Funding Research

October 2000, 94 pages. Bay Area Video Coalition, 2727 Mariposa Street, 2nd floor, San Francisco, California, 94110, (415) 558-2100, funded by the Ford Foundation.

This study identifies successful programs and practices of training programs that provide low-income people with job skills in the technology field. The study can be helpful to grantmakers wishing to better understand this field.

Cultural Policy Research was the topic of two breakfast roundtables at GIA's 2000 conference in Minneapolis. A combination of scheduled presenters and other participants gave brief summaries of current research underway. The cumulative impact of hearing about so many projects at the same time inspired Reader editors to want to share the reports with our readers. This overview does not pretend to be exhaustive, but rather is a snapshot based on roundtable participation and the ability of the following report contributors to respond quickly to our invitation. We extend many thanks to them.

In summer 2000, junior professionals working in Los Angeles County arts and culture organizations gathered to form the Emerging Arts Leaders (EAL), named to reflect their ambitions of becoming established arts leaders. The group has met bimonthly four times and is in the process of formalizing a mission statement and 2001 activities, one of which is to establish a professional development training program. EAL is composed of about thirty junior professionals from all facets of the arts (artists, arts organizations, grantmakers, for-profit enterprises, and independent consultants).

See them in snow under a full moon
they told me.
The shadows will take you out of
yourself to when
the Stones were erected, the time it
took and the reason
we try to guess today.

Richard Hugo, from "The Standing Stones of Callanish"

Poets know that how we ask a question determines how we see the answer. The Murdock Charitable Trust, in its ambitious new study of arts funding, is learning the same thing. It's often your landscape of assumptions that determines what you can see.

The Potrero Nuevo Fund is a donor-advised fund housed at the Tides Foundation in San Francisco. Established about five years ago by Bill Laven and Christine Pielenz, the Fund supports projects in the arts, the environment, and sustainable architecture. While the Fund's giving to environmental and sustainable architecture projects is international in scope, the arts giving is focused on the Bay Area, and primarily on individuals and arts education.

The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation was established in 1985 to provide supplemental instruction to promising young artists and financial assistance to visual artists of demonstrated talent. Today, the Foundation awards approximately $500,000 annually.

GIA is pleased to announce the publication of Creative Family Giving in the Arts, the second volume in its series of Field Resource Books. The book portrays a variety of innovative programs of support for the arts and artists, and emphasizes giving by small family foundations and programs that make grants under $10,000. The project was co-chaired by Kathleen O'Grady of the O'Grady Foundation and Mercy Pavelic' of the Heathcote Art Foundation.

The remarkable growth of the online sector in recent years can be assessed in many ways — from the rapidly expanding number of wired households (over half are now connected to the Internet) to the sheer explosion of content on the World Wide Web (which now encompasses over a billion pages). Data traffic exceeds voice traffic on the nation's phone lines now, and far more email messages than postal letters are sent every day.

2000 reprint edition, first published in 1992, 296 pages, paper. Arts Extension Service Press, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, ISBN 0-275-94054-3

2000, 122 pages; Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF), Denver Colorado, 303-629-1166.