“In the Arts, we’ve created new avenues for securing long-term, affordable spaces for arts and cultural organizations. We’re also collaborating with grantees to find alternative organizational models for supporting and sustaining artists’ creative practices.” (2nd video) – Kenneth Rainin Foundation (Oakland, CA)

“As tertiary music institutions explore ways to increase the social orientation of their curricula, it is important that the student voice be present in research and scholarship. How do students themselves conceive of the notion of a ‘socially engaged’ musician? What social roles do they see for themselves as musicians?” – Music Education Research

“The purpose of this study was to explore a fledgling community-school music partnership, Making Music, and to examine the benefits and challenges of this partnership. The partnership was initially conceived to fill gaps in the music curriculum in an urban school district where few middle schools housed music programs and music at the elementary and high school levels were inconsistent. What made this partnership unusual was that any school participating in the program received free music instruction on a weekly basis, but only for three years.” – Arts Education Policy Review

“A priority for educational philanthropists is to help schools compensate for social inequalities, which was true of the funders who supported arts education in Baltimore and Boston. But increased access to arts instruction does not guarantee that every student in a school system receives a high-quality, sustained arts education.” – Arts Education Policy Review

“While the foundation will continue to support nonprofit arts organizations that are creating, producing, and presenting performances across the region and will continue to fund organizations working to ensure that Bay Area youth have access to high-quality arts education, it will also provide, through new focus areas, support for artists and artists’ networks and will work to help arts leaders become more effective advocates for their communities.” – Philanthropy News Digest

“The Open Society Foundations announced recently the launch of its Culture and Art program, which ‘seeks to advance diverse artistic practices and strengthen locally-led cultural spaces around the world through grantmaking, capacity building, and convening power.'” – Grantmakers in the Arts

“It takes some courage to come to a conference of funders and tell them what they do wrong. In no uncertain terms. Especially if you are an organization that could use their money. But there was a lot of that at the Tuesday morning panel titled: Expressions for Justice: Grantmaking in the arts for systems change. The exchange was open, and maybe the most direct of the entire GIA conference.” (For the main web page of the 2019 GIA conference, click here. For the full GIA 2019 conference blog, click here.) – Grantmakers in the Arts

“The ADA is often mentioned as some kind of total solution to a still inaccessible world. But as was pointed out at the beginning of Monday’s panel, Variations on a Theme: Funding Disability Aesthetics, the ADA is the bare minimum. It is often a box half-heartedly checked … The ADA exists and the world is still inaccessible, and that includes the art world — a tangible and theoretical space that touts itself as radical. But there is nothing radical about inaccessibility.” (For the main web page of the 2019 GIA conference, click here. For the full GIA 2019 conference blog, click here.) – Grantmakers in the Arts

“The Black Art Futures Fund was a topic of great curiosity at the 2019 GIA conference, if only because it seemed to the GIA crowd that founder DéLana R.A. Dameron is on to something new with her start-up funding effort. And so the session titled Our Beloved Community: Collaborative grantmaking, which formally introduced the project to attendees drew an eager audience, even though it started at 8 a.m. Wednesday morning. The room was packed.” (For the main web page of the 2019 GIA conference, click here. For the full GIA 2019 conference blog, click here.) – Grantmakers in the Arts

Bree Davies: “When I saw the conference workshop Innovations in Artist Housing: Inspiration from South America to address the ‘Soho Effect’, I was stoked. … [But] the panel on artist housing did not include a single artist, let alone an artist impacted by — or blamed for — the ‘SoHo Effect.’ Instead, the panel physically resembled many urban planning panels I’ve had to painfully sit through — upper middle class white people who want to talk about housing, mostly in terms of real estate values and sexy urban design. They did not want to talk about the realities just outside the windows of the room I began to feel trapped in.” (For the main web page of the 2019 GIA conference, click here. For the full GIA 2019 conference blog, click here.) – Grantmakers in the Arts

“I think in many ways we as a sector have pigeonholed foundation program officers. We have internalized this idea that their role is one of micromanager and compliance officer, whose jobs are mainly to ensure nonprofits align and comply, even with ineffective or harmful practices and strategies set by foundations. This old-school default role prevents POs from being authentic allies and partners with pivotal responsibilities that could greatly enhance our work. It’s time for our sector to completely reimagine the role of foundation program officers. Here’s what this may look like, in no particular order, based on experience I’ve had with the program officers who have been the most helpful.” – Nonprofit AF

“It’s time for cultural philanthropy to get more creative. … A small-but-growing number of funders are working with arts and culture organizations and individual donors to address inequities at the community level in creative, systemic ways. Here’s a look at three steps funders can take to drive change toward more inclusive arts philanthropy, along with some examples from the field.” – Stanford Social Innovation Review

Vu Le: “Our sector talks a lot about grants. … There are endless articles and workshops on how to increase your chances to get grants. And many foundations, to their credit, have been working to streamline their grant applications. But maybe we are not having the right conversations. Maybe the question is not ‘how do we improve grant applications’ but rather ‘are grant applications the best way for funders to determine who should be funded? Have they ever been? Is this tool broken or even harmful, and if so, can we afford to keep using it?'” – Nonprofit AF