New Methods of Philanthropy and Supporting Creative Practice: LINC as a Case Study

Wednesday, October 17, 9:30am – 11:00am

Organized by Candace Jackson, managing director, LINC; Regina R. Smith, senior program officer, arts & culture, The Kresge Foundation.

Presented by Cora Mirikitani, president and CEO, Center for Cultural Innovation; Carla Perlo, founding director, Dance Place; Laura Zabel, executive director, Springboard for the Arts.

When it launched in 2003, Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC) was planned as a ten-year national initiative to improve the support landscape for artists in the U.S. After successfully elevating systems and practices in artist support, social equity, community engagement, and economic development, LINC will hold true to this plan, ‘sunsetting’ in June 2013. What can important experiments like this reveal about new approaches to philanthropy? How might the case study of LINC prompt new visions for philanthropic investments that marry research and practice or that address the arts ecology? This session will explore the values and concepts that LINC helped animate as a way to jump-start a larger conversation and set of actions around cultural equity, innovative philanthropic models, and the evolving role of intermediaries.