Carmen Graciela Díaz's Blog

In February 2020, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF) co-hosted a first-of-its-kind gathering in Washington, D.C., with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). A report, produced by NACF, documenting the gathering and its main recommendations to strengthen the Native arts, cultures, and humanities field.

On Tuesday, March 23, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will present a webinar centered on how arts organizations can reopen their venues in 2021 with special guest Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health.

In "Keeping in Touch, Building Trust - A Funders Report from the Virtual Front Lines," Jennifer Negron, program officer at The Pinkerton Foundation, shares the importance of building relationships with the people and organizations they help fund and how the organization approached virtual “site visits” in the midst of the pandemic.

In a recent piece, Adam Fong, Program Officer in Performing Arts at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, reflects on a cluster of "adaptation grants" Hewlett put in place to help ensure Bay Area arts organizations "have sufficient resources to adapt to challenges both arising from and exacerbated by the pandemic."

Throughout this month, South Arts will be running a series of articles penned by their program participants and grant recipients exploring how their work has changed in response to the pandemic.

In a recent article in Alliance Magazine, Nicolette Naylor and David Sampson examine legal action as a key tool for interrogating and challenging power and advancing justice.

Vu Le writes in Nonprofit AF about “sunsetting” in philanthropy and how he appreciates "when funders have the courage to do this. So many societal problems could be resolved more effectively if more foundations would spend more now to solve these problems instead of hoarding resources, which allows entrenched issues to persist."

Grace Nicolette, vice president, Programming and External Relations of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, wrote recently that her observation from working in philanthropy for more than 15 years "is that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are often left out of conversations around race, either purposefully or by neglect."

In its inaugural year, NPN’s Southern Artists for Social Change program awarded $300,000 through 12 project grants to artists and culture bearers of color engaging in social change in urban, rural, and tribal communities of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

A post by Jamie Hipp and Margaret-Mary Sulentic Dowell, in collaboration with the Arts Education Partnership Higher Education Working Group, says "offering arts integration coursework for preservice teachers can embolden elementary teachers to embed the arts into the crowded curriculum, leading to benefits for students and teachers alike."