective for the Study of Art History and Curatorial Studies.

In a recent report on how funders are collecting and using demographic data PEAK Grantmaking learned that about half of grantmakers are collecting this data. "Of that half, almost all of them are collecting information on the communities that nonprofits serve, and less than half of them are collecting information on the board and staff leadership of the nonprofits," explains a post by Philanthropy New York.

Back in 2016, local Pittsburgh artists Jerome Charles and Max Gonzales were arrested for being the "Most Wanted Graffiti Artists in Pittsburgh," local media reports recall.

A new book, "Decolonizing Wealth," challenges colonial dynamics in philanthropy and finance, philanthropy's white supremacist legacy, and the little investment and support of POC-led efforts in communities as result of those dynamics.

For The Benefit Of All: The CMA’s Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion Plan is the name of the 19-page report that came about after a nine-month period, in which the The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) facilitated in 2017 over 100 meetings with over 400 people in Cleveland.

When I first got to Oakland, I didn’t know where I was. I gave the cabbie who picked me up at the Emeryville Amtrak station an address on Apgar Street. The house where he dropped me off, near 40th and Market, within walking distance of the MacArthur BART station, was where I lived for my first year in California.