Social Justice

To better support Black artists and cultural communities, arts philanthropy should increase its focus on stability and resilience in creative practice. Covid has fully revealed its long-standing fragility, leaving 63% of all artists unemployed and 66% unable to access the infrastructure necessary for their work.¹

In William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying, a young character by the name of Vardaman is allowed to believe that his “mother is a fish,” because no one takes the time to tell him that his mother is dead. Instead he associates what he witnesses with the reality he understands within a highly dysfunctional family. In the novel, he repeats, “fish. fish. fish.” Similarly, I would offer that we are currently operating in a highly dysfunctional philanthropic family. I believe in the potential of our work.

A panel hosted in May 2020 by the Freelance Artist Resource Collective on building solidarity in and with Asian American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities featured important conversations that deserve reliving in the midst of acts of violence against Asian American communities.

In a recent article in Alliance Magazine, Nicolette Naylor and David Sampson examine legal action as a key tool for interrogating and challenging power and advancing justice.

Grace Nicolette, vice president, Programming and External Relations of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, wrote recently that her observation from working in philanthropy for more than 15 years "is that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are often left out of conversations around race, either purposefully or by neglect."

In its inaugural year, NPN’s Southern Artists for Social Change program awarded $300,000 through 12 project grants to artists and culture bearers of color engaging in social change in urban, rural, and tribal communities of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Toya Lillard wrote a piece in Hyperallergic that asks "the philanthropic, nonprofit, and education sectors to expand their circles of trust beyond white or white-adjacent executive leadership in order to water the roots."

Philanthropic organizations and funders launched together the California Black Freedom Fund, a new $100 million initiative to provide resources to Black-led power-building organizations in the state over the next five years.

“Where is the point of connection between people who are impacted by these systems of injustice and people who may have thought they had some distance from it? Where do they actually share a similar experience and how do you build a cultural strategy out of that point of connection?”

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project initiative will fund, according to the announcement, five projects "focused on confronting the past and shaping the future by challenging the narratives behind America’s monuments."