Funding Research

The UNUM Foundation operates as a private foundation supporting organizations in the Greater Portland (Maine) area. The foundation has six target areas of interest: aging, disability, education, family issues, AIDS, and economic development and the arts. It is funded by the UNUM Corporation, the world leader in disability insurance and among the world's leading special risk insurers. The UNUM Foundation was established in 1969. The original corporate entity was the Union Mutual Life Insurance Company, founded 150 years ago this year. The company name became UNUM in 1986.

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.

1999. 48 pages. National Center for Family Philanthropy, 1220 19th Street NW, Suite 804, Washington D.C., 20036, 202-293-3424.

1997, 20-25 pages in each of three papers, Lila Wallace Readers' Digest Fund, Two Park Avenue, 23rd Floor, New York, New York 10016, 212-251-9800.

The Council on Foundations' 1998 Family Foundation Conference was held February 22-25 in Los Angeles. For the first time in the recent history of this conference, family foundation trustees and executive staff lobbied and succeeded not only in including arts on the conference agenda, but in having an entire day devoted to elective arts sessions. Arts funding was one of five "spotlight sessions on critical issues." Mercy Pavelic, president of the Heathcote Art Foundation, participated on a panel on Arts Funding and the Future.

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.

1999, 10 pages, Institute of Museum and Library Services, 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C. 20506.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has issued a companion piece to its 1997 publication "True Needs, True Partners: Museums and Schools Transforming Education." The earlier publication profiled fifteen successful museum education projects and suggested factors that form the foundation for successful school-museum partnerships.

Hotel-Motel Taxes for the Arts
AMS Planning and Research, edited by Randy Cohen - 1996, 11 pages

Sales Taxes for the Arts
Duncan M. Webb, AMS Planning and Research - 1996, 15 pages

Amusement Taxes for the Arts
Martha I. Dodson, edited by Rachel S. Moore - 1997, 14 pages

Americans for the Arts Books c/o Whitehurst & Clark, 100 Newfield Avenue, Edison, New Jersey 08837, 800-321-4510 ext. 241, www.artsusa.org.

People are betting on the renewal of Washington D.C. Without doubt, Washington is struggling with profound structural, financial, and governance challenges including the lack of voting representation in Congress. However, another District story is starting to be told — the story of the District as the home of thousands of dynamic and effective nonprofits and others who are renewing neighborhoods, investing in families and cultural life, and bringing life and leadership to the District.

Classical musics are comparatively rare; they seem to need for their existence not only a leisured class able to command a quantity of surplus resources but also a situation where that class is to some degree isolated from the majority of the people and possesses the social power to represent its own tastes as superior.