Family Foundation

Art collector, philanthropist, and software entrepreneur Peter Norton, inventor of Norton Utilities, established his family foundation with his wife Eileen Norton in 1989. Based in Santa Monica, California, the Foundation has an endowment of approximately $33 million; its giving last year was close to $4.5 million. The primary focus of the Foundation is on contemporary visual arts nationwide.

The Allen Foundation for the Arts is one of six foundations that make up the Paul G. Allen Foundations, a family of foundations established by Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen. The other Allen foundations focus on medical research, health and human services, forest protection, virtual education, and most recently, music.

Last year when RAND released The Performing Arts in a New Era, (Performing Arts) the prediction that times were going to be particularly difficult for mid-sized performing arts organizations was widely quoted. It was prominent in press coverage of the report and quickly embraced as a fact by grantseekers and foundation colleagues. I was curious to return to Performing Arts and the conditions it cites for organizations in the middle, to see how they apply to readings of recent field reports for different performing arts disciplines.

We just returned from yet another community gathering where arts leaders sought the support of their business and civic counterparts by documenting the "economic impact" of arts spending and employment in their region.

November 2001, 24 pages. Working Group on International Collaboration in the Arts, Arts International, 251 Park Avenue South, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10010-7302, 212-674-9744, 212-674-9092 fax.

"Anonymous Was a Woman" is a brilliant name for a grant program focused on supporting individual women artists. The phrase is taken from A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf's classic statement of the challenges facing females seeking to create art. With these four words, Woolf succinctly and powerfully evoked the centuries long struggle of women to gain recognition as artists. Yet there is much more to this innovative grant program than its thought-provoking name.

On November 12, 2000, a headline on the front page of the Atlanta Journal/Constitution read, "Study finds Atlanta arts community trailing peers." A full-page story in Section A followed. This one headline challenged the city's cherished self-assessment as "cultural jewel of the South" and quietly affirmed the suspicions of many of its artists and cultural workers.

This is the story about the headline, the study, and the volunteer efforts of an incorporated ad hoc group that calls itself the Atlanta Arts Think Tank and that commissioned the landmark study.

Meetings are big business. Or, in other words, talk is not cheap. An economic impact study by Deloitte & Touche LLP demonstrated that conventions, expositions, and meetings generated $82 billion in total direct spending in 1994, supporting 1.57 million jobs.1 Meetings of associations and membership organizations, as opposed to corporate-sponsored events, account for the lion's share of this spending (68 percent). Many of these associations serve the arts and culture.

A New Framework for Building Participation in the Arts
Kevin F. McCarthy and Kimberly Jinnett, RAND, 2001,
112 pages, 310-451-7002, order@rand.org.

Another research report lands on your desk. Do you make time to read it, or does it add to a growing pile of things-to-read-someday?