Public Policy & Advocacy
Grantmakers in the Arts holds public policy and advocacy as one of its core funding focus areas and believes one of the most important roles we can serve in benefitting our members and the arts grantmaking community – maximizing the impact our sector can have toward increasing access to the arts and realizing racial justice through the arts – comes by way of our public policy and advocacy work. In GIA’s vision for the future, foundations have shifted their foci to increasingly include advocacy and public sector policy and practice.
Grantmakers in the Arts’ Public Policy & Advocacy work has 3 components:
1. GIA educates funders about how they can advocate and support both advocacy and lobbying.
2. GIA advocates and lobbies for federal governmental policies that benefit artists and other workers as well as students, seniors, children and caregivers.
3. Knowing that much government change happens at the level of agency practice, GIA learns from and provides professional development to public agencies that support the arts and artists at the state and local levels, including through the new GIA Public Sector & Cultural Policy Committee.
FUNDER EDUCATION
GIA educates funders about how they can advocate and support both advocacy and lobbying. Foundations, nonprofit organizations and public agencies can advocate. Advocacy is focused exclusively on raising awareness of issues and the impacts of approaches. Lobbying seeks more targeted influence.
Grassroots lobbying is the action of informing the public about an issue and asking them to take direct action, vote for a certain bill, for instance. Direct lobbying is the action of speaking to a government official with an express ask to take direct action such as voting for a certain bill.
The difference between advocating and lobbying can be identified by asking, “Is there a discrete piece of legislation under discussion? Am I encouraging someone to vote for or against that legislation?” If the answer is no, then you are advocating. If the answer is yes, you are lobbying.
Far more of us can engage in or support lobbying than we often realize. Nonprofits can lobby and foundations can support lobbying.
- Foundations themselves CANNOT lobby, with the exception of community foundations. But, foundations CAN support lobbying.
- Foundations CAN support nonprofits’ lobbying through general operating support as long as none of their funds are earmarked for lobbying.
- Foundations CAN support nonprofits’ lobbying through project grants for projects that include lobbying as long as none of the grant is earmarked for lobbying.
- Foundations CANNOT say, “Here’s your lobbying money.” Foundations CAN say, “Here’s your grant and we recognize that some of it will be used for lobbying.”
ADVOCACY AND LOBBYING
GIA advocates and lobbies for economic justice for workers, including artists. GIA advocates for a guaranteed income. Guaranteed income has its roots in the racial and gender justice movements of the 1960s when both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Panther Party advocated for the policy. GIA advocates for portable benefits for workers. Benefits tied to employment is a historic relic meant to prevent people of color from accessing health insurance and other benefits. This relic discourages entrepreneurship and risk-taking, and has racialized outcomes. GIA has released a call for our stakeholders to endorse the Portable Benefits for Independent Workers Pilot Program Act.
In our support of equity, GIA is race-explicit but not race-exclusive. GIA advocates for cultural and economic self-determination for people with disabilities especially in light of intersecting forms of oppression for racialized people with disabilities. GIA advocates for changing public policies to allow people with disabilities, including artists, to secure greater resources for their work without being rendered ineligible for public supports. GIA is endorsing the Allowing Steady Savings by Eliminating Tests Act (the ASSET Act). The bill raises the limits on assets people with disabilities can hold before being disqualified from public benefits while also indexing those limits to inflation. The bill also prohibits states from using asset tests for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance program (SNAP), and Low Income Home Energy Assistance (LIHEAP).
As part of our support for cultural and economic self-determination, GIA advocates for the solidarity economy. GIA has advocated for all members of Congress to support the National Worker Cooperative Development and Support Act (HR 7221), which aims to promote and expand worker-owned cooperative businesses in the United States by endowing the Small Business Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Department of the Treasury, Department of Commerce, United States Department of Agriculture, and Department of Labor with responsibilities and authorities to implement programs and initiatives to support worker co-ops. Individuals and nonprofits can endorse here. Here is more information on the bill. Support to artists working as part of solidarity economies has risen from 7% of GIA’s member survey respondents in 2022 to 13% in 2023 – almost twice as many. Support to organizations working as part of solidarity economies has gone from 0 survey respondents in 2022 to 13% in 2023.
GIA has successfully lobbied to include arts-related provisions in the Child Care for Working Families Act, which proposes to better help low-income families pay for childcare and expand high-quality state preschool options. GIA advocated for AmeriCorps to make national volunteer service more accessible by offering an increase in living allowances.
GIA lobbies for policies that strengthen the nonprofit cultural sector and the public education system, which employ artists while benefiting society as a whole. GIA are committed to invigorating funding and support for arts education within federal policy, and defend that every resident has access to the arts as part of well-rounded, life-long education. Over the past several years, GIA has worked to raise the visibility of the arts in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), provisions we helped integrate into the legislation. Thanks to ESSA, GIA guides our members and their grantees in advocating for new or expanded arts programs at their local schools and districts.
Organized since 2012, GIA’s Arts Education Funders Coalition (AEFC) has worked to address identified needs in comprehensive arts education and to strengthen communication and networking among arts education funders. The AEFC includes members from Americans for the Arts, Arts Education Partnership, Center for Cultural Innovation, The George Gund Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Wallace Foundation, among others. Advised by a committee of Coalition members, GIA engages the services of Washington, D.C.-based Penn Hill Group, a firm with education and labor policy expertise and experience working with diverse education groups to research, develop, and promote educational and labor policy strategies.
Most recently, GIA worked with Representative Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) on the development of the Arts Education for All Act, the broadest arts education policy bill ever introduced in Congress. In Spring 2021, GIA influenced the U.S. Department of Education to highlight the importance of equitable access to arts and culture when determining how to reopen schools. Additionally, GIA emphasized the need to make explicit how this access was racialized prior to the pandemic. Addressing this inequity was essential to effective reopening and remains essential to the adequate provision of comprehensive, well-rounded education. GIA advocates and lobbies for lifelong learning. GIA is delighted that, in 2020, Congress passed the Supporting Older Americans Act including our recommendations that the Administration on Aging include the arts in the issues to be identified and addressed and be included among supportive services for older Americans.
STATE AND LOCAL PUBLIC AGENCIES
In 2025, GIA is piloting the GIA Public Sector & Cultural Policy Committee. The committee will be an incubator for state and local funder organizing and cultural advocacy, cross-sector collaboration, and intersectional equity toward economic justice and is the newest addition to GIA’s commitment to public policy & advocacy. The committee will advise, inspire, and inform GIA’s thought leadership and programming in support of more equitable cultural funding and public policy. You may find more information HERE.
This committee follows GIA’s first public policy track at our 2024 national conference and the Cultural Policy Learning Series & Action Lab, a leadership and professional development community of practice program for public sector workers who seek to advance intersectional equity through arts and culture and public policy. These are all steps toward realizing the recommendations in the GIA-commissioned report, Opportunities at the Intersections: Advancing Racial Equity via Arts and Culture in the Public Sector, written by Jen Cole and Rebecca Kinslow.
GIA is eager to continue informing the field’s support for advocacy and to advocate for public policies that enhance lifelong access to the transformative power of arts and culture and create economic justice for artists and other workers.
Today, President Biden announced his intent to appoint the following individuals to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) was founded in 1982 by Executive Order to advise the President on cultural policy.
Read More..."Philanthropy comes in many forms. For over a decade, Black Philanthropy Month has been a time of reflection on Black philanthropists’ contributions—including the contributions of Black liberation movements," said Son Chau for Nonprofit Quarterly. "As an American-born, Vietnamese philanthropic professional, this annual convening in August prompts me to reflect not only on the financial and political contributions that Black communities up and down the socioeconomic ladder have made to a democratic society. It also encourages me to rethink the definition of philanthropy itself."
Read More...From Nonprofit Quarterly: The cultural sector is seeking alternatives to business-as-usual. This article is the second in the series, “Remember the Future: Culture and Systems Change,” co-produced by Art.coop and NPQ. In this series, queer, trans, and BIPOC artists and cultural bearers reflect upon the unique role that culture has played and can play in activating and enacting structural change—and in building a solidarity economy.
Read More...From The White House: "By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Policy. The arts, the humanities, and museum and library services are essential to the well-being, health, vitality, and democracy of our Nation. They are the soul of America, reflecting our multicultural and democratic experience. They further help us strive to be the more perfect Union to which generation after generation of Americans have aspired. They inspire us; provide livelihoods; sustain, anchor, and bring cohesion within diverse communities across our Nation; stimulate creativity and innovation; help us understand and communicate our values as a people; compel us to wrestle with our history and enable us to imagine our future; invigorate and strengthen our democracy; and point the way toward progress."
Read More..."On the evening of Thursday, September 28, dozens of Brooklyn Museum union workers lined the institution’s grand entrance, chanting 'overworked and underpaid' and 'ancient art, not ancient wages.' Visitors to the museum’s Open House, an event celebrating the revamped Asian and Islamic art galleries, streamed in through different entrances in an attempt to circumvent the protestors," said Elaine Velie for Hyperallergic.
"Employees at the Brooklyn Museum officially unionized in August 2021 and began contract negotiations with museum leadership in January of this year. While the two parties have reached tentative agreements on some non-economic issues, they have yet to come to terms on healthcare and wages."
Read More...From the White House Briefing Room: "At the national level, NEA Chair Jackson will participate in the United We Stand Summit, alongside National Endowment for the Humanities Chair Lowe, and will be partnering on a messaging initiative in future months. We extend an invitation for you to join us for this important, first-of-its-kind event, with information on how to watch the summit forthcoming. The arts and culture have an important role to play in this issue. As we all know, the arts help us develop the skills needed to find connection, common purpose, and recognition of our shared humanity. They are an integral part of America's civic infrastructure: the norms and agreements that we rely on to care for one another. In this time of division and polarization, strengthening this civic infrastructure through the arts is paramount."
Read More...As Philanthropy New York has been solidifying its commitment to centering racial equity, our programming and networks have evolved as well. One of YLBC’s intentions now reads, 'building a more networked philanthropic sector dedicated to equitable, inclusive, collaborative and innovative philanthropy,'" said Donita Volkwijn, Senior Director, Member Engagement, Philanthropy New York.
"Not everyone is as lucky to have the kind of boss that operated in the values stated above. Goodness, I haven’t always been that lucky and the unlucky moments have come about largely because of how I identify. At this point, most people (at least the ones reading this piece) recognize how racism can cut people off from opportunity. What is harder to recognize is how racism denies members of the BIPOC community the opportunity to learn and grow."
Read More..."Events at the Whitney Museum of American Art this year have featured a consistent new guest: the museum’s union. Last night, at the museum’s annual gala and Studio Party, about 50 people turned out, standing on the curb with signs bearing such slogans as 'LIVING ARTISTS LIVING WAGES,' 'HONK FOR A FAIR CONTRACT,' and 'WHITNEY WORKERS WANT FAIR WAGES' and banging on drums as guests filed into the museum’s lobby for a luxe dinner," said artnet news. "Compared to the demonstration that followed the opening of the Whitney Biennial, it was a clear increase in participation, plausibly stemming from a wage offer on April 19 that fell far below the union’s proposal."
Read More...From JPMorgan Chase: "New JPMorgan Chase PolicyCenter brief recommends asset and income restriction reforms."
Read More...“Today, Congresswoman Barbara Lee introduced the Advancing Equity Through the Arts and Humanities Act to acknowledge the role that arts and humanities play in dismantling systemic racism in the United States."
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