Nadia Elokdah's Blog

Grantmakers in the Arts announces the inaugural Public Sector & Cultural Policy Committee! 

The GIA Public Sector & Cultural Policy Committee is accepting nominations from interested individuals to serve on the Committee. 

Submit an Expression of Interest

About the Committee

“Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust’s nearly $141 million in grantmaking during the last half of 2021 is a keen expression of both its legacy of long-term strategic investment in Maricopa County’s (AZ) resilience and its unique ability to respond powerfully to unfolding crises,” announced in the Business Wire.

Memphis Music Initiative (MMI) recently announced the launch of "Call & Response: The Sound of Black Arts Revolution," a campaign and "a call to funders in the creative youth development nonprofit space to do better by the Black and brown leaders who give so much of themselves to their communities, and the young people they serve. Black Pay Matters. Black Legacy Matters. Black Rest Matters," according to the announcement in late March.

“When we fight pipelines, when we fight oil projects, when we fight all of the extractive development that harms our mother, we don’t do that just for ourselves,” Krystal Two Bulls says, director of the LANDBACK Campaign within the Indigenous advocacy organization NDN Collective in Grist. Elaborating, “We do that so we can all actually have an earth to live on in the future. So that future generations that aren’t even born yet have an earth to come to.”

"For decades, arts and music education in California has been dying a slow death in many schools, strangled by budget cuts amid an ongoing emphasis on core subjects like reading and math and test scores as the measure of student success," reports Louis Freedberg in EdSource.

“Some of the changes that we instituted during the pandemic were things that we were actually thinking about before,” said Rashad Cobb, community engagement program officer at the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation. He summarized, “These weren’t necessarily new ideas that we had never thought (of) before, but maybe the pace at which we would’ve implemented these ideas was sped up by the pandemic.”

“Philanthropists apparently wanted to help arts and culture organizations that were hurt by canceled performances, classes and fund raising events, which caused a loss of revenue,” Fidelity Charitable said. Summarizing support as, “Donors gave $351 million more in 2021 than in 2020 to arts and cultural organizations.”

For Richmond-based artist Austin “Auz” Miles, the impact of her work is right there in the communities where she paints,” reports Nia Norris in NextCity. Elaborating, “Miles is part of a collective called All City Art Club whose mission is to bring murals to the Southside.”

In an Upack the Past feature in Al Jazeera, Donna J. Nicol writes, “From New Deal liberalism in the 1930s to the academic culture wars of the 1980s and the rise of Donald Trump, how White fears of losing power led to philanthropy that openly discouraged discussions of race and diversity.”

“Hauser & Wirth Institute gives $700,000 in grants to preserving historical records,” reports Benjamin Sutton in the Art Newspaper. “One of the things we’re trying to do is set a new precedent for models of philanthropy in art,” says Lisa Darms, the executive director of Hauser & Wirth Institute.