GIA News's Blog

(7-21-10) From the Washington Post:

In a White House where first lady Michelle Obama's relationship to the arts strives to be both rarefied and common, cerebral and pragmatic, the cultural program is dictated by tradition, personal life story... and an unabashed desire to shake things up.

(7-21-10) The Performing Arts Alliance reports, "According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), processing times for regularly-filed artist visa petitions will not exceed 14 days.

(7-21-10) From Open Society Institute:

To give a boost to New York City arts organizations hard hit by the financial crisis, the Open Society Foundations today announced $11 million in grants to support community and educational arts initiatives...

Surdna Foundation has released the report “A Documentation and Analysis of Surdna Arts Teachers Fellowship Program (SATF): The First Decade 2000-2010” prepared by Mindy N. Levine. More from surdna.org:

Angie Kim will be leaving The Getty Foundation at the end of this week and will be joining Southern California Grantmakers (SCG) as their Director of Programs beginning August 9.

(7-20-10) Despite signals in 2008 that funding would end after a two-year grant period, New York arts organizations are struggling to fill gaps in their budgets created by the discontinuance of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's grantmaking program (administered by the Carnegie Corp. of New York).

(7-20-10) Further to our July 2nd post on community-vote-based corporate giving, Kate Taylor reports on ArtsBeat about a Lincoln Center employee who used Twitter to issue a call to arms against fellow American Express grant candidate StoryCorps. The arts community responded:

(7-19-10) July 18, Rebecca Knight for The Financial Times:

A growing number of business programmes are introducing courses focused on 'practising philanthropy,' with the aim of teaching MBA students how to have a strategic edge in their giving by conducting site visits to non-profit organisations, tracking social and operational metrics and measuring the impact of their charitable contributions.

(7-19-10) New Research by Katherine Fulton, Gabriel Kaspar, and Barbara Kibbe, published by the Monitor Group and supported by the W. K. Kellog Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

(7-16-10) On July 10, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation announced grants totaling nearly $4 million, with $1,597,500 directed to the arts. On the same day, Paul Allen announced his intention to leave the bulk of his $13.5 billion estate to philanthropic causes—in part, answering a challenge to "America's uber-rich," issued by fellow billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates, to make public pledges of substantial support to philanthropic causes.