Family Foundation

Collaborative Circles: A Review

Frances Phillips

2004, 171 pages. Commissioned by Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Washington, D.C. 20063.

When Kathy Freshley (The Meyer Foundation), Marian Godfrey (The Pew Charitable Trusts), and Janet Sarbaugh (Heinz Endowments) planned a roundtable discussion, "General Operating Support: Making It Strategic," for GIA's 2006 annual conference in Boston they imagined that they would greet a small, if passionate, group of familiar GIA members that Wednesday at 8 a.m. Instead, the session turned out to be one of the conference's true dark-horse surprises. Over fifty people showed up!

In the Reader last issue I reported on the Cleveland Foundation's decade-long effort (in partnership with other area funders, cultural institutions, and the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture) to make the case for local public support for the arts here. At the GIA conference last November, anyone within shouting distance of those of us from Cleveland must have heard that we were suc-cessful. The grins on our faces lit up the host celebration that first night.

Over the past few years, foundations of all kinds have been paying increasing attention to ways their resources can have greater impact by effecting policy and systems change. This trend has led foundations to reassess how they do their work and who their likely partners are. As a result, a body of knowledge within philanthropy is being created about how to successfully draw on foundation resources to change policy.

Re-imagining Orchestras: A forthright report on the mixed results of one foundation's efforts

Stan Hutton

PDF available below

Background

New Year's Day, 1980, found Arlene Goldbard living in Washington, D.C. monitoring and reporting on our nation's de facto cultural policy. The fact that Arlene was doing this says a lot about the leadership role that many of us were counting on the federal government to play in leveling the field so that our many U.S. cultures would have an equal chance to express themselves, to develop, and, inevitably, to cross-pollinate. It was a substantial and beautiful vision then, and remains so today.

1997, 107 pages, Dance/USA, 1156 Fifteenth Street N.W., Suite 820, Washington D.C. 20005-1704, 202-833-1717, fax 212-833-2686, danceusa[at]artswire.org