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Upstart Co-Lab released “The Guide: what cultural institutions need to know about investing for values and mission” as a primer on impact investing specifically for leaders of museums and other cultural institutions.

“Intended to (…) answer foundational questions such as What is Impact Investing? Does impact investing mean sacrificing financial returns? Why do institutions engage in impact investing?,” explains the announcement.

Read here.

In a recent article, Next City tackled the concept of third places and “the importance of public space, separate from home or work, designed by and for Black people.”

Read here.

Produced by the National Coalition for Arts’ Preparedness & Emergency Response (NCAPER) with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a National Endowment for the Arts grant to South Arts, the administrative home of NCAPER, the “NCAPER Field Guide” aims to “demystify federal disaster relief for the arts and culture sector; it aims to help artists and organizations see what’s available, understand clearly what isn’t available, and decide if pursuing federal aid is a good use of time.”

Explore here.

The City of New York announced funding for a new cultural space to be built to serve as Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater’s headquarters. “With just over $3 million in new City funding added as part of this year’s capital budget, the project is now fully funded with $10.2 million in City support,” according to the press release.

Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater is a champion of Puerto Rican and Latinx cultural heritage.

Read the details here.

Image: Courtesy of the City of New York
Aloha Boricua: Photo by Erika Rojas

Artists at Work, “a pilot that launched last summer in Western Massachusetts to pay artists a living wage — including healthcare — to collaborate with cultural organizations and local initiatives in creating work that responds to issues such as youth mental health, food justice and COVID awareness campaigns in marginalized communities,” is the center of a recent article in Next City.

Read here.

In an essay published by the National Endowment for the Arts, Eleanor Savage discussed how the pandemic “has highlighted and amplified technology’s central place in every aspect of our daily lives” and “the vital role of artists in the development and shaping of social and cultural tools and in world-building through technology.”

In this piece, the program director at Jerome Foundation and GIA board member, lifts up one of the discussions at the 2020 GIA Convening.

Many future-facing conversations in the philanthropic sector are centering on arts and technology. Grantmakers in the Arts’ 2020 virtual convening, Power, Practice, Resilience Remix’d, opened with a visionary keynote featuring Ruha Benjamin, Salome Asega, and Sage Crump, all of whom are creatively engaged with technology, sciences, and cultural work. The conversation, titled “Building the Future We Want,” highlighted the big questions that technology-centered artists such as Sasha Constanza-Chock and so many others are asking around the use of technology and who has input into its design and implementation. (…) What this keynote conversation also raised was the issue of insufficient financial support for arts and technology, even in this moment when these artists, networks, and communities are creating vibrant new ways to construct experience and change narratives.

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“We have to find business structures that meaningfully place people first and upend the practice of concentrating decision-making power and money in the hands of administrative leadership while undercompensating and disenfranchising the majority of workers,” wrote Arianna Gass and Daniel Park on a worker cooperative.

Read more here.