GIA Blog

In a recent letter, members of the Arts Education Council of Americans for the Arts state "AFTA has much work yet to do to repair the harm caused — most directly to BIPOC-led arts and culture organizations — by decades of gatekeeping and resource-hoarding, spearheaded by their senior leadership."

Farhad Ebrahimi, founder and president of the Chorus Foundation in Boston, MA, writes for The Forge on the subject of private philanthropy's future, and the structural reforms that are needed:

Philanthropy as it’s conventionally understood is the product of racial capitalism. As a result, I see progressive — or even radical — private philanthropy as, at best, a transitional form. If we seek to support transformational work, then we ourselves must be open to transformation. I like to think of this as a “just transition” for the philanthropic sector: we must directly challenge the conditions that produced the wealth inequality that allowed for private philanthropy in the first place.

For the Mellon Foundation's 2020 annual report, the foundation's president Elizabeth Alexander reflects on how Mellon moved through the past year's challenges due "to the institutional analysis in which we already had been engaged, examining and reframing our mission and values within a new strategic direction and rigorously clarifying which problems we were trying to solve with our grantmaking."

For the month of July, GIA’s photo banner features work supported by Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona.

An article in Chalkbeat discusses efforts that have "attempted to ban critical race theory, the academic framework that examines how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism."

The Communicative Arts Academy, "a vital hub for a community largely excluded from Los Angeles’s cultural institutions," is at the center of this New York Times Style Magazine article.

In his recent blog post, Backlash: A Sharp Right Turn by a Philanthropy Member Organization, Phil Buchanan, president of Center for Effective Philanthropy, calls out the current critique of pro-BIPOC philanthropy.

Equity in the Center's Race Equity Cycle Pulse Check is a free, online tool "to assess where organizations are on the Race Equity Cycle."

Theatre Communications Group announced the launch of THRIVE!, a regranting program to provide unrestricted funds and professional development and technical assistance for U.S.- based Black Theaters, Indigenous Theaters, and all Theaters of Color (BITOC), according to the Blackfilm.com.

NDN Collective expects to open an Indigenous-led, culture-based school in Rapid City, South Dakota, in Fall 2022. The school, set to serve 40 students in the first year, "will be the first Indigenous-led school designed specifically for students in the Rapid City community," as the announcement explains.