Public Agency

2007, Americans for the Arts, 1000 Vermont Avenue, NW, 6th Floor, Washington, DC 20005, 202-371-2830, www.americansforthearts.org

Download pdf: www.artsusa.org

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.

GIA member and board member Ben Cameron (Doris Duke Charitable Foundation) called this opportunity to our attention. We are grateful to Jean Cook at the Future of Music Coalition for putting this article together quickly as we went to press.

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.

When we visit our physicians, we naturally assume they bring a bundle of knowledge and insight to the meeting. For one thing, we expect them to bring a broad and nuanced understanding of human physiology, and how its many interconnecting systems (circulatory, respiratory, muscle, nervous, lymphatic, and so on) influence our health and well being. We also expect that they know how and where to look for indicators of our health (taking our temperature, testing our blood pressure, checking our blood for chemical balances).

Over the past forty years, several hundred legal frameworks have been established for cooperative action by governments on ecological issues — treaties such as the Biodiversity Convention, the Climate Change Convention, the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species, and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. How do these relate to art?

Outreach