GIA Conference proceedings

For years, funders have urged collaboration and mergers among nonprofit organizations. Motivations range from lack of resources, perceived duplication of services, and desire for greater impact, among others. What prevents strategic alliances in the nonprofit community that are so common in other sectors? What conditions indicate that a merger or alliance would work or is something to avoid? Experts in this field talked with community-focused funders about the barriers within the arts, explored ideal conditions, and sought to define best practices for the funders' role.

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Mass migration and population displacement, technological change, and the globalization of commerce are all forces contributing to the changing face of our communities. Such forces require funders to question accepted definitions of minority, multicultural, or international arts. How do funders effectively support increasingly diverse and unfamiliar cultural activity in our communities? How do we address conflicting definitions of quality and authenticity? How do we support artists and artistic traditions that increasingly move with ease across national boundaries?

This interactive session explored the cultural landscape in the US and provided a forum for examining what democracy means in this country today. Radio journalist Tony Kahn presented stories and personal observations drawn from people's daily lives. Bill Ivey joined Kahn for a discussion of how artistic expression, arts enjoyment, and arts discourse had gone beyond the traditional nonprofit definitions that have shaped the work of grantmakers, as well as the obstacles and opportunities presented by this broadened cultural landscape.

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There is growing recognition that arts education is beneficial for children and can play a role in school reform efforts. But what about arts education makes the most difference for children? Should we simply be teaching the various disciplines or should the arts be inte-grated with other academic subjects? What role should community arts organizations play? What level of exposure makes a difference? We heard from researchers who recently completed work that answers some of these questions.

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Foreign perceptions of United States' values and policies have changed markedly in the post-9/11 world. The use of US “soft power” has been ardently debated of late, and the role of art and culture could figure prominently in changing external perceptions.

Charles Johnson – novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose balance of philosophy and folklore has been praised since the publication of his first novel in 1974 – gained prominence when his novel Middle Passage won the National Book Award in 1990. Like his other works of fiction, Middle Passage embodies Johnson's controversial version of black literature, defined in his Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970 as "a fiction of increasing artistic and intellectual growth, one that enables us as a people – as a culture – to move from narrow complaint to broad celebration."

Lucy Bernholz, Ph.D., is founder and president of Blueprint R & D, a strategy consulting firm specializing in program research and design for philanthropic foundations. She has worked as a program officer and consultant to foundations for 11 years. As a community foundation program officer she was responsible for grant programs in the arts and humanities, community development, education, environment, health, historic preservation, and human services.

Melanie Beene will guide (and perhaps goad) us as we explore the sometimes competing interests raised through GIA's 2003 Field Inquiry. Where are the edges that distinguish our interests one from another? What are the lines that draw us together? How can GIA best use its resources on behalf of arts grantmakers so you, in turn, can strengthen the place of arts and culture in our communities? Between January and June 2003, GIA conducted a members survey and listened to members and other arts grantmakers in sixteen cities.

Over the past two years, Creative Capital has designed a professional development workshop to deliver skill-building opportunities to artists across the country. This program seeks to build the capacity of individual artists, many of whom operate as one-person organizations. The workshop uses an integrated approach to fundraising, marketing, and public relations with an emphasis on individualized strategic planning. Professional consultants and trained Creative Capital grantees co-lead the workshops so that participants benefit from expertise and first-hand experiences.

We are poised at a moment of shifting ground at the edge of a Network Age...an age of distributed culture. We have witnessed a reorganization of the social, political, and economic infrastructure of our world around electronic networks. This session will explore how artists and their communities have been transformed by the Network Age. Leading new media curator Steve Dietz and JC Herz, former New York Times writer and author of the seminal book Joystick Nation, will be joined by virtual panelist Ann Doyle, manager of arts and humanities initiatives for Internet2.