Grantmakers in the Arts

The Canada Council for the Arts – Canada’s public arts funder – has a new strategic plan for 2021-26: Art, now more than ever. The plan has a strong focus on rebuilding a more just and equitable arts sector in Canada.

"If you’ve taken a leap, what was the runway you needed? If you wanted to take a leap, but didn’t, what held you back?" writes guest editor Donita Volkwijn about the prompts for the latest edition of Nonprofit Wakanda Quarterly.

The Henry Luce Foundation announced recently the commitment of $14 Million in new grants intended to amplify diverse experiences and fund community-engaged projects.

"We have to stop being afraid of the critique,” Joe Scantlebury, CEO of Living Cities says in the Chronical of Philanthropy. “We don’t improve in silence.”

In a new report, "Pulse Checking Progress Toward Operationalizing REI: Arts, Culture & Healing," from LivingCities revisits learnings and progress from internal racial equity work over the part five years in response to a 2017 internal learning report, “What Does it Take to Embed a Racial Equity & Inclusion Lens?"

“Our work here in Chinatown,” Yin Kong, director and co-founder of Think!Chinatown, says, “Is about place-keeping. It’s about celebrating, strengthening and amplifying,” in an interview with NextCity. The article continues, "For a neighborhood relatively compact in size — Chinatown covers roughly two square miles in Lower Manhattan — it boasts an impressive and dedicated collective of cultural organizers," and more than $200 million announced in public dollars just in the past two years, after decades of "pigeon-holing" and insufficient funding.

"Color Congress, a national collective of majority people of color (POC) and POC-led organizations aimed at centering and strengthening nonfiction storytelling by, for and about people of color in the US, has launched in advance of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival," Filmmaker magazine reported this January leading up to the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. "Founded by documentary impact and field-building strategists Sahar Driver and Sonya Childress, the collective will invite POC-led doc-serving organizations to apply for unrestricted two-year funding from a $1.35 million fund, and later in the year, they’ll be invited to join the Congress and direct over $1 million in grants aimed at addressing field challenges."

"We’re moving beyond DEI (bodies at the table), racial equity (measuring POC against white people), and perhaps even racial justice (the righting of racial wrongs), to an actual focus on what Black people need to thrive (building pro-Black)," Cyndi Suarez writes in the latest issue of NonProfit Quarterly (NPQ). "These parallel realities exist right now. But there is a gap between the leaders of color and radical white conspirators at the edge—and the funders who claim to be."