Working for Black August: Black Arts & Culture Funding and Justice Resource Hub

Throughout this resource hub, we aim to amplify funds and resources that explicitly center Black artists, cultural communities, and experiences. Additionally, we borrow a lens from the BIPOC project¹ that centers Black and Indigenous folks - whose experiences shape relationships for all ALAANA/POC people’s relationships with white supremacy culture – as another dimension of resource and financial investment intended to realize justice.

This hub is curated with the intention of identifying and amplifying funds and resources that support Black artists, culture, and communities. We recognize that this is an incomplete list that we expect to evolve and hope will expand.

Funding for Black Artists and Cultural Communities

• The Black Donors Project - Black Donors Project surveys Black donors who give to the arts with a goal to measurably shift financial support for Black art by identifying Black giving preferences of Black donors for Black artists, Black-led arts organizations, and Black-owned galleries.
• Pittsburg’s Cultural Treasures - Pittsburgh’s Cultural Treasures, will focus first on supporting Black cultural organizations. Some of the grants may range from $500,000 to $1 million and will pay out over multiple years.
• Black Artist Fund - A micro- and small grant fund started by Sacramento black creatives to address inequity in arts funding.
• Black Art Futures Fund (BAFF) - A collective of emerging philanthropists promoting the elevation and preservation of Black arts & culture and seeking to amplify and strengthen the future of Black art.
• Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh - A joint grantmaking program committed to helping create a vibrant cultural life in Pittsburgh and the region for Black artists and cultural organizations that focus on Black arts.
• Black-Led Movement Fund at Borealis Philanthropy - Supporting organizations working to advance the vision of young, Black, queer, feminist, and immigrant leaders. In particular, we prioritize funding organizations who are actively leading and anchoring the Movement for Black Lives
• NBAF (National Black Arts Fund) - Artist Project Fund to support Black Artists in getting back to work and thus provide for their households.
• Black Trans Protestors Emergency Fund from Black Trans Femmes in the Arts (BTFA Collective)
• ArtsWave Grants for African American Arts - Connecting local Black arts and cultural innovators with access to resources and opportunities to grow and thrive, new in 2020.
• #DefendBlackLife Response Funds & Black-Led Organizing Work - This compilation of Rapid Response Funds, general funds for Black-led organizing, and Black-led organizing work to support for the long term has been curated by Justice Funders for the purpose of tracking, sharing information and supporting movements for justice.

Funding for BIPOC Artists and Cultural Communities

• Belonging in Oakland: A Just City Fund (Cultural Affairs Division City of Oakland) - To generate an array of possible answers to that provocative question, we turn to community-rooted BIPOC (Black/Indigenous/People of Color) visionaries, artist activists, and resilient culture keepers to help us imagine new landscapes and narratives, liberate deferred potential, recover old wisdoms, and unleash radical hope.
• Take Notice Fund (National Performance Network) - NPN envisions a world in which artists of color living and working in the South have the power, resources, and opportunities to thrive. The Take Notice Fund honors BIPOC artists living and working in Louisiana, providing funding to advance their artistic practices.
• 26 Organizations You Can Donate to That Support Emerging Black Artists, Thinkers, and Change-Makers - Organizations across the U.S. thst aim to foster the careers of aspiring Black creatives in a variety of ways.
• REACH Fund at Borealis Philanthropy - Tackling liberatory possibilities and funding to reach that goal.
• BIPOC Artist Fund at The Sable Project - dedicated to providing funding for Sable artists who identify as Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color.
• Mobilize Power Fund at Third Wave Fund - A rapid response fund that supports the leadership of young women of color, trans, gender non-conforming, queer, and intersex youth under 35 in social movements, regardless of 501c3 status or fiscal sponsorship.
• Critical Minded - Granting and learning initiative to support cultural critics of color in the United States, where they are underrepresented in the coverage of all artistic disciplines.

Advocacy, Movements, and Networks

• Black Social Change Funders Network - A network of funders committed to creating thriving Black communities by strengthening the infrastructure for Black-led social change.
• Black Philanthropic Network at ABFE - A group of nine regional affinity groups whose focus is to support philanthropy in Black communities and that is in alignment with ABFE’s mission to promote effective and responsive philanthropy in Black communities.
• Invest/Divest from the Movement for Black Lives - The Movement for Black Lives launched the Vision for Black Lives, a comprehensive and visionary policy agenda for the post-Ferguson Black liberation movement, in August of 2016.
• Invest/Divest created by Funders for Justice a Program from Neighborhood Funders Group - Addressing how we “reallocate power and resources back to our safety, back to our health, in ways that help us thrive, and that don’t criminalize or dehumanize us.”
• Black Lives Matter Arts+Culture - uplifting Black artists, educating Black communities on the intersection of art, culture, and politics, and disrupting the status quo of the art world by uplifting emerging Black artists who speak audaciously, who are unafraid, and who stand in solidarity with the most marginalized among us.
• The Center for Cultural Power - a women of color, artist-led organization, inspiring artists and culture makers to imagine a world where power is distributed equitably and where we live in harmony with nature.

Anti-Racist Reading List

• Schomburg Center Black Liberation Reading List - "In response to the uprisings across the globe demanding justice for Black lives, the Schomburg Center has created a Black Liberation Reading List. The 95 titles on the list represent books we and the public turn to regularly as activists, students, archivists, and curators, with a particular focus on books by Black authors and those whose papers we steward."
• “How to Be an Antiracist: A Conversation With Ibram X. Kendi” - An interview with Dr. Kendi challenging traditional definitions of racism, who can be racist, and how to work differently to create an anti-racist society.
• “What is an Anti-Racist Reading List For?”
• “We Must be in It for the Long Haul” - Black Foundation Executives Request Action by Philanthropy on Anti-Black Racism
• “Crisis Funding is Not Enough: Invest in Black Communities⁠ for the Long Term” - Borealis Philanthropy’s call to investing in long-term partnerships with communities working to end anti-Black violence and police brutality, and build lasting freedom and dignity for Black and other communities of color.
• Justice Funders’ Dismantling White Supremacy & Anti-Blackness in Philanthropy - An exploration and acknowledgment of “the ways in which our institutions and our field at large have perpetuated these systems of oppression.”
• “The Case for Funding Black-Led Social Change”
• “Nonprofits Led by People of Color Win Less Grant Money with More Strings”
• “Through Pop Culture, Can We Imagine Life Beyond White Supremacy?”
• “Race in the Writers’ Room: How Hollywood whitewashes the stories that shape America”
• "Conversation Claudia Rankine: On Whiteness" MacArthur Foundation Fellow and acclaimed author Claudia Rankine presents an investigation of the historically unquestioned role Whiteness plays in race relations.
• “What does an equitable economy look like?”
• “Statements About George Floyd Are a Start, but How Will Organizations Live Their Values?”
• “Redlining by Another Name: What the data says to move from rhetoric to action”

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

1. “We use the term BIPOC to highlight the unique relationship to whiteness that Indigenous and Black people have, which shapes the experiences of and relationship to white supremacy for all people of color within a U.S. context.” From https://www.thebipocproject.org.