Nadia Elokdah's Blog

"As the nation recognizes Black History Month, it is an opportunity to lift up the power of the arts while celebrating the contributions of Black artists to the collective tapestry of our nation," writes National Endowment for the Arts Chair Dr. María Rosario Jackson in a statement this month following her confirmation. Jackson is the first African American and Mexican American woman to serve as chair of the NEA.

"Using learnings from the Giving Circles," LUNAR Co-Founders/Directors Yichen Feng and Sabrina Wu write in their recent announcement, "we are building a $20M+ integrated capital fund. Rooted in solidarity, racial justice, and trust, we will deploy patient, flexible, integrated capital to Black and Indigenous-led organizations, businesses, and community developments."

"Racism is structural; it is upheld and perpetuated by institutions, like foundations, in the ways that they operate," writes Celia Bottger, program assistant & grants manager, NorthLight Foundation in a blog for Philanthropy New York. "In addition to taking concrete steps to institutionalize racial equity in our policies and practices, we at NorthLight came to recognize that we must engage in a process of decolonization."

"Federal arts funding in the United States is something of a sore subject: in comparison to other places around the world, creatives in this country function in near-perpetual states of uncertainty, striving endlessly to be afforded the security of a grant or gallery representation," writes Helen Holmes in the Observer.

"If you’ve taken a leap, what was the runway you needed? If you wanted to take a leap, but didn’t, what held you back?" writes guest editor Donita Volkwijn about the prompts for the latest edition of Nonprofit Wakanda Quarterly.

The Henry Luce Foundation announced recently the commitment of $14 Million in new grants intended to amplify diverse experiences and fund community-engaged projects.

"We have to stop being afraid of the critique,” Joe Scantlebury, CEO of Living Cities says in the Chronical of Philanthropy. “We don’t improve in silence.”

In a new report, "Pulse Checking Progress Toward Operationalizing REI: Arts, Culture & Healing," from LivingCities revisits learnings and progress from internal racial equity work over the part five years in response to a 2017 internal learning report, “What Does it Take to Embed a Racial Equity & Inclusion Lens?"

“Our work here in Chinatown,” Yin Kong, director and co-founder of Think!Chinatown, says, “Is about place-keeping. It’s about celebrating, strengthening and amplifying,” in an interview with NextCity. The article continues, "For a neighborhood relatively compact in size — Chinatown covers roughly two square miles in Lower Manhattan — it boasts an impressive and dedicated collective of cultural organizers," and more than $200 million announced in public dollars just in the past two years, after decades of "pigeon-holing" and insufficient funding.

"Color Congress, a national collective of majority people of color (POC) and POC-led organizations aimed at centering and strengthening nonfiction storytelling by, for and about people of color in the US, has launched in advance of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival," Filmmaker magazine reported this January leading up to the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. "Founded by documentary impact and field-building strategists Sahar Driver and Sonya Childress, the collective will invite POC-led doc-serving organizations to apply for unrestricted two-year funding from a $1.35 million fund, and later in the year, they’ll be invited to join the Congress and direct over $1 million in grants aimed at addressing field challenges."