Philanthropic Imaginaries: Creating the Funding Landscape We Need

SOLD OUT

Sunday, October 13, 7:45am-4:30pm
Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel | Tower D

This year’s racial equity focused preconference uses Decolonizing Wealth by Edgar Villanueva as the jumping-off point for an exploration of investment in culture toward racial justice. What are models of funding marked by self-determination for the communities they seek to support? What is different about these models? What sustains them? What can we adapt from them for our own practices?

This preconference will include a mix of presentation and discussion of different funding models and how they support communities, as well as generative workshops to intentionally reimagine and re-design how wealth, opportunity, and self-determination manifest for communities of color.

Preconference participants will jointly conceptualize how they can adapt philanthropic models of self-determination for their own contexts to try when they return home.

This preconference will use the 4 Rs model used by the Interactive Institute for Social Change, which explores the ways in which we Resist, Reform, Reimagine, and Redesign systems toward racial justice.

We will present various funding models through the lens of different strategies (Resist, Reform, Redesign) for the sake of our collective consideration of which elements of each model fit into these strategies and which fit into other strategies.

Agenda

Presenter Bios

Gwyn Barley
Vice President, Community Partnerships and Grants, Colorado Trust

Gwyn Barley serves The Colorado Trust, a health conversion foundation striving to achieve health equity for all Coloradans, as the vice president of Community Partnerships and Grants. She leads an amazing team of nine Colorado based staff working throughout Colorado building power to achieve health equity. The place based and resident driven partnerships are aligned with the field of advocacy grantees focused on moving inequitable policies at the local and state levels. The work is grounded in diversity, equity, and inclusion practices to deconstruct white supremacy and eliminate historical oppressions thereby building a just future for all Coloradans. Until 2012, Barley was on the faculty of the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She worked in advancing relationship centered medical education and community based participatory research with residents living in neighborhoods around the campus. She completed her Ph.D. in Social Welfare at Brandeis University in the Heller School for Advanced Studies in Social Welfare. She was a Pew Fellow in Health Policy. She earned a Masters of Planning at the University of Southern California and a Sociology degree at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Denise Brown
Board Member, Bread and Roses Community Fund

Denise M. Brown is passionate about using her skills and energies on creating, supporting and illuminating work at the intersections of art, culture, and social justice. She is currently the executive director of the Leeway Foundation in Philadelphia, an organization whose mission it is to support women, trans and gender non-conforming artists and cultural producers creating art for social change. Prior to that she was associate director of Bread and Roses Community Fund, a film programmer for the Neighborhood Film/Video Project and Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema (PFWC), and a consultant with Leeway and other organizations in the Philadelphia area. For over 25 years, Brown has consulted with cultural and social justice organizations, individual donors and foundations on program development, and grantmaking strategies regionally and nationally. Brown is currently a member of the boards of Bread and Roses Community Fund, the Henrietta Wurts Memorial Fund, Grantmakers in the Arts -where she co-chairs the Racial Equity Committee-, and Scribe Video Center.

Kiara Chávez
Motus Theater Community Development & Marketing Coordinator

Kiara Chávez came to Motus after graduating from CU Boulder’s Business School with a degree in Marketing. While at CU, she helped found Latin Arts Society, whose mission is to celebrate Latin heritage through art, in order to lessen the impact of culture shock often experienced by students of color entering CU’s environment. Her experience as an immigrant with DACA has fueled her passion for social justice. Chávez also shares her story as a monologuist for Motus’ UndocuMonologues performance. She is fluent in both English and Spanish.

Sage Crump
Program Specialist, LANE, National Performance Network

Sage Crump is a culture strategist who seeks to expand and deepen the work of artists, cultural workers, and arts organizations in social justice organizing. Crump is a member of Complex Movements, a Detroit-based artist collective whose work interdisciplinary work support local and translocal visionary organizing. Crump is currently Program Specialist for Leveraging a Network for Equity (LANE) at the National Performance Network. LANE is a 10-year initiative that amplifies the leadership of arts organization of color and rural organizations grows and grows their ability to thrive in culturally authentic ways. Board vice chair for the Center for Media Justice, Art2Action, and a member of Alternate ROOTS, Crump’s work incorporates complex sciences, emergent strategy, and creative practice to imagine the world we want to live in and build strategies and practices that will get us there.

DéLana R.A. Dameron
Founder, Black Art Futures Fund

DéLana R.A. Dameron brings over a decade of experience in non-profit fundraising and program development in the areas of arts & culture and education. In 2013, she began Red Olive Creative Consulting, a boutique consulting firm specializing in fundraising and organizational development for small and mid-sized arts & culture organizations. In addition to consulting for small arts & culture organizations of color towards building capacity and sustainability, Dameron is the founder of Black Art Futures Fund, a collaborative grant-making initiative for small Black arts organizations, and serves as the Board Chair of Recess.

Nadia Elokdah
Deputy Director & Director of Programs, Grantmakers in the Arts

Nadia Elokdah most recently served as special projects manager with the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs coordinating the City’s monuments commission. Prior, she served as coordinator in the development of the City’s first cultural plan, CreateNYC. In this role she coordinated and led hundreds of engagements with a broad cross-section of the public, as well collaborating in the writing and production of the plan. Nadia is a trained architect and design strategist, researcher, professor, and published author.

Anthony J. Garcia
Executive Director, Su Teatro

Anthony J. Garcia has been the executive artistic director of Su Teatro since 1989 and has been a member of Su Teatro since 1972. He received his BA in Theatre from the University of Colorado at Denver. Garcia has received numerous awards and accolades for his artistic vision, including the 1989 University of California, Irvine Chicano Literary Award, a 2006 United States Artists Fellowship, an artist residency at the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, and was named the Denver Post 2010 Theatre Person of the Year. Most recently, he received the prestigious Livingston Fellowship from the Bonfils Stanton Foundation. Garcia is a past faculty member for the National Association of Latino Art and Culture (NALAC) Leadership Institute as well as a past board member, he is a peer trainer for the Colorado Creative Industries’ Peer Assistance Network, and a member of the Western State Arts Federation’s (WESTAF) Board of Trustees. Garcia is also an adjunct professor at Metro State College in Denver.

Khadija Katherine Haynes
co-chair, Montbello FreshLo

Khadija Katherine Haynes is a native of Denver and a fourth-generation Coloradoan. In addition to years of engagement in cultural arts, she has been an activator, community leader, and strategist in the Denver community. Leveraging her experience working on political campaigns ranging from school board races to presidential campaigns, Haynes now leads K-Solutions, a political and governmental consulting and lobbying firm based in Denver. Her diverse client list includes multinational corporations and local community organizations. Haynes currently serves as the co-lead of the FreshLo project in the Montbello neighborhood and a board member of the Montbello Organizing Committee, that is working to solve the food, cultural, and employment gaps is this community of over 36,000 residents. She is also Vice-Chair of FaithBridge, a nonprofit founded by State Representative James Coleman with a mission to bridge relationships between churches, schools, businesses, and community; and a trustee of the National Western Stock Show Association. As a passionate arts activist, Haynes is one of the founders of the Colorado Black Arts Movement (CBAM), a 501(c)(3) African American arts advocacy organization conceived in 2011. She has directed theatrical and other performance pieces for more than 40 years. Haynes was the first African American woman admitted to the exclusive MPA Directors program at the California Institute of the Arts. Her field of study there was in directing for film, television, and stage. Haynes has directed shows in Denver, Los Angeles, Tennessee, and New York. In Denver, she has directed at the Bonfils Theatre, the Denver Civic Theatre, Eulipions, and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

Maria Rosario Jackson
Senior Advisor, Arts and Culture, The Kresge Foundation

Maria Rosario Jackson is senior advisor to the Arts & Culture Program at The Kresge Foundation, and an Institute Professor at Arizona State University where she holds appointments at both the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, and the College of Public Service and Community Solutions. In 2013, President Obama appointed Jackson to the National Council on the Arts. She serves on the advisory board of the Lambent Foundation and L.A. Commons, and on boards of directors of both the Alliance for California Traditional Arts and The Music Center in Los Angeles. At Kresge, Jackson is an independent consultant. She began working with the Arts and Culture Program team in 2012 as it developed a Creative Placemaking strategy. Jackson is the former director of the Culture, Creativity and Communities Program at the Urban Institute, where she was based for 18 years. Prior to her role at the Urban Institute she was a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty at UCLA. Jackson has been adjunct faculty at Claremont Graduate University and at the University of Southern California. She was also James Irvine Fellow in Residence at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. Jackson earned a doctorate in urban planning from University of California Los Angeles and a master’s degree in public administration from University of Southern California.

Adrian H. Molina
Poet

Adrian H. Molina, aka Molina Speaks, is a master of ceremonies, artist, poet, adjunct college professor, facilitator, and creative consultant for a better world. While living in Denver, he has continued his work in rural areas in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. His multicultural upbringing and pan-indigenous philosophy inform his understanding of intersectionality at a root level.

Mallory Rukhsana Nezam
Founder, Justice + Joy

Mallory is a cultural producer, city strategist, and public artist working at the intersection of community development, socially-engaged art, and urban planning. She works with governments, artists, and grassroots cultural organizations to bring arts and equity into community planning and policy. She is the founder of STL Improv Anywhere, a performance group that disrupts public spaces, and was a founding member of the STL Artivists, creating artworks combating racial inequality and police profiling. After leaving St. Louis in 2017, she helped start the inaugural Arts & Culture team at Transportation for America, leading arts, culture and transportation projects in communities around the country. She has also served as the first Arts & Culture Fellow for Boston’s regional urban planning agency, and policy and racial justice organization PolicyLink’s Research Artist-in-Residence. Mallory holds a Masters of Design in Art, Design, and the Public Domain from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design where she completed her thesis research on artists-in-residence in government. She is currently establishing a national Planners of Color Collaborative and runs a consulting practice called Justice + Joy.

Lori Pourier
President, First People’s Fund

Lori Lea Pourier grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation and is a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation. Since 1999, she has served as the president of First Peoples Fund (FPF). FPF is national Native nonprofit that provides grants and fellowships for Native artists and culture bearers to help them grow their businesses and build their communities through art and culture. Pourier has been involved in the arts, social justice, and community development fields for 28 years. She has dedicated much of her efforts on reconnecting Native communities to their cultural assets and bringing new philanthropic resources to Native artists and culture bearers directly. She is a recipient of the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change Fellowship and a recipient of the 2013 Women’s World Summit Foundation Prize for Creativity in Rural Life. Pourier was awarded the Native American’s In Philanthropy, 2013 Louis T. Delgado Distinguished Grantmaker Award. She currently serves on the board of directors of the Jerome Foundation and the Women’s Building Project at the Novo Foundation.

Mike Roque
Executive Director, Community Foundation of the San Luis Valley

Mike Roque is executive director of the Community Foundation of the San Luis Valley and owns Café del Valle in Antonito, Colorado. Roque served as founding director of the Denver Office of Strategic Partnerships as a political appointee of then-Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. Roque has also served as executive director of the Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training (GIFT) and the Chinook Fund. Roque is a 2018 BALLE Fellow.

Eddie Torres
President & CEO, Grantmakers in the Arts

Eddie Torres joined Grantmakers in the Arts in October 2017. He most recently served as deputy commissioner of cultural affairs for New York City. Torres served on the GIA board of directors from 2011 through 2016. Prior to joining the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, he was a program officer with The Rockefeller Foundation. He prior served as director of external partnerships for Parsons the New School for Design. He has also served on the arts and culture team at The Ford Foundation as well as on the staff of the Bronx Council on the Arts. He holds a Master of Arts in Art History from Hunter College and a Master of Science in Management from The New School.

F. Javier Torres-Campos
Program Director, Thriving Cultures, Surdna Foundation

F. Javier Torres-Campos serves as program director of the Thriving Cultures program overseeing a $9+ million grantmaking portfolio seeking to advance the Foundation’s social justice mission. His career has been committed to building just and sustainable communities in partnership with artists and culture/tradition bearers. Prior to joining Surdna, Torres-Campos served as the director of National Grantmaking at ArtPlace America. In his role, he was responsible for building a comprehensive set of demonstration projects that illustrated the many ways in which arts and culture can strengthen the processes and outcomes of the planning and development field across the United States. Prior to ArtPlace, Torres-Campos was senior program officer for Arts and Culture at the Boston Foundation where he led an exploration of the role of culture as a tool for transformation, sustainability, and as central to the development of vibrant communities. He also spent six years as the director of Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, a community based multi-disciplinary arts complex that operates as a regional presenter and local programmer for Latino arts, a program of IBA. Torres-Campos most recently served as a board member for Grantmakers in the Arts and an advisory board member for the Design Studio for Social Intervention.

Dr. Rita Valente-Quinn
Motus Theater Producing Director

Rita Valente-Quinn brings to Motus Theater over a decade of experience as an arts administrator and curator. She has led and collaborated with professional teams around the world to bring theater and dance projects to fruition for audiences in diverse contexts: the plains and villages of rural Portugal, the city theaters and slums of the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the Fowler Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Department of World Arts and Cultures (WAC/D) at UCLA. Valente-Quinn completed her Ph.D. in Culture and Performance Studies at WAC/D. Valente-Quinn is responsible for oversight of Motus funding, staff, operations and assuring Motus can continue to offer innovative theatrical programming for years to come.