Grantmakers in the Arts

From Dance/NYC by Alejandra Duque Cifuentes and Rosemary Reyes

Reflecting on: What are grantees asking for? How can funders listen and respond accordingly?

As a major service organization for dance in the metropolitan New York City area, Dance/NYC had to move quickly to address the needs of all of our constituents when COVID-19 arrived in March 2020.

The Flamboyan Arts Fund and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from Broadway Cares, launched a $1 million emergency relief fund to support individual artists and cultural organizations in Puerto Rico to help mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the arts and culture sector in the island.

"Approaching your grantmaking with a racial justice lens is not just for times of crisis. By employing this lens at all times, funders can unlock long-term transformational impact and strengthen the community-wide infrastructure needed to foresee, respond to, and avert potential damages from crises like the COVID-19 pandemic."

Reflecting on: What are grantees asking for? How can funders listen and respond accordingly?

I have cried more in the last few weeks than I have in my entire life. My grief began the day Washington State Governor Jay Inslee banned large events in Seattle-area counties, effectively closing all cultural institutions, performance venues, and arts spaces. It was one of the State’s first steps in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. Soon, a stay-at-home order would be issued, shuttering all non-essential businesses across Washington.

In a recent Monument Lab podcast, artist Mel Chin says the lesson from the coronavirus pandemic situation and other situations “is to exercise self-critique and empathy. How do you have to rekindle it for each situation,” he says.

Reflecting on: What strategies exist to support, regrant to, and advocate for cultural organizations (without formal audits)?

The current crisis has necessitated that we — as with many of our colleagues around the country — reassess our “normal” way of conducting philanthropic business because these are not “normal” times. The crisis we are facing is of an existential nature — the very survival of our cultural organizations and artists is at stake.

When the research started in 2017 for Freedom Maps: Activating legacies of culture, art, and organizing in the U.S. South, an upcoming report, the authors could not have imagined our current reality.

Reflecting on: What strategies exist to support, regrant to, and advocate for cultural organizations (without formal audits)?

If you asked me where I would be on April 13, 2020, I would have described a fun-filled adventure staycationing with my familia in D.C. over Spring Break. Instead, I am sitting in my “command center” — the spare room in my basement — helping the arts navigate through the worst crisis in a generation. This is not what I had planned, or what any of us had planned. Yet, this is where we are — where a lot of us are — and we must figure out how to make it all work.