Last week, 412 New York City-based arts entities founded, led, and serving Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and all People of Color (POC) called for leaders of NYC’s cultural community to create a $100M fund to support POC-led arts entities and to address gaps in cultural equity across the city. The call comes as the group launches HueArts NYC, the only citywide effort to bring greater cultural equity, visibility, and support to all POC cultural institutions and initiatives across NYC’s five boroughs.

Following an extensive series of surveys, interviews, and community conversations with POC arts community leaders, HueArts NYC has released “Mapping a Future for Arts Entities Founded and led by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and All People of Color in New York City,” its ‘brown paper,’ outlining the unique contributions, assets, and challenges of POC arts entities in the face of persistently limited resources and support. The report also includes six key findings and six recommendations NYC policymakers and philanthropic leaders can take to radically shift cultural equity across the city.

“For decades POC leaders in our arts community have advocated for policy changes that would make the difference between our POC-led arts entities surviving or thriving,” said Kemi Ilesanmi, Executive Director of The Laundromat Project, a project partner of HueArts NYC. “An initiative like this is far overdue, and so is receiving the meaningful support equal to the contributions we make in keeping New York so vibrant and special.”

Accompanying release of the brown paper is a first-of-its-kind digital map and directory spotlighting more than 400 POC arts entities serving NYC neighborhoods, and capturing critical information about the work, people, communities, and opportunities that POC arts entities offer that shape NYC’s cultural fabric and that helps fuel NYC’s creative economy.

Read more here.

Image credit: Screenshot of Map & Directory, HueArtsNYC.org.

“In a sentence: The dance funding ecosystem is small compared to other performing arts, and the impacts of the pandemic on top of decades of declining public funding mean a growing role for philanthropy,” reports Inside Philanthropy in their State of American Philanthropy report.

“If we truly believe that the arts are an essential part of our lives, then as philanthropists, we must create more financial stability for artists, particularly those BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities hardest hit by economic ebbs and flows,” says Maurine Knighton, program director for the arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. “The majority of giving for dance goes to ballet, and it’s important to understand that ballet companies—especially the big ones—operate in a different universe from most dance organizations,” Inside Philanthropy reports. “Meanwhile, legions of contemporary dance companies, folk dance groups, dance education nonprofits, and other dance organizations are operating on shoestring budgets with minimal full-time staff, if any. Many dancers work other jobs to pay the bills.”

By the numbers:

The dance field’s top 10 grantmakers collectively gave $297 million from 2014 to 2018—considerably less than in music ($466 million) and theater ($400 million), according to data from Candid.
A Dance/USA survey of 109 dance organizations found that only 7% had annual budgets over $500,000.
The median hourly wage for dancers in May 2020 was $18.58, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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Black Philanthropy Circle, a fund at the Baltimore Community Foundation, has been launched to focus on charitable giving to nonprofits that directly support Black people and communities in the Baltimore area.

The Circle plans to award $25,000 grants to Black-led nonprofits or those that are based in Black communities. Nonprofits that focus on the following areas will receive priority: arts and culture, economic welfare, education, non-political community organizing, environment, human services, and health and wellness. The group has begun its first grant-making cycle and will be accepting applications until Feb. 28.

Read more here