Community Foundation

Arts Funding IV examines recent changes in arts grantmaking by one segment of private institutional donors — private and community foundations. While the larger, more fragmented arena of government and private support lies outside this investigation, it is nonetheless useful to place foundation support within this larger context. The following overview outlines the basic framework of private and public arts funding in the U.S. and discusses funding in relation to the overall financing of nonprofit arts groups.

Economic language and ideas have increasingly found their way into discussions of artistic value and cultural benefit. For better or for worse, the discipline of economics has been the lingua franca of public policy discourse for at least the past fifty years. Sometimes the terms resonate harshly on our ears. How do people in the world of arts and culture answer those who speak this language, who try to value cultural activity in terms of economic multipliers, cost-benefit analysis, quantitative outcome measures and, a current favorite, contingent valuation methodology?

In a crowded auditorium at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, funders, community activists, and artists gathered in March to listen to a panel discussion on hip-hop activism in the Bay Area. The goal of Constant Elevation: The Rise of Bay Area Hip-Hop Activism was twofold: to inform and educate funders about hip-hop activism and how it fits into foundation support, and to highlight local best practices that use Hip Hop as a framework.

At the GIA conference in fall, 2002, we hosted a round table discussion with the euphemistic title "Adapting in a Time of Constraints." Essentially its burden was to ask: what should we, as funders, be doing for the cultural institutions with whom we work in the context of these extraordinarily difficult times?

2002, 60 pages. American Assembly, 475 Riverside Drive, Suite 456, New York, NY 10115, 212-870-3500, amassembly@columbia.edu

Art, Technology, & Intellectual Property provides an excellent summary of intellectual property questions faced by the arts community, both nonprofit and for-profit.

November 2002, 72 pages. Human Interaction Research Institute, 5435 Balboa Boulevard, Suite 115, Encino, CA 91316, 818-386-9137, HIRILA@aol.com

Partnership as an Art Form: What Works and What Doesn't in Nonprofit Arts Partnerships should be required reading for funders who are encouraging their grantees to work more closely together in these difficult economic times.

2003, 79 pages. Department of Art Education, Ohio State University, 128 North Oval Mall, Room 258, Columbus, OH 43210, 614-292-5649

This final report on Transforming Education Through the Arts Challenge (TETAC) is more than a compilation of the results of a five-year initiative to link comprehensive approaches to arts education with national and local school reform efforts.

2002, 79 pages. RAND Corporation , 1700 Main Street, P.O. Box 2138, Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138 (310) 451-7002, order@rand.org

2003, 130 pages.

September 2002, 292 pages, $24.95, paper. Center for Urban Policy Research, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. 732-932-3133, ext 555, cuprbook@rci.rutgers.edu