Racial Equity in Arts Funding Workshops

GIA’s Racial Equity workshops have been designed to help participants recognize that cultural funding is a system that has been historically racialized like so many societal systems and to help guide our approaches to re-designing cultural funding as an anti-racist system.

GIA offers two racial equity workshops for arts grantmakers: grounding and advancing:

The GIA Racial Equity in Arts Funding workshop is grounding and includes information on the history of racialization in the United States, the history of cultural funding, and real-world stories of success and examples of racial equity funding, strategies, and resources you may bring with you back to your organizations.

The Pro-BIPOC Arts Funding Community of Practice workshop is advancing, building on concepts and practices from the first. It is intentionally designed to be more dialogic, focused on building a community of practice between participants as they design or re-design their funding to be anti-racist. This workshop is most appropriate for those who have already participated in GIA’s Racial Equity in Arts Funding workshop; have already participated in racial equity, racial justice, or anti-racist trainings; or have experience designing or redesigning their funding to be anti-racist.

If you want to know more, explore the workshop Frequently-Asked Questions.

Workshop participants in cities like Detroit; Cleveland; Seattle; Trenton, NJ; and Boston, MA; have shared with us that what is learned through these workshops will be highly instructive and useful to their work moving forward. Here are some of their remarks:

“The whole facilitation team brought much needed context, advice, and inspiration to the group.”

“The case studies were useful to see other organizations' struggles, efforts, and successes and compare them to the experiences we face. It is always helpful to learn about how other similar organizations operate.”

“There was a level of honesty around the challenges of racial justice work that I haven't experienced in a training previously.”

Please contact us at workshops@giarts.org with any questions.

For further context, we have included some of GIA’s racial equity content below: