Arts and Community Development

At a time when public support of the arts faces a range of challenges, state arts agencies could use a framework to help them better serve the arts community and engage more people in the arts -- thereby elevating these agencies' public value.

Council on Foundations Annual Conference, May 1, 2001

Craig McGarvey, The James Irvine Foundation

From a position of received privilege, how should one behave so that it might be put to productive use as people are learning to get better at their work? This is a central question facing philanthropy, and it figured centrally in preparations for today. How to say something appropriate and helpful under such extraordinary circumstances?

There was the problem that no single foundation's body of work could possibly measure up to being singled out.

Native America at the new Millennium is a Ford Foundation-funded collaboration by the Harvard Project, Native Nations Institute, and First Nations Development Institute that serves as a primer on contemporary American Indian affairs. NANM addresses topics as wide-ranging as tribal government, non-profit organizations, political activism, economic development, housing, welfare, health, arts, and media.

This report presents key findings from a study of large foundations' giving to Native American causes and concerns. It addresses the real dollar value of grantmaking from 1989-2002, top donors and top recipients, and the general purposes to which grants are targeted. The pamphlet concludes with a discussion of what the data imply (and in particular, what action they ought to motivate) for foundations, Native-serving nonprofits, and tribal governments.

The story of how the Boston Foundation became the first community foundation to develop and implement policy on exercising its proxy votes on investments to advance its mission.

Posted courtesy of Stanford Social Innovation Review

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2009, Americans for the Arts, 21 pages. Americans for the Arts, 1000 Vermont Avenue NW, 6th Floor, Washington, D.C., 20005, (202) 371-2830, www.artsusa.org.

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Gourd Girls
Priscilla Wilson
2005, 220 pages
Mt. Yonah Press, Sautee, Georgia

In the past two years, several prominent foundations at national, regional, and local levels have appointed new presidents. Such leadership transitions are likely to increase in the years ahead in keeping with the larger generational shift in the nonprofit sector. Very few of the new foundation leaders are likely to come from the arts sector, and many will have had little direct experience with our field.