Philanthropic practice

The guide Rural Prosperity through the Arts and Creative Sector: A rural action guide for governors and states tackles how a growing body of research shows that arts-based economic development can help communities to thrive.

A collaboration between the National Governors Association (NGA) Center for Best Practices, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA),

Big philanthropy came under scrutiny at the recent Skoll World Forum, where 1,200 people from 81 countries gathered at the University of Oxford, England, according to Forbes.

In response to the "philanthropic neglect of rural, small city and suburban communities in the region," The Heartland Fund, a donor collaborative housed at the Windward Fund, was launched in 2018 by the Franciscan Sisters of Mercy and the Wallace Global Fund, according to a piece in the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

The first annual impact report on the NYC Inclusive Creative Economy Fund, released by LISC NYC, looks at the creative economy as a driver of comprehensive community development.

Showcasing the story of Julie Phelps, executive director of CounterPulse, a community-based art and culture space in San Francisco, Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, discusses the importance of nonprofit executives running small, community-based organizations.

Sherece Y. West-Scantlebury, president and CEO of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, shares in an article published in Stanford Social Innovation Review how the foundation she leads embarked on a path to transform its endowment and achieve racial equity.

An initiative to prevent funding groups that promote hatred was recently launched by Amalgamated Foundation and its partners. The "Hate Is Not Charitable" campaign is calling for Donor Advised Funds (DAF) providers "to exercise their legal discretion over grants recommended by their donors and adopt pro-active policies to ensure that funds do not flow to organizations that promote hatred."

How does philanthropy stay accountable to the values we claim to espouse? Over the past seven years, ArtPlace America invested $87 million in supporting artists as allies in equitable community development. The National Creative Placemaking Fund (NCPF) funded 279 creative placemaking projects in 208 communities of all sizes across the United States. As that fund came to a close at the end of 2017, we decided to interrogate how effective we had been at aligning our values with our assumptions and philanthropic practice.

Successful cultural organizations masterfully manage contributed and earned income. This income mix can include corporate grants, endowment income, foundation grants, government grants, individual donations, membership fees, ticket sales, and unrelated business income (National Endowment for the Arts 2012). Although Alicia Schatteman and Ben Bingle (2017) have suggested that government funding is the most stable of these sources of income, foundations have played a significant role in the development of the US cultural sector (Renz 1994; Negley 2017).

Having worked with panels since my first job in philanthropy at the National Endowment for the Arts, thirty years ago, I am always interested in learning more about how to make the panel system better. Discussions about process, scoring systems, panel adjudication methods, conflict of interest, panel recruitment, multistep review processes, criteria, and more are infinitely fascinating to me and at the heart of improving our own work at the Jerome Foundation.