Applying Racial Justice Principles to Arts Education Grantmaking

Monday, October 13, 3:15pm – 4:45pm

Organized by Justin Laing, Senior Program Officer, The Heinz Endowments.

Presented by James Brown, Project Director, Lighthouse Project, Homewood YMCA; and Charlie Humphrey, Executive Director, Pittsburgh Filmmakers/Pittsburgh Center for the Arts; and janera solomon, Executive Director, Kelly Strayhorn Theater.

This session will focus on The Heinz Endowments’ efforts to transform its arts education grantmaking by incorporating principles learned from GIA’s anti-racism Thought Leader Forum. These principles include seeing our work as cultural organizing, increasing accountability to constituents, adding greater emphasis on deeper, if fewer, relationships, and speaking more frankly to issues of race and power in philanthropy. We will describe the Transformative Arts Initiative and how over the past year it has sponsored national travel of twenty-three local advisors, provided data to the community, and revised strategy in way that it has not heretofore. As an effort to have the session be a continuance of the work itself, three grantees will describe how their projects came to be and how the our new grantmaking process has and has not impacted the work itself.