“The Kenneth Rainin Foundation co-hosted the pilot for a new series, ‘Let’s Talk,’ in partnership with Bay Area artist Beatrice Thomas of Authentic Arts & Media in December. Over fifty artists, arts workers and funders joined us for our first event to examine the central question: what do artists need to thrive? Below I recap the talk and what we learned, and share upcoming session dates for 2023.”

“The goal of the “Let’s Talk: What Artists Need To Thrive” series is for the Foundation’s Arts Team to engage in meaningful dialogue and be more accessible and transparent, especially with artists who have historically been unacknowledged by or excluded from philanthropy. We will apply what we learn to improve how we advance equity and support diverse, visionary Bay Area artists.”

“With so many virtual offerings available, we wanted to design a series that was additive for the sector. This is why we are collaborating with Beatrice Thomas, an artist and trained facilitator, to develop, host and refine the series. As part of the planning for the pilot, we solicited discussion topics and questions from attendees during registration. We received 52 questions or approximately one question per attendee. This level of engagement speaks to both the creativity and dedication in the arts sector as well as the need for more transparent and equitable funding.”

“The next three sessions of “Let’s Talk: What Artists Need To Thrive” will uplift three historically excluded audiences: queer artists, artists with disabilities and Indigenous artists. These events will feature artist panels and question and answer sessions so we can hear directly from artists and those who work in the arts. We will incorporate as many of the attendee questions as time will allow. Based on attendee feedback about the program length, we are scheduling the first session for 90 minutes; the last 30 minutes will convene optional small group breakout rooms.”

Let’s Talk: What Artists Need To Thrive | Tuesday, February 28 at 12–1:30 PM PT
Artist and host Beatrice Thomas will facilitate a conversation with queer artists discussing what they—and all artists—need to thrive in 2023 and beyond. Speakers include artists Snowflake Arizmendi-Calvert, Monique Jenkinson, Marilet Martinez, Jean Melesaine and Mama Celeste aka Grey Tartaglione, and funders Jaime Cortez, William + Flora Hewlett Foundation; and Olivia Malabuyo Tablante, Gerbode Foundation.

Let’s Talk: What Artists Need To Thrive | Thursday, April 6 at 12 PM PT
Artist and host Beatrice Thomas will facilitate a conversation with artists with disabilities to discuss what they—and all artists—need to thrive in 2023 and beyond. Speakers and program length will be announced in March.

Let’s Talk: What Artists Need to Thrive | Friday, May 5 at 12 PM PT
Artist and host Beatrice Thomas will facilitate a conversation with Indigenous artists to discuss what they—and all artists—need to thrive in 2023 and beyond. Speakers and program length will be announced in April.

Learn more and register here.

“In this line of work, I have met lots of amazing funders. Shoutout to all the brilliant philanthropy professionals who are working hard and often without much fanfare to change the ridiculous systems that make fund seeking so painful and ineffective,” said Vu Le for Nonprofit AF. “On the other hand, many foundations have a condescending belief that they know what’s best for nonprofits, and that they are like a mentor to these poor misguided organizations. A sort of ‘benevolent paternalism.’ It leads to some terrible funding practices that we need to do away with.”

1.Requiring funds to be matched by other sources: “We’ll give you money, but you must match it by raising money from other sources.” This practice has been so ingrained that we don’t stop to question it; some of us even start to think it’s a good thing, like funders are in with us on a used-car sales tactic: “We have a funder willing to fund this project, but only if we match it. Can you help us get this matching grant?” sounds like “My manager says we can’t go any lower on this 1993 Honda Accord, but I can probably convince her to take off another $500 if you’re willing to sign today.” Gross. Let’s stop playing games and just provide the funds needed for critical work to get done. Stop requiring matching funds.

2.Having a challenging application process to teach nonprofits: One time I encountered a grant for $5,000 that required a six-page narrative, bespoke budget, logic model, workplan, and six or so other attachments. When I asked why this grant was so complicated, the program officer told me it’s because the grant review committee wanted to help nonprofits develop grantwriting skills, so they made their process complex and time-consuming on purpose. This is a bizarre and self-fulfilling loop: Let’s create a burdensome process to teach nonprofits skills to deal with burdensome processes. No one needs you to teach them anything, and it’s not your job (which is to provide funding). If you want to be helpful, just accept grant proposals that have already been written.

3.Requiring board approval and board signatures: Some foundations require a board officer’s signature on applications. On one occasion I had to drive an hour in Seattle traffic to get my board president’s signature because he didn’t have the tech skills to do an electronic signature. When I asked the program officer why this was necessary, the response was that the foundation just wanted board members to be in the loop before they provided funding (of 10K). We are grown-ass adults here. Nonprofit staff don’t need approval from their board as if they were kids needing their parents’ permission to go on school field trips. And here’s a secret: Because of how ineffective or destructive many boards are, sometimes boards are kept out of the loop intentionally; that’s how a lot of good work gets done!

4.Tapering funds down from year to year: For the rare multi-year grants that are given, some funders like to do this thing where they taper off the funds, for example $75K the first year, $60,000 the second year, $50,000 the last year, etc. Tapering sends the message “You’re a freeloader and we actually don’t trust you to do your own planning to stop being one, so we’ll need to put mechanisms in place to wean you off our funding, you raggedy parasite.” If you trust grantees and want to work as partners, talk with them to determine the best way to allocate the funding. Maybe they may need it in equal installments, or perhaps they would benefit more from having a smaller disbursement now and bigger ones in later years. And honestly, we need grants to be at least 10-years at a time if we want to see changes.

Read the full list here.

From New York Foundation for the Arts: In conjunction with the opening of Cycle 17 of our Rauschenberg Medical Emergency Grants, NYFA has scheduled two live online information sessions. We hope to reach even more artists from across the country who may be eligible, and in need of critical financial support for medical, dental or mental health emergencies. Interested artists can ask questions directly during the sessions; a recording will also be posted online by March 4.

Rauschenberg Medical Emergency Grants Cycle 17 is open through March 17. These national grants of up to $5,000 support direct treatment expenses for medical, dental or mental health emergencies that occurred July 1, 2022 or later; the deadline is January 13, 2023. Choreographers, those creating in the visual arts, and those creating in the film/video/electronic/digital arts, living anywhere in the U.S., D.C, US territories, or tribal nations are eligible. Cycle 18 will open April 18, with a deadline of May 19, for emergencies occurring September 1, 2022 and later. Two live online information sessions will be held for interested artists – no registration is required:

Friday, Feb. 24 – 7:00-8:00PM ET – Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86917439557
Tuesday, Feb. 28 – 2:00-3:00PM ET – Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88081558180

Guidelines and the online application are here: https://www.nyfa.org/rmeg; a recording of the information session will be posted March 4.

Rauschenberg Dancer Emergency Grants Cycle 8 opens March 21. These are one-time grants of up to $5,000 to professional dancers, dancers who have had paid engagements since at least 2019, but don’t necessarily have performing as their primary career or source of income. The program is open to dancers who have experienced dire financial emergencies due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences, including lack or imminent endangerment of essentials such as housing, medicine/healthcare, utilities, and food. Cycle 8 will be open March 21 through April 28, 2023. Program guidelines, an informational video, and the online application are here: https://www.nyfa.org/rdeg.

Both of these programs are open to artists living anywhere in the U.S, its territories, tribal nations, and the District of Columbia. Artists with disabilities, artists of color, and artists living outside of New York are particularly encouraged to apply. For more information, email emergencyfunds@nyfa.org, or call 212/366-6900 x 239.

From the Mellon Foundation: “The Mellon Foundation today announced Imagining Freedom—a $125 million, multiyear grantmaking initiative supporting arts and humanities organizations that engage the knowledge, critical thinking, and creativity of millions of people and communities with lived experience of the US criminal legal system and its pervasive forces of dehumanization, stereotyping, and silencing. As one of the Foundation’s core Presidential Initiatives, Imagining Freedom exemplifies Mellon’s vision to create just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking.”

“More than half of the nearly two million people who are currently incarcerated are Black and/or Latinx, and incarceration rates for Native people are nearly four times that of their white counterparts. This state of affairs is historically determined; the criminal legal system is inextricably linked with the history of the United States, from the earliest days of native conquest and enslavement to ongoing and entrenched structural discrimination and racial violence, and has powerfully shaped its present.”

“’As artists, writers, and scholars working inside and outside of prison have long known, the arts and humanities uniquely and powerfully counter some of the most enduring, far-reaching, and least seen impacts of mass incarceration in our country and on its individuals and communities,’ said Elizabeth Alexander, President of the Mellon Foundation. ‘Through Imagining Freedom, we are supporting artistic, cultural, and humanistic work that centers the voices and knowledge of people directly affected by the carceral system—recognizing their full humanity, deepening our shared understanding of the system and its effects, catalyzing us to address the damage it causes, and envisioning and enacting just responses to harm. We cannot understand who we are as a country if we don’t listen to all of the voices that make up our interdependent communities.'”

“At the core of Imagining Freedom is a commitment to supporting artists, writers, thinkers, humanists, memory workers, and storytellers whose lives have been impacted by the criminal legal system, as well as those working to bridge carceral and non-carceral spaces, foster connections between people, and bring together broader intellectual and imaginative communities. Grantees range from large institutions to nascent organizations, and span geographies, generations, and disciplines.”

“Through these grants and others, totaling over $41 million in funding thus far, Imagining Freedom is supporting work to ensure a broad public history and primary source record of mass incarceration and its impacts. By uplifting the often-overlooked perspectives and voices of those impacted by the criminal legal system, Imagining Freedom aims to help both individuals and communities challenge and re-envision the systems now in place, so we can all forge new paths toward justice.”

Read the full announcement here.

“Last month, ‘Avatar: Way of the Water’ captured the world’s imagination. But you don’t have to travel to Pandora to witness the magic of the water or the power of community action to make a change,” said Henry Olaisen for Next City. “For eight years, as leader of the Betty Wright Center in Palo Alto, a warm-water therapy facility open to the public, I saw this kind of magic every day. It taught me a lesson that holds true for anyone seeking greater equity in any healthcare system: If we are to design systems and facilities that are truly for the people and with the people (known as patient-centered care), we must carefully listen and learn from people with disabilities when designing facilities and programs.”

“In community-based settings, people with disabilities often know more about what they need than ‘experts.’ At the center, we learned this lesson again and again.”

“Many of our clients, we learned, were triggered by the resounding echoes within the pool hall. Suspending hundreds of sound baffles not only advanced the learning environment for people on the autism spectrum (myself included) but neurotypicals. Children and adults with spastic disorders similarly taught us that 86-degree water – an industry standard held by the YMCA and others – is simply an unsafe temperature for those with chronic pain and neuromuscular disease. Raising the temperature to just below the basal core temperature (93 degrees) allowed for sustained traction and water-walking activities without goosebumps.”

“In a similar vein, people with para- and quadriplegia guided us to design and build more water wheelchairs to leverage our pool ramp rather than investing in hospital-like swing lifts. Based on this input, a group of innovative Eagle Scouts and their entrepreneurial parents co-created a more liberating – and humanizing – way to enter and exit the pool. In the design of community settings for the disabled, listening to user input helps create a better experience for everyone. People with disabilities are ideal teachers for building a continuum of learning culture. They have a lifetime of experiences in patience and compassion – requisite character qualities to overcome burnout in healthcare.”

“We learned to work through challenges through deep breathing – a critical skill that people with chronic pain know all too well. People with disabilities also model something increasingly rare today: engaged and civil democracy for the purpose of system improvements. When para-transport continually fails people with disabilities, they mobilize together – realizing the strengths in numbers and stories. At Betty Wright, people with disabilities self-selected to teach and mentor our interns from nearby Stanford in adapted design and water walking – things traditional academic courses and ivy-league professors failed to teach them.”

“This sense of a higher calling to the system permeated our culture. All staff, whether lifeguards, administrators, or practitioners, gained and proudly shared their best practices, recorded these, and co-taught– so that we learned and rose together. Rather than gaining deeper and deeper specialization, leading to siloed workflows, our participants with disabilities taught it was more useful to them that we all knew little about a lot; and they were eager to learn from everyone, one day at a time.”

“The future calls for more local community spaces for learning and thriving, and these need to be designed in partnership with those who use them. Places that bring diversity and ability together will become increasingly important to foster civil engagement, learning and co-design, challenging our biases and assumptions.”

“Giving everyone a voice is the best way to ensure that magic continues to happen.”

Read the full article here.

“Just a few days into the 118th Congress, it feels like our nation is trapped in a cycle of vitriol and discord. Thousands of (reported) hate crimes, increases in antisemitism, racist election campaigns and our enduring partisan political divide make the goal of unity under a set of universally supportive values seem farther away than ever,” said La June Montgomery Tabron for MSNBC. “Meanwhile, our collective, annual celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which occurred yesterday, is a time when many of us participate in service projects and reflect on what it would take to achieve racial equity in the current environment.”

“As we discuss the most effective ways to bring about racial equity, we need to make space for something else: racial healing. This is not because racial equity has been realized — far from it. It’s because it is clear that we can’t have one without the other. Racial equity, imposed from above, mandated by a court or lawmakers, will never stick unless there is also racial healing, grown from within and nurtured carefully.”

“Racial healing is what’s needed for a country that has been poisoned by racism for centuries. It is an authentic acknowledgment of and open grappling with the generations of trauma that have been visited on all of us — Indigenous, Black, Latinx, White, Asian — since long before our founding as a nation. It is a process for connecting, telling the truth, building relationships and bridging divides so that communities can develop the trust to work together toward a more equitable future, and a world in which all our children can thrive. Racial healing begins with affirming everyone’s humanity, not ‘blaming and shaming.’ It’s about communities having the difficult, often uncomfortable conversations needed to build trust and discover a new sense of wholeness.”

“The research here is clear. The Pew Research Center found broad public agreement that the country has made advances in racial equity, but Americans do not all agree that increasing cultural awareness of racial issues is a good thing. Only 46% of white Americans said the increased focus on racial inequity was a positive development. That’s compared to 75% of Black Americans, 64% of Asian Americans and 59% of Latinos.”

“To be clear, this is not just about the work white Americans need to do. As CEO of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, I’ve worked with incredible organizations around the world confronting the effects of racial trauma. These experiences have taught me that this is not just about white people listening to Black, brown and Indigenous people, or vice versa, but about building honest, trust-based relationships and holding authentic conversations with one another so we can all heal from the damage of systemic racism.”

“This is why, as part of our recent Racial Equity 2030 challenge, our foundation is supporting organizations like Communities United in Chicago. This intergenerational, community-led organization sees how deeply so many Chicago youth are suffering from systems of racial injustice: schools being closed in already under-resourced neighborhoods, communities with no economic opportunity plagued by violence that comes from trying to survive, and poor access to housing and health care. Their partnership with the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital demonstrates what can happen when a major institution supports youth who have a wealth of lived experience in developing their leadership skills with a focus on healing. These youth learned that the deep exploration and validation of their own experiences could have profound benefits for their physical and mental health. This is healing work led by and for Black youth, to benefit their own communities.”

“It’s also why we are working to make sure our own field of philanthropy, as well as others with the power to influence larger ecosystems, heed this same call to action. Changemakers and community leaders have been running full tilt for years, with many staff and volunteers burnt out and eager for stronger solidarity. Many communities of color working for justice are carrying the dual burdens of waging the fight against systemic racism while also surviving its effects. They deserve time, rest, and the space to heal, too — and it’s on all of us to help make sure they meet their needs.”

Read the full article here.

Claire Riley recapped Flannel and Blade’s webinar “Meta, Musk and MAGA,” which gathered nearly 200 people involved with nonprofit communications. “…Our session was a response to the massive shake-ups happening in social media,” said Claire. “Capitalism is cracking all over the world: people are rising up here and quiet-quitting there. AI and other technology is exploding into a cultural Renaissance, with an ever expanding division of audiences and growth of niche sub-subcultures.”

“That leads us to ask: what are the biggest risks of social media, for organizations in the world today, who are trying to do good? We hope that you’ll see by the end of our report-out, that sometimes even these kinds of big shake-ups can lead to silver linings.”

“The world is increasingly polarized on every – single – thing. And every communication that an organization puts out has the possibility of being questioned or pushed back on. For nonprofits, it’s so easy to get put off by the negativity, and sometimes outright aggression, that can come back at you. We’re all individuals who process and understand information differently, and it’s hard for non profits who are trying to reach as broad an audience as possible with their messaging—the reality is, you can’t please everyone.”

“But, where the light comes in is that nonprofits can (and do) model a better kind of public discourse than the aggression we sometimes sadly see from other people online. Orgs who have the opportunity to go out to people that support them through social media have the opportunity to change the narrative on polarization every single day, over and over, and on every single platform, by posting as a force for good.”

“It also presents the opportunity to take stock of our audiences on our platforms, and learn how to have healthier relationships with more social platforms, so we are not dependent on any one of them.”

How to handle tech risks:

Put security at the forefront. The security situation has deteriorated faster than most expected. Staffing shortages across Twitter mean that the site is a considerably less safe and less responsive platform than before.
Practice digital hygiene. Prepare for anything associated with your account to get into the wrong hands or become public. Clearly map out who has access to your accounts. Avoid linking your bank account or critical information. Clean out your DMs. And clearly document and limit who has access to your organization’s Twitter credentials.
Don’t leave just yet. Threat experts are concerned that the turmoil at Twitter, including the sudden lack of cybersecurity leaders and many community moderators, will cause parts of the site to stop working and, at worst, that security holes might lead to compromised accounts. But deactivating a Twitter account also poses risks because an impersonator could then more easily manipulate a person’s followers.

“There are real people with real life issues, and sometimes life threatening problems, that rely on nonprofit social channels for support and information. If you are a nonprofit that has service based users that connect with you on Twitter, if you decide to exit the platform, you need to sign post people to where you’re going and leave information so people know how to find you.”

“And remember: even if the platforms lose their safeguarding teams or requirements, you still have the power to safeguard your nonprofit through community management. You can pick and choose which comments are seen, which comments are deleted, which comments you respond to, how you phrase the language that you use in your own little pocket of good. So if you’re still showing up in that community, there’s no reason why you have to lose that community. “

Read the full report here.

From Stitcher: On Aug. 1, 1942, the nation’s recording studios went silent. Musicians were fed up with the new technologies threatening their livelihoods, so they refused to record until they got their fair share. This week, Evan Chung explores one of the most consequential labor actions of the 20th century, and how it coincided with an underground revolution in music led by artists like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

One Year is produced by Evan Chung, Sophie Summergrad, Sam Kim, and Josh Levin. Listen to the episode here.