Community Foundation

A growing number of scholars and writers have been tracing the multiple connections between the arts and economic vitality during the past decade. A recent book by anthropologist Maribel Alvarez, There's Nothing Informal about It: Participatory Arts within the Cultural Ecology of Silicon Valley (2005) has drawn a new set of connections for me and raised the possibility that informal, or participatory, cultural practices may have greater meaning in an economic context than I previously recognized.

America is on the threshold of a significant transformation in cultural life. There have been many cultural shifts in recorded history: Gutenberg's invention of the printing press and the rise of the reading public; the growth of a mercantile class and the birth of private art markets independent of the church and the king; the invention of gas streetlights and the beginning of urban nighttime entertainment. The most recent cultural transformation, still with us today, was set in motion on the threshold of the twentieth century.

2005, 158 pages. Arts Education Partnership , One Massachusetts Avenue, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20001-1431, 202-336-7016, aep@ccsso.org

The Arts Education Partnership's new book, Third Space: when learning matters, should be required reading for anyone involved in what promises to be a lively and contentious debate around the 2007 reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Steve Gunderson is the new president and CEO of the Council on Foundations. After serving three terms in the Wisconsin State Legislature, Gunderson served sixteen years in the U.S. Congress, where he focused on agriculture, education, employment policy, health care, and human rights. After not seeking re-election in 1996, he served as senior consultant and managing director for the Washington office of the Greystone Group, a Michigan-based strategic management and communications consulting firm.

2006, 114 pages. Published by the University of Minnesota, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, Project on Regional and Industrial Economics (PRIE). Funded by the McKnight Foundation and the Fesler-Lampert Chair in Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota.

For classical music lovers in East Texas and Western Louisiana, KTPB-FM has been the only source of classical music programming for the past fifteen years. From its first broadcasts, KTPB has offered the live presentations of the Metropolitan Opera alongside concerts of the Longview Symphony and the East Texas Symphony Orchestra.

2005, 40 pages. New York State Council on the Arts, 175 Varick Street, 3rd floor, New York, NY 10014-4604, 212-627-4455.

PDF available for download on website.

2005, 22 pages. Grantcraft, a project of the Ford Foundation, 320 East 43rd Street, New York, NY 10017, 212-573-5288.

PDF Download: www.grantcraft.org/dl_pdf/personalstrategy.pdf.

This fifteenth guide in the Grantcraft series promotes thedevelopment of personal strategies for grantmakers to better manage the ambiguous "soft" part of their work. Other guides are also available on this web site.

2005, 82 pages. The Foundation Center, 79 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10003-3076, 212-620-4230.

Published in cooperation with the Independent Sector, this report is the first comprehensive analysis of U.S. foundation funding for social justice from 1998 to 2002, based on data that includes all grants of over $10,000 from more than 1,000 of the nation's largest private and community foundations.

2005, 174 pages. Theatre Communications Group, 355 Lexington Ave. New York, NY 10017-0217, 212-697-5230.

Launched in 1999, the National Theatre Artist Residency Program was designed to foster both new and expanded relationships between theaters and artists through grants for long-term residencies. This volume documents the experiences of the 135 artists and 99 theaters that participated in the program through 2005, and provides an in-depth analysis of the many challenges and opportunities they faced.