Grantmakers in the Arts

Video from last week's Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media webinar, a funder briefing co-sponsored by GIA, is now available on the GFEM website, here. Titled Sustaining and Growing Community Media Centers: A Funder Briefing, the excellent presentation—I participated and walked away with a great deal—covers the following:

Chris Langston, program director at the John A. Hartford Foundation, participated in the April 6th Thought Leader Forum on Arts and Aging, which was co-sponsored by GIA, Grantmakers in Aging, and the National Center for Creative Aging. He reflects on the days proceedings on the Hartford Foundation blog, outlining several potential strategies for a collaboration between arts, aging, and health funders.

A new Research Note from the National Endowment for the Arts, Time and Money: Using Federal Data to Measure the Value of Performing Arts Activities, analyzes the value of arts and culture through concrete monetary measures, through ‘revealed preferences’ as seen through consumer spending, and through time use, which is a ‘quality of life’ measure.

I have Tyler Green's daily 3rd of May (titled after Goya's painting of the same name) post supplied to my iGoogle home page, also daily. Green's description of his undertaking follows below. My two cents: By pairing current events (or opinions or quips) with art, the gravity of the moment and the resonance of the artwork, they both grow.

Rick Moyers, from The Chronicle of Philanthropy:

The general aversion of many boards to talking about finances in any detail creates an initial roadblock to conversations about reserves. And the lack of a widely understood and commonly used definition of operating reserves doesn’t help. It’s hard to talk about something if you don’t know what it is.

In an article for boston.com, Michael Rezendes outlines Boston's updated tax-related-non-taxing of the city's larger education, health, and cultural nonprofits. He explains:

On Tuesday, the university plans to announce that Joichi Ito, known as Joi, will become the fourth director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, which was originally founded by the architect Nicholas Negroponte in 1985 and has since become recognized for its willingness to take risks in developing technologies that are at the edge of the computing frontier.

"First, whenever I hear that an arts organization has had recurring deficits (often leading to the accumulation of excessively high debt), my first question is: does this organization’s trustees know how to read an audited financial statement and a cash flow statement? This is a sincere question."