The Wallace Foundation has announced a six-year, $40-million arts initiative, Building Audiences for Sustainability, designed to help about 25 outstanding performing arts organizations across the United States create programs that attract new audiences while retaining existing ones. This initiative aims to provide meaningful support to arts organizations whose artistic vision and mission involve building audiences. The foundation also seeks to understand and share evidence and experiences from these organizations on whether and how they can achieve and sustain audience gains, and whether these gains improve their overall financial health.
Grantmakers in the Arts
October 1, 2014 by Steve
October 1, 2014 by SuJ'n
During the month of October, GIA's photo banner features artists and projects supported by Houston Endowment. Houston Endowment is the Anchor Sponsor for the annual GIA conference happening this month.
Houston Endowment supports nonprofit organizations and educational institutions that produce and maximize enduring benefits for the people of the greater Houston area. Jesse H. Jones and Mary Gibbs Jones established Houston Endowment as a private philanthropic foundation in 1937; since that time, Houston Endowment has donated almost $1.7 billion ($3 billion in constant dollars) to help arts and culture, education, environment, health and human services organizations realize the Joneses’ vision of creating a community where the opportunity to thrive is available to all.
September 29, 2014 by Janet
By Janet Brown from her blog Better Together
My first year at Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) was 2009. When I travelled the country to meet members and learn about their work, I was surprised by my conversations with most private funders.
September 24, 2014 by Steve
A blog post from Rebecca Thomas at Nonprofit Finance Fund:
Earlier this month, Nonprofit Finance Fund released a new analysis featuring the responses from the leaders of 919 arts and culture organizations who took our 2014 survey of nonprofit business health. The State of the Arts and Culture Sector report captures the challenges and triumphs of nonprofits grappling with financial pressures, changing demographics, new technologies, and opportunities to expand the reach of their programs. (The full data can be filtered by artistic discipline, geography and budget size through our online survey analyzer, available here).
September 23, 2014 by Steve
From Joel Brown, writing for The Boston Globe:
After an eye-opening campaign pledge followed by a six-month national search, Mayor Martin J. Walsh has chosen the city’s new Chief of Arts and Culture. In the new cabinet-level post, Julie Burros will be charged with enacting Walsh’s plan to put the creative sector front and center in Boston’s future. Burros, 49, who will be sworn in to the $125,000-a-year post in December, will tackle everything from creating a broad cultural plan to the nuts and bolts of making the city an easier place for artists to live and work.
September 23, 2014 by Steve
The National Endowment for the Arts is launching new resources to assist practitioners who are working on arts-based community development projects. These resources will assist those practitioners to develop projects that are authentic, equitable, and that augment existing local assets. Those resources are:
- Exploring Our Town, an online resource featuring case studies of more than 60 previous Our Town projects complete with an insights section of lessons learned
- 2015 Our Town guidelines with a new project type designed to build and share creative placemaking knowledge more broadly
- Beyond the Building: Performing Art Organizations and Transforming Place a national convening to be held on November 3, 2014
September 23, 2014 by Steve
Following a national search, Artist Trust has announced that Shannon Roach Halberstadt has been hired as its Executive Director. She will start at Artist Trust in October 2014. Halberstadt is currently the Executive Director of Spokane Arts and previously served as Executive Director of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Recording Academy and as Managing Director of the Vera Project.
September 17, 2014 by Steve
Helicon Collaborative was commissioned to help Grantmakers in the Arts understand the value of its local funder workshops presented in 2012 and 2013 and other programs where capitalization education has been included since 2010, when GIA’s National Capitalization Project began. The results are detailed in the newly published Progress Report on Grantmakers in the Arts’ National Capitalization Project.