Taking Root: The Environment of Arts and Culture

Two related sessions at grantmaking conferences last fall addressed important questions concerning the relationship of art, culture, and the environment. In each case, funders sought practical information about creative collaboration and successful cross-sector funding. Whether labeled "arts" or "environment" funders, grantmakers craved creative ways to attract new partners — both individuals and organizations — to their work. The bad news is that these conversations only scratched the surface of potential; the good news is that there will be new opportunities to develop this approach in the near future — specifically, at the Council on Foundations 2003 meeting. More on that later.

At the Environmental Grantmakers Association (EGA) session, two projects helped participants connect the dots between art, culture, and the environment. The first was Green Guerillas, a New York City organization that works with residents of low-income neighborhoods with limited green space. Green Guerillas support these residents as they develop vacant lots into vibrant community gardens. The gardens are physical expressions of creativity and ethnicity that provide tangible links to cultural and geographic roots of a community's inhabitants. The second project was a Native American community health center in northern California — Potawot Health Village. Growing out of the cultural philosophy of its nine tribes, the Village treats health of the individual as inextricably linked to health and sustainability of the people and land where that individual lives, breathes, and interacts. Embedded in both projects are goals applicable to wide-ranging philanthropic interests — health, ecological restoration, cultural expression, and community strengthening, to name just a few.

Within this frame, environmental funders described their hopes for using art and culture as tools for drawing new allies into environmental work. They expressed frustration with a construct that places environmental work far from where people perceive themselves to live and work. However they also expressed hope that a cultural approach could help these same people see that ENVIRONMENT is all around them. They talked of the potential of art and culture to raise the profile of environmental concerns that have not yet landed on the public's radar screen.

The Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) session was a loosely-structured dialogue among interested funders about how to push forward an arts/environment approach both within and outside of their foundations. The projects described above became two examples among many brought forward by participants that sparked discussion. Community artist/activist Lily Yeh set the tone earlier in the day when she vividly described her work in north Philadelphia to “build livable communities through art and greening.”

Interestingly, at both sessions, many around the table had already begun work at this intersection of art and environment, if only around the edges. GIA participants discussed specific problems they faced in pursuing an arts/environment approach. Overwhelmingly, “language” was named as a barrier to successful forward motion even within their own institutions. They articulated a need to find ways to talk about cultural approaches to environ- mental work (and vice versa) that weren't cumbersome or “loaded” in ways that alienated colleagues using different lenses. For example, how might they keep the language of art and culture from being seen as “soft” or “fuzzy” by policy-minded funders and practitioners within the environmental field, whose work is deeply rooted in science and technology.

In these days of sharply reduced grantmaking budgets, funders are challenged to provide support that helps organizations achieve specific goals, under whatever “category” those goals may fall. More than ever, we must understand how “our” issues and goals intersect with the broader world in order to assure that those goals are relevant in a realistic context and not simply attractive goals unto themselves (i.e. “goals under glass”). The conversations described here are an encouraging start, but they are only the beginning. Where to go from here? We need language that includes rather than excludes. We need to break out of our usual conversation circles and talk to people working in worlds less familiar to us but no less relevant to the people and places we are trying to affect through our funding.

Devoted to exploring connections between arts and other fields, last October's GIA conference included comments on “Integrating Nature” by historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, who provoked arts funders to consider assumptions regularly made by individuals, groups, and social or political movements that create barriers to goals. Regarding the environmental movement, Limerick observed that our “culture of specialization” has effectively divided environmental history from ethnic history — ironic, since the Civil Rights Act and the Wilderness Act were passed in the same year. She suggested that arts can infiltrate and disarm in ways that theory alone cannot, particularly in a movement — environment — with its strong roots in literature. GIA has organized another session with Ms. Limerick and writers Richard Rodriguez and Inada Lawson to further tease out ways in which the art/environment connection can play out in practical, fruitful terms. The session will be presented at this spring's Council on Foundations
meeting in association with EGA. Both GIA and EGA continue to pursue avenues for extending communication and learning opportunities between their philanthropic constituencies.

After years of sowing seeds of funding in neatly cultivated rows, we are learning that tidy categories, while convenient, are at best problematic and perhaps even counter-productive in carrying out funding goals. Understanding how ingredients intermingle can help us reframe our conversations, talk with new and different players, realign our partnerships and collaborations, and ultimately move us toward our goals more creatively and effectively.

Together, Bethany Wall, program officer at Mertz-Gilmore Foundation in New York City and Judi Jennings, director of Kentucky Foundation for Women, developed “Taking Root in Art and Culture” sessions for last fall's EGA and GIA conferences. Their collaboration continued with this article.