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 provides professional development to public agencies that support the arts and artists at the state and local levels.

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 the 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).

GIA advocates for the solidarity economy as part of our support for cultural and economic self-determination. 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. 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

GIA has developed our first public agency track at our national conference in Chicago in October 2024. This track is the next iteration of the Cultural Policy Learning Series & Action Lab. The Cultural Policy Learning Series is a publicly accessible series of classes on such issues as racial equity and transformational practice in the public sector, translating between sectors, and planning toward action. 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.

by Abigail

January 2010, 21 pages. Fine Arts Fund, 20 East Central Parkway, Suite 200, Cincinnati, OH, 45202, 513-871-2787, www.fineartsfund.org

Supporters of the arts have struggled to develop a national conversation that makes the case for robust, ongoing public support for the arts; but public spending on the arts is too often criticized as an example of wasteful government spending or a misguided government intrusion into an area where it does not belong.

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by giarts-ts-admin

Speech delivered at the Council on Foundations Family Foundation Conference, February 2, 2010, San Diego

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by Abigail

October 2009, 105 pages. PennPraxis, 409 Durham Wing, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 10003, 215-573-8719, www.design.upenn.edu/pennpraxis

Download at: http://issuu.com/pennpraxis/docs/report_publicart

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by Steve

ARTWorks for Kids, part of the Hunt Alternatives Fund, garners sustained private and public support of arts organizations in Eastern Massachusetts and promotes the arts in classrooms, afterschool programs, and the larger community. This brochure is aimed at arts education advocacy.

Download:

   Making the Policy Case for Public Investment in Youth Arts (564Kb)

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by Steve

Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts; Edited by Michael Hutter and David Throsby; Cambridge University Press, 2007, 324 pages

The art that matters to us … is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us that has nothing to do with the price.
— Lewis Hyde
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by Steve

Like most Americans, you may be baffled by the continued optimism of our President and his advisors about the economy. Every month more people are laid off, unemployment mounts, and thousands of small businesses, including those headed by artists, collapse. More people lose their homes to foreclosure. Economists are beginning to murmur that deepening unemployment could extend the recession and that the federal debt-financed stimulus program is not enough.

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by Steve

Brooklyn, NY - National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman delivered a keynote address today to close the 2009 national Grantmakers in the Arts conference: Navigating the Art of Change.

In his remarks, Chairman Landesman laid out the guiding principle that will inform his work at the agency, which can be summed up in two words: "Art works." Chairman Landesman explained that he means this in three ways:

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by Steve

2009, 102 pages, Common Core, 1016 16th Street NW, 7th Floor, Washington, D.C., 20036, (202) 223-1854 http://www.commoncore.org

Download:

   Why We're Behind: a Report by Common Core (3.6Mb)

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by Steve

On May 12th, more than 60 artists and creative organizers engaged in civic participation, community development, education, social justice activism, and philanthropy came together for a White House briefing on Art, Community, Social Justice, National Recovery.

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by Steve

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
Penguin Press, 2008, 352 pages. ISBN-10: 1594201722

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