Steve's Blog

From Lisa Chiu at The Chronicle of Philanthropy:

An interesting post from Venkatesh Rao on his blog Ribbonfarm.com explores the 400+ year history of the corporation. And he declares the “age of the corporation is coming to an end” at the outset. His mental model of the human world is visualized here. Of it he says:

Information from Foundations Center's Glass Pockets project:

1. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
2. Ford Foundation
3. J. Paul Getty Trust
4. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
5. W. K. Kellogg Foundation
6. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
7. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation
8. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
9. Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
10. Lilly Endowment Inc.

The John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has published a new video that promotes and describes the MacArthur Fellows Program (commonly referred to as genius grants). Take a look at this program and hear from some recipients.

NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman continued his Art Works tour of the US with a visit to the central valley of California. Apparently it's the first ever such visit by an NEA chair. Rocco's host on the visit was Amy Kitchener, who runs the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, while he met with organizations and artists from Fresno, Merced and Modesto.

Read Rocco's full post here.

A pair of Harvard mathematicians have leveraged the power of Google's massive effort to digitize the world's published text to begin a quantitative analysis of culture, a study they've termed Culturomics. In this video, Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel—co-founders of the Cultural Observatory at Harvard and Visiting Faculty at Google—show how Culturomics can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology.

The McKnight Foundation has named Minnesota-based dancer and choreographer Ranee Ramaswamy as the 2011 McKnight Distinguished Artist, in recognition of artistic excellence spanning more than three decades. Now in its 14th year, the annual honor includes a $50,000 cash award and recognizes individual Minnesota artists who have made significant contributions to the quality of the state's cultural life.

Nonprofit Finance Fund has published a new series on the need for and uses of capital in the arts. The materials convey stories and lessons learned from NFF’s $15 million Leading for the Future Initiative, the first national Initiative to deploy a specific kind of investment – change capital – to help arts organizations adapt their programming, operations and finances to thrive in a changed and changing economic and cultural landscape.

Remember to check in with the Major State Arts Agency Budget and Restructuring Proposals document from NASAA for updates on State Arts Agencies. Kansas, of course, is the big news today. But other states are facing similar situations and NASAA is keeping us informed of them all.

From Standford Social Innovation Review:

Most successful foundations and nonprofits understand the importance of advocacy. Over the last decade, foundations have put more resources into advocating for the policies they believe in, with some notable successes. Yet grantmakers have often hesitated to plunge in. Sometimes they worry about appearing too political or partisan. But more often they hesitate because effective advocacy is difficult, and evaluating whether various approaches are working is even harder...