Family Foundation

The highlight of summer in Santa Fe this year was the June 17 (1997) opening of the Georgia O'Keefe Museum, a project of the Burnett Foundation. Anyone needing a caterer, carpenter, or waiter was...well, disappointed. The entire town was consumed by opening festivities. As one grantmaker noted, this was Georgia's version of “Desert Storm.” The number of museum visitors staff predicted for the entire year was roughly 150,000—but in the six weeks following the opening, numbers have already totaled 90,000.

GIA Newsletter editors welcome reports on conferences and meetings that might be of interest to GIA members. The following report also led to a longer feature by Stanley Katz in this issue.

Conflicting Visions of Philanthropy
June 3, 1998
Presented by the New York Regional Association of Grantmakers at the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundations).

Presenters: Gene Bryan Johnson, senior producer for news, WNYC New York Public Radio; Dr. Stanley Katz, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University; Sandra Silverman, president, the Scherman Foundation

Currently they hold almost $70 million in assets. With some luck and hard work, they hope in ten years to increase that amount ten-fold to over $750 million. They can be found east and west, north and south. They are modest and ambitious. They are large and they are small. And, most importantly, they are changing and challenging the very nature of public funding of the arts nationwide.

February 1998, appx. 40 pages, Arts International, 809 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017, 212-984-5370, fax 212-984-5574, ainternational[at]iie.org

On March 7, 1997, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, in conjunction with Community Partners, ARTS Inc., and the California Assembly of Local Arts Agencies, convened a workshop titled "Arts Incubators: Building Healthy Arts Organizations and Healthy Economies." The seventy-plus participants included representatives of arts organizations, local arts agencies, municipalities, and foundations.

Kudos to Retiring Board Members
The fall 1998 conference in Chicago will signal the end of GIA board service for a remarkable group of leaders. Each one of the six individuals leaving the board, along with Ben Cameron who departed mid-year, has given magnificently of themselves in building GIA into a much richer and more participatory provider of services to its membership.

As they return to regular membership in GIA, these individuals leave a board far more responsive to its members, supported by a wonderfully facilitative staff, and serving many more arts grantmakers.

In June 1998 the New York Regional Association of Grantmakers held a forum on "Conflicting Visions of Philanthropy" and I was invited to place the recent criticism of the field of philanthropy in historical perspective. [See page 44 for a short report on the session as a whole.] My objective at the forum, and in this revision of those remarks, is to put the problem in bold historical relief and to provide a context for understanding the long tradition of criticism of foundations and philanthropy. In doing so, I want to make five basic points.

1.

Management Consultants for the Arts, Inc., 132 East Putnam Avenue, Cos-Cob, Connecticut 06807, 203-661-3003

The Cleveland Foundation, founded in 1914, is the nation's oldest community foundation. In 1998, the Foundation's assets totaled $1.5 billion and it made grants totaling $47 million.

At Target Community Relations, our weekly staff meetings culminate with the presentation of the week's "Pepper Grinder Award." Any staff member who has made a gaffe of significance is encouraged to self nominate, disclosing his or her outlandish act of stupidity to the rest of the staff. The winner (or loser, depending on your point of view) is presented with a gauche pepper grinder that must be prominently displayed in his or her office until the next meeting.