Despite civil society organizations being at the forefront of fighting the complex problems of our world, most of them suffer from financial instability. Research done by Humentum highlights these “starvation cycles” CSO’s are stuck in with recommendations for funders to break that cycle. What comes after that research?

In this webinar organized by EDGE Funders and Ariadne, we invite Katie Skartvedt from Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, Moulaye Camara from Humentum and Nasim Losai & Ayubu Masaki from The Foundation for Civil Society, to delve into a case study of funders and CSO’s working together towards financial resilience with a focus on indirect cost coverage.

Join us to hear about some of the successes and challenges on the journey towards financial resilience from the perspective of researchers, CSO’s and funders.

Learn more and register.

“Creativity, Culture & Capital is a collaborative project between Arts & Culture Finance (UK), Upstart Co-Lab (US) and Fundación Compromiso (Argentina), three women-led non-profit organisations, all working at the intersection of impact investment and the creative economy.”

“This project brings together international stakeholders who believe that art, design, culture, heritage and creativity can benefit people, communities, society and the planet – and that impact capital will be a vital tool to support the positive growth and development of the global creative economy. As a living resource and community platform, Creativity, Culture & Capital illustrates that the creative sector already delivers social impact and proves that impact investment supports a more just and sustainable global creative economy.”

Learn more here.

From The Chronicle of Philanthropy, “The need to increase funding for Black feminist organizations is urgent, according to an open letter released Thursday from some of philanthropy’s most influential organizations, including Melinda Gates’a Pivotal Ventures, Rihanna’s Clara Lionel Foundation, as well as the Ford Foundation and MacArthur Foundation.”

“’It’s time to fund Black feminist movements like we want them to win,’ supporters of the nonprofit Black Feminist Fund write in the letter to other philanthropists. ‘Because across our most urgent global challenges — from Colombia to Sudan, Brazil and Nigeria, to the U.S. and France — Black feminists are dreaming and delivering the solutions we need.'”

“The Black Feminist Fund is looking to raise $100 million to support nonprofits led by Black women, who have been historically underfunded in philanthropy. The fund, which launched in 2021, has raised $35 million of its goal so far.”

“According to a report from the Ms. Foundation for Women and the consulting group Strength in Numbers, less than 1 percent of the $67 billion that foundations contributed in 2017 went to organizations that specifically support minority women and girls. The Black Feminist Fund’s research says that dropped to less than 0.5 percent in 2018. Black women and girls made up nearly 7 percent of the U.S. population, according to 2022 U.S. Census figures.”

“McHarris says the Black Feminist Fund is eager to achieve this initial $100 million funding goal quickly so it can pass on the funding in eight-year grants to nonprofits working on some of the most pressing global issues like climate change, systemic violence, and hunger, as well as working to end racial and gender inequity.”

“’Black feminist leaders on the front lines of movements today are splitting their time between figuring out how to end violence and figuring out how to write reports,’ she said. ‘Imagine a world where they get to spend 100 percent of their time to figure out how to build the world we deserve and need. That’s what we’re trying to do.'”

Learn more here.

“The Mellon Foundation—the nation’s largest funder of the arts, culture and humanities—today announced more than $12 million in funding to support twenty-six colleges and universities across the nation mounting social justice-related research or curricular projects.”

“The grants are the result of Mellon’s Higher Learning inaugural open call—announced in Spring 2022 as a means of continuing to support inquiry into issues of vital social, cultural, and historical import. The open call invited proposals from institutions exploring three distinct topical categories—Civic Engagement and Voting Rights, Race and Racialization in the United States, and Social Justice and the Literary Imagination—in an effort to help illuminate the significance of voting rights controversies in US history from numerous humanities perspectives; demonstrate the complex import of race and racialization within US culture and society; and highlight the role of the literary imagination in making and remaking worlds and societies, past and present.”

“Open to any accredited, non-profit, four-year liberal arts degree-granting institution in the US with more than 1,000 full-time degree-seeking undergraduates and multiple humanities degree programs, the call generated more than 280 submissions from 150 institutions. From the initial applicant pool, 26 institutions were selected to develop full proposals and were confirmed to receive funding.”

Grantees included Bard College, Clemson University, Florida Atlantic University, Vanderbilt University, Indiana University, and more.

Read the full announcement here.

Creative Study introduces a new solidarity economy source, No Starving Artists! No Sellouts!: Introduction To Creative Work In The Solidarity Economy, The What And The Why In Four Parts in partnership with Art.coop. The free course, ” introduces you to a growing library of courses dedicated to creatives building their own worlds. It is a part of a living, breathing process created by people who know that values-aligned ways of working together can be joyful, impactful, and pay the bills. We have survived and thrived by being in community and we welcome you. Guided by Cooperative Journal podcast host Ebony Gustave and artist Rad Pereira, this first module sets the tone and lays the foundation for what will be shared.” Learn more about how to participate here.

“Adriana Griñó, Arts Program Officer, has announced she will leave the Kenneth Rainin Foundation effective January 20. Adriana joined the Foundation as Program Assistant in 2014. She was promoted to Program Associate, which was followed by her appointment to Program Officer in 2017,” said the Kenneth Rainin Foundation. “Her decision to leave the role comes after over eight years of service in advancing the Foundation’s goal of enabling Bay Area artists to thrive. Over the years, Adriana has developed meaningful connections with grantees, peer funders, partners and staff, and has strengthened the Foundation’s contributions and impact in the field.”

“Adriana has led the New & Experimental Works (NEW) Program, which provides unrestricted and support for artist fees to enable Bay Area artists to produce visionary projects relevant to the communities they serve. She also managed our Open Spaces Program, which funds temporary public art installations in San Francisco and Oakland. Adriana hosted over a dozen grant proposal workshops, processed hundreds of applications and stewarded over 150 grants over the past five years. Beyond grantmaking, Adriana supported the Arts Program’s strategic shifts to center individual artists. She helped launch the prestigious Rainin Fellowship in 2021 in partnership with United States Artists, which administers the program. Four Arts Fellows selected annually receive a grant of $100,000 plus tailored supplemental support in recognition of their superior artistic contributions and leadership in the Bay Area.”

“At the height of the COVID pandemic, Adriana worked with the Arts Team to provide emergency relief support to grantees and raised funds from peer foundations to enable three rounds of awards for individual artists through the East Bay/Oakland Relief Fund administered by the Center for Cultural Innovation. This program has distributed over $1.6 million to over 1,000 artists throughout the Bay Area over the past three years.”

Read the full farewell here.

From Democracy and Belonging Forum: “Four days away from the Christmas of 1848, in the dark and occult hours before morning wakes, Ellen and William Craft beheld each other through tearful eyes for the last time. Minutes later, they collapsed to the floor, both falling into a writhing heap of limbs and agony, convulsing, trembling, and flailing until the strong brew they had ingested hours earlier passed through them. When the sun yawned awake to the sounds of the cock crow, his surveillant gaze travelled across the undulating fields of Georgia, across the cottonfields of one plantation in Macon, and fell through the cracks of the cabin where two lovers had spent their last human moments, and where a few obsidian-black feathers belonging to two fugitive crows now littered the log floor – tell-tale signs of a daring escape, a transformation too offensive for history to embrace.”

“Something about Black exile, about Black refusal, gestures at a generosity stranger than ‘truth’ can accommodate; it gestures at how things spill away from neat lines and steady identities; it gestures at the drunken, creolized promiscuity of ‘reality itself’. Black exile distrusts straight lines and loves zigzagging cartographies, meandering stories that do not care much for some Cartesian notion of a fixed truth. Black exile loves death and ghosts, moonlit dalliances, subterranean experiments, hybrid bodies, bacchanal aesthetics, perverse mixtures and spillages, monsters with phallic horns sprouting from their heads, grandmother concoctions, and stories of a promiscuous ‘world’ that won’t stay still long enough for us to paint its portrait. For Black exile, facts vibrate at the speed of mystery.”

“Voices are presumably discrete things, located firmly within the agential control of human subjects. Something that cannot be taken from us, synonymous with free will even. But such a view of voice, as an object of a stable human organism, displaces the roles the world around us and strange worlds within play in shaping speakability. Voices are not solely the products of individual or collective vocal folds: without oxygen, without the efforts of microbial communities that inhabit vocal fold mucosa, without a milieu that grants language such power – often investing it with a nobility denied others who cannot speak, without a politics that gives currency to speaking, without the mutuality of a (perceived) listening apparatus, speaking would be invisible. It would be no matter at all.”

Read the full article here.

“As the New Year promises to bring many changes to the social sector and beyond, one thing remains unchanged and top of mind for many: the economic climate in the U.S. With high levels of inflation persisting and the possibility of a recession looming, many are predicting what 2023’s economy will mean for today’s workforce,” said Guy Mika for Candid. “Unfortunately, there’s no crystal ball that can tell employees what to expect this year. However, we can revisit the topic of workers’ rights through a new lens by exploring the increasing role that a newer breed of labor organizations plays in the social sector.”

“The unique and dynamic needs of such workers have given rise to a new form of labor organizations. Meet the growing ‘alt-labor’ movement: today’s emerging ecosystem comprised of the latest variety of workers’ rights organizations. Unlike 501(c)(5) labor unions, most alt-labor organizations are 501(c)(3) nonprofits. Thus, they cannot engage in collective bargaining on behalf of workers or formally organize legal strikes. Instead, they pursue a variety of other strategies centering on litigation, education, and industry-wide advocacy.”

“For example, the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) undertook a six-year lobbying campaign in New York to pass better protections for domestic workers. Similarly, the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) has pursued a legal strategy of suing restaurant owners for wage violations and used the legal settlement process as an opportunity to negotiate additional rights for workers.”

“While alt-labor nonprofits have secured an ever-growing presence in the workers’ rights movement, it’s too early to say if support for these workers’ rights organizations will continue to expand. The pandemic highlighted the importance of essential workers, and public support for unions reached an all-time high since the 1960s.”

“But for now, our Magic 8 Ball™ responds with, ‘Ask again later,’ to the question of whether the alt-labor movement will continue to build on its early momentum and further influence the future of labor organizing and advocacy. In the meantime, Candid will continue to collect data and track the role workers’ rights organizations play in the social sector and the economy at large.”

Read the full article here.

Art.coop invites listeners to Remember the Future together by listening to the stories of artists and culture bearers who know that the practices of the Solidarity Economy are not some new technology, but actually are ways of being in relationship with people and planet that are as old as time. They are our ancestral practices. In this 7 episode narrative pilot, listeners learn: You don’t have to be a starving artist or a sell out. You can find work where you joyfully live your values and pay the bills. We meet QTBIPOC creatives who are firing their bosses, freeing the land, electing themselves, and building livelihoods based on care, cooperation, mutual aid, and solidarity. Every other episode grounds listeners in a practice-based offering to activate the solidarity economy in their body, in their community, and in their context today. Listen to the podcast here.