From NEA: President Joseph R. Biden will present the 2021 National Medals of Arts in conjunction with the National Humanities Medals on Tuesday, March 21, 2023 at 4:30 p.m. ET in an East Room ceremony at the White House. First Lady Dr. Jill Biden will attend. The event will be live streamed at www.whitehouse.gov/live

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD, said, “The National Medal of Arts recipients have helped to define and enrich our nation’s cultural legacy through their life long passionate commitment. We are a better nation because of their contributions. Their work helps us see the world in different ways. It inspires us to reach our full potential and recognize our common humanity. I join the President in congratulating and thanking them.”

Recipients include founding member of Grantmakers in the Arts, Joan Shigekawa.

From Funders for LGBTQ Issues:

Last week, the governors of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas signed into law bills attacking the rights of LGBTQ communities:

➤ Arkansas restricted drag performances in public spaces.

➤ Mississippi banned gender-affirming health care for youth under the age of eighteen.

➤ Tennessee restricted drag performances in public spaces and banned gender-affirming healthcare for youth under the age of eighteen.

These bills are only four of three hundred and ninety-one anti-LGBTQ bills proposed in state legislatures across the country since the start of the 2023 legislative session and they join bills in Utah and South Dakota also signed into law in these first three months of the year. Republican controlled state houses and governors in the South and Midwest have ramped up their efforts to codify transphobia into state law. Throughout these two regions, lawmakers have signed bills that target trans people, our families, and trans youth in particular.

Make no mistake: we are in a crisis.

We have seen more broad anti-LGBTQ bills and specific anti-trans bills introduced in the last three months than in the whole of 2022. And while fewer than ten percent of last year’s bills were passed into law, the escalating number and severity of harmful legislation is a harbinger of things to come.

Over one hundred and fifty bills specifically target transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) communities. Wholesale assaults on bodily autonomy are part of a terrifying and well-worn tactic by far-right movements to weaponize TGNC communities as a divisive wedge issue to roll-back hard-won rights within reproductive, racial, and gender justice. Even this past weekend, several star speakers at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) Convention unleashed an avalanche of anti-trans rhetoric, with one mainstage speaker demanding the “eradication” of TGNC communities. This rise in authoritarianism is not addressed by current funding practices.
Queer and trans organizers on the ground are leading beautiful, robust and intersectional movements despite being vastly underfunded. Our sector has a mandate to show up and resource this intersectional movement building and simply put, in this moment of crisis it is not doing enough.

Our most recent tracking report found that philanthropic funding for LGBTQ communities is stagnating. Further, funding for state organizing only comprises fourteen percent of all LGBTQ funding. As we continue to fight for the safety, wellness, joy, and abundance of our community— particularly our TGNC youth— alongside the most mundane right to exist, this number is not enough.

Those in the philanthropic sector committed to investing in civic engagement, racial justice, reproductive rights, and indeed all social movements must center trans and gender-nonconforming movement organizations in their grantmaking.

Funders for LGBTQ Issues will continue to bring our network together in the coming weeks and months to find new ways to resource LGBTQ communities. We invite funders to join us on Monday, March 20th at 3 PM for a special funder briefing. This briefing will provide funders an opportunity to hear from movement leaders about their work in this critical moment and consider how philanthropy can support the work and fund TGNC communities.

It is well past the time for change and decisive action, philanthropy can and must do more and we are here to support it as it does. It is our hope that funders will listen and learn from the wisdom of our movement as they work to resource the liberation we all deserve.

Read the full letter and learn how to support.

“Philanthropy comes in many forms. For over a decade, Black Philanthropy Month has been a time of reflection on Black philanthropists’ contributions—including the contributions of Black liberation movements,” said Son Chau for Nonprofit Quarterly. “As an American-born, Vietnamese philanthropic professional, this annual convening in August prompts me to reflect not only on the financial and political contributions that Black communities up and down the socioeconomic ladder have made to a democratic society. It also encourages me to rethink the definition of philanthropy itself.”

“Black liberation movements have advanced social progress for those who have not traditionally had political power or access to capital: the working class (white and BIPOC), women, queer and trans people, and immigrants and refugees. These movements’ leaders—usually grassroots volunteers who I view, too, as philanthropists—have demonstrated solidarity in their non-monetary philanthropy. Their approach to philanthropy did not just focus on redistributing wealth for charitable purposes based on a donor’s individual intent or a generalized love of humankind. They collectively pooled resources—such as skills, leadership, and knowledge—for the love of their communities and to advance social movements and uplift humankind.”

“Philanthropy comes in many forms. For over a decade, Black Philanthropy Month has been a time of reflection on Black philanthropists’ contributions—including the contributions of Black liberation movements. As an American-born, Vietnamese philanthropic professional, this annual convening in August prompts me to reflect not only on the financial and political contributions that Black communities up and down the socioeconomic ladder have made to a democratic society. It also encourages me to rethink the definition of philanthropy itself.”

“Throughout grade school, my brothers and I were fed by free lunch programs modeled after the Panthers’ free breakfast program. Additionally, as children, we had access to universal healthcare with Santa Clara County, the first healthcare program of its kind in the nation, modeled after the Panthers’ free health clinics. Later, we received free higher education at California’s public universities. As we grew into adulthood, Black communities were increasingly denied the opportunities and resources for which they fought—and were being pushed out of their homes. East Palo Alto’s Black population has decreased significantly due to growing inequality and gentrification: from 60 percent of the city in 1980 to less than 2 percent in 2020. Similarly, in Oakland, where I reside now, the Black population has dropped by more than half, from almost half of the city in 1980 to only 20 percent in 2020.”

“Today, my elders continue to send resources to relatives in the region that was my family’s home over four decades ago. For instance, upon celebrating milestones of relatives abroad, living or deceased, my mother and father would remit funds to support family activities related to ancestral worship, intergenerational education, and economic development in the rural areas where my ancestors are buried.”

“Black leaders taught me and my family the power of our collective resiliency in the face of many forms of violence, whether it is by war, the state, or our economic system. Likewise, they contributed to the public and nonprofit infrastructure—a result of cross-racial solidarity movement work—from which we benefited. This infrastructure supported not only my family’s material success in this country, but also our inclusion in a multiracial democracy.”

“Our sector may not recognize the community-led philanthropy of my family or Black liberation organizers as tax-deductible contributions. But to me, this is what philanthropy looks like.”

Read the full article here.

“Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, is celebrating a milestone this week as it completes the final phase in a project to boost its energy resiliency,” said Ricardo Arduengo for Grist. “The community’s 17,600 residents now host the archipelago’s first cooperatively managed solar microgrid — a network of photovoltaic panels and battery storage units that will use renewable energy to keep the lights on and power flowing during a power outage.”

“The system includes some 700 panels mounted on seven buildings in the town’s central plaza and a battery storage system capable of providing up to 187 kilowatts of power.* The batteries can provide enough off-grid electricity to keep 14 downtown businesses running for up to 10 days, serving as community hubs in case of an extended power outage.”

“Business owners and residents will run the microgrid through a nonprofit called the nonprofit Community Solar Energy Association of Adjuntas, which will sell electricity to the commonwealth’s grid through a power purchase agreement. Money saved by not buying power from Puerto Rico’s main power company will support maintaining the microgrid and starting new community projects, according to the Honnold Foundation.”

“The system was built in response to Puerto Rico’s increasingly severe hurricanes and the prolonged power outages they have caused for Adjuntas residents — some of whom have gone without electricity for as long as 11 months. Last fall, Hurricane Fiona destroyed half of Puerto Rico’s transmission lines and distribution infrastructure, knocking out power for hundreds of thousands of people. The damage came even as the archipelago’s power struggled to recover from similar destruction caused five years earlier by Hurricane Maria. Beyond the risk from extreme storms, Puerto Rico’s gas-fired power plants face ongoing risks from earthquakes.”

“As hurricanes and other climate-related natural disasters grow more destructive, many communities across the U.S. are turning to microgrids. One report published in 2021 said the cumulative capacity of such systems could more than triple by 2030, creating almost half a million jobs nationwide and billions of dollars in economic activity.”

“It’ll do the kind of things that really help communities keep together during power outages and natural disasters,” Trujillo said. “It’s a beacon of light, both figuratively and literally, in times of need.”

“What we are doing with the microgrid is a reference for what can and should be done in other municipalities in Puerto Rico,” he told me. “We can change our energy system, it can be done — we have shown that it can be done.”

Read the full article here.

From the Ford Foundation: “Today, Borealis Philanthropy and the Ford Foundation announced the launch of the $1 million Disability x Tech Fund, the only national fund supporting disability-led groups working to bring about transformational change at the intersections of disability rights, justice and technology.”

“The Disability x Tech Fund’s inaugural cohort of grantees is comprised of five disability-led organizations and two individual fellows addressing fieldwide harms that occur when people with disabilities are excluded from the development, deployment and governance of tech. Those include algorithmic bias that undermines access to necessary benefits, biometric surveillance that disproportionately punishes people with disabilities and barriers to participation in the digital economy, among others. The Fund’s grantees seek to address these harms through research, litigation strategies, accessible content creation and interpretation, and frontline community-developed open source platforms.”

“The Disability x Tech Fund was born out of a yearlong process led by an advisory committee made up of people with disabilities, representing a wide range of expertise and backgrounds at the intersection of technology, disability rights and justice. This advisory committee informed philanthropic investments from Borealis and Ford on strategies to address harms at the intersection of disability and technology, and it nominated and selected the inaugural cohort of grantees. In doing so, the Disability x Tech Fund models a vision for the world where the leadership of people with disabilities is not only considered but prioritized in technology development.”

“‘Many people with disabilities live at the intersections of inequity, bias and discrimination, but we are often siloed from broader equity and justice movements,” said Sandy Ho, director of the Disability Inclusion Fund. “The Disability x Tech Fund intentionally supports disabled leaders who are most directly impacted by systems of oppression and who understand that we all do or will experience disability at varying times, to varying degrees. We fundamentally believe that disabled perspectives, innovation and expertise will strengthen efforts to advance technology solutions, eliminating ableism — which hinders broad and necessary possibilities for all human beings now and especially into the future.'”

“The Disability x Tech Fund will expand the participation, leadership and thought partnership of overlooked and under-resourced people with disabilities across the tech sector. The Fund is grounded in the belief that designing solutions for a more just and inclusive technology future requires an investment in the leadership, expertise and experiences of those who are most directly impacted by technology bias and discrimination. To that end, the Disability x Tech Fund supports organizations that are disability-led and disability-serving, particularly those led by Black, Indigenous and people of color; queer and gender nonconforming people; and women.”

Read the full announcement here.