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In “The importance of BIPOC voices and the unique challenges BIPOC content creators face,” Vu Le writes in his Nonprofit AF blog, about talented BIPOC folks that are “hesitant to contribute content and get their voices out there.”

“This has been going on for as long as I can remember. Let’s examine this, because the perspectives of folks who are most affected by injustice are vital to our sector. This post is meant as encouragement and advice for BIPOC content creators, but I want white allies to pay attention to this issue, as you have a lot of gatekeeping power in this area,” he says.

Le adds that “our sector needs BIPOC voices, or nothing changes.” In this blog, he offers advice for both BIPOC folks and white colleagues to advance those voices.

Read here.

Image: Obi Onyeador / Unsplash

“We must build up people of color and Indigenous-led philanthropic and movement infrastructure organizations in order to challenge the power structures in this country and invest into the self-determination of the people on the frontlines,” said Nick Tilsen, NDN Collective president & CEO, as he recaps the past month of mobilization in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tilsen explains NDN Collective decided to keep existing programming, while building a new fund and strategy to respond to the COVID-19 crisis. “In the past 30 days we have raised over $4 million and deployed over $2.5 million to nearly 100 partners impacting over 200 Indigenous communities. This was possible because of organizers, activists, Tribal leaders, partners, philanthropic collaborators, and straight-up changemakers who were willing to step up in this historic moment.”

He added,

The past 30 days have been evidence that organizations like NDN Collective, who have grown out of movements with lived experience in doing this work, can be catalytic. We can stimulate change not only in times of crisis, but on the daily, as we strive to co-create the new world we are fighting for.

Read more here.

Image: NDN Collective website

A report from the United States Department of Arts and Culture tackles how “as natural disasters and social emergencies multiply, the need has grown for ethical, creative, and effective artistic response—arts-based work responding to disaster or other community-wide emergency, much of it created in collaboration with community members directly affected.”

The report, according to the Department of Arts and Culture, seeks to engage:

-artists who wish to use their gifts for healing, whether in the immediate aftermath of a crisis or during the months and years of healing and rebuilding resilience that follow.
-resource-providers—both public and private grantmakers and individual donors—who care about compassion and community-building and,
-disaster agencies, first responders, and service organizations on call and on duty when an emergency occurs, and those committed to helping over time to heal the damage done.

Read here.

Image: Free-Photos / Pixabay

On behalf of GIA’s team and our membership, I am writing this blog post as a response to Quanice Floyd’s recently shared article, The Failure of Arts Organizations to Move Toward Racial Equity. First, to Quanice – Grantmakers in the Arts hears you. Your statement offered our community the opportunity and charge to reflect deeply, specifically about power.

As a membership association of grantmakers, we are a seat of power. The easiest thing to do when a colleague like Quanice critiques our field is to evade or dismiss the critique or to defend ourselves, to list the good things we’ve done. But that is the opposite of listening and learning. It is the opposite of committing to justice as a practice and a process.

To quote our senior development manager, Sylvia Jung, we at Grantmakers in the Arts know that providing racial equity content does not mean racial justice has been achieved. As a Philanthropy Serving Organization, Grantmakers in the Arts is complicit in perpetuating and upholding White supremacist, patriarchal, misogynist, ableist, and hetero-normative systems and cultures. We acknowledge our part in perpetuating these systems and acknowledge the need to be deliberate about challenging these dynamics with our choices, behaviors, and actions. We can only do this well by listening, by centering and amplifying voices like Quanice’s.

I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to learn from my team members and board members. It is thanks to these colleagues – such as our vice president, Nadia Elokdah and program manager Sherylynn Sealy– that we have had successes centering the voices of BIPOC colleagues and organizations in our programming, encouraging the field to increase funding to BIPOC artists and organizations, hosting Racial Equity in Arts Funding workshops, as well as other successes. And, these successes are not excuses to avoid constant and continuous self-examination and correction. If the process of hegemony is constant and continuous, the process of counter-hegemony must be constant and continuous.

Even when we are well-intended, we make mistakes. As we establish at the start of each and every workshop we facilitate, we can honor intent while acknowledging and attending to impact. In fact, we must. Often in our desire to center the voices of folks who are harmed by our actions, we risk burning them out by piling work on them, asking them to execute the education and labor to fix our mistakes, and to place these increased responsibilities on top of their already considerable emotional labor. In our desire to share the work of BIPOC organizations and communities, we open them up to others’ copying their work without crediting them as the innovators they are. As we center marginalized groups, we risk tokenizing them. I’ve certainly made these mistakes, as well as so many other mistakes, and am working to correct them.

Grantmakers in the Arts, as a member organization, and I, as a person, commit to remain humble enough to listen, recognize mistakes made, and to continuously try again. This listening and self-correcting is the process. When it comes to executing its work equitably, Grantmakers in the Arts is in process. We will never be done. We invite our peers to join us in reflecting and evolving.

In a recent Artsy article, Kemi Ilesanmi, executive director of The Laundromat Project (The LP), discussed the mission and the work of this New York–based, POC-centered organization “that aims to meet the concerns of local communities of color and enact change through public engagements with the arts by actualizing spaces like community gardens, plazas, and, yes, laundromats.”

The goal is to enact that change through these hubs, as Artsy writes, “where people come together, share ideas, and work out creative solutions to the problems affecting them and their neighbors.”

“What we really do,” she says, “is we build, we nourish, and we equip people to be community leaders and use their full creative arsenal to envision and make the world that they deserve and want to live in.”

Read more here.