GIA Blog

"Eighteen months after an unprecedented movement for racial justice, many organizations are feeling frustration and disappointment. What now?" writes Benjamin Abtan in the Stanford Social Innovation Review as 2021 comes to a close. Abtan continues, "In many of these cases, racial equity fatigue stems from the distance between the high hopes for change felt in 2020 and the current situation."

Artist Kevin Beasley was invited to create an artwork in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. "Instead, he bought land, cleared it, and began to plant a garden," writes Siddhartha Mitter in the New York Times. "By now, many local faces were familiar to him; others were not, and he listened intently to their suggestions, and also to their doubts and cautions."

In a new report, "Creative Equity National Survey Culture: Race, Myth, Art = Justice," a project of Creative Justice Initiative, was designed in 2018 to address the racist, discriminatory, and unjust policies that continue to victimize disenfranchised communities.

The U.S. Senate has voted to confirm Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson as the 13th chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. She had been nominated for the position in early October. Dr. Jackson has had a long career in strategic planning, policy research, and evaluation with philanthropy, government, and nonprofit organizations. Her work appears in a wide range of professional and academic publications, this website included.

By David Andersson & Nicholas Mosquera

This post is part of the series, Future of the Field: Cross-Sector Creative Placemaking Series.

Angelique Power, president and CEO of the Detroit-based Skillman Foundation, speaks with eJewishPhilanthropy on the power — and necessity — of centering trust within grantmaking. "What’s complicated about philanthropy is that money and power are often synonymous," Power says, "And so while the sector is directed at helping, being the arbiter of how capital moves makes you — in some ways, it jeopardizes trust, just in that act right there. It creates this uneven scenario where people are coming to you asking for funding."

Victoria Foundation announced yesterday that Sharnita C. Johnson will serve as the Foundation’s Vice President of Strategy, Impact and Communications. In this new position, Johnson will provide oversight and management of all programmatic activities and ensure alignment with the Foundation goals and values.

Earlier this month, Candid and the Center for Disaster Philanthropy (CDP) released the eighth edition of its annual Measuring the State of Disaster Philanthropy report. In it, they examined available 2019 data on global disaster-related philanthropy, analyzing funding from foundations, bilateral and multilateral donors, the U.S. federal government, corporations, and donations through donor-advised funds (DAFs) and online platforms.

This post is part of the series, Future of the Field: Cross-Sector Creative Placemaking Series.

In a recent review in Elle Decor, art critic Kimberly Drew surveys the first-of-its-kind period room that presents an imagined Black home in New York City. "The exercise coined by [Saidiya Hartman, Ph.D.] is the work of overlaying historical gaps with imaginative narrative building," Drew writes. "This practice stems from the reality that the everyday lives of Black people have often been underdocumented or plainly ignored."