GIA Reader (2000-present)

At the 2009 GIA conference in Brooklyn, we asked participants to tell us how Grantmakers in the Arts can best contribute to building a successful nonprofit arts sector in this country over the next ten years. Participants provided 439 ideas, from which six strategies emerged. These strategies will drive the future work of GIA, which as a national association is uniquely positioned to serve the “greater good” of a vital sector of American society.

INTRODUCTION

The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream.
By John Zogby; Random House (New York), 2008, 256 pages

The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education; By Steve Seidel, Shari Tishman, Ellen Winner, Lois Hetland, Patricia Palmer. Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education (Cambridge, MA), 2009, 121 pages. Commissioned by The Wallace Foundation with additional support from the Arts Education Partnership

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

When I was in college, I had a great work-study job at an organization that placed students in internships with local nonprofits. It was a small outfit and a jack-of-all-trades sort of job. I answered phones, mocked up application forms, stuffed envelopes, filed, ran errands, organized open houses, and learned how to write a business letter. It wasn’t the sort of job you’d want to stay in for too long, but it was a fabulous introduction to the nonprofit sector. It gave me practical office skills to boot.

I have visited groups of GIA members and nonmembers in every region of the country this year, from Boston to Los Angeles and Atlanta to Seattle. It has been an interesting first year as executive director of GIA, to say the very least. What I have observed is that grantmakers have not taken a “recess” during this challenging time. In many ways, for private and community foundations especially, there could have been a pulling away from grantees, a kind of “we can’t help you” attitude.

I began my work life over thirty years ago writing poems with children in my daughter’s kindergarten class. At that time, I didn’t think of myself as a community artist, the descriptor I’d come to use in a few years. I thought of myself as a mother, a volunteer, a lover of poems, and as someone who had fun sharing imagination with kids.

Originally a nautical term, battening down was a procedure to safeguard ships against bad weather. The crew would prepare for an impending storm by fastening canvas over doorways and hatches. Now in the arts, it is a time to take a few deep breaths and batten down the hatches.