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From the 2023 IDEAS Festival: Join us [Saturday, June 24 at 4pm] for a Behind the Actor’s Studio-style interview with powerhouse practitioners in social change and cultural equity! Grantmakers in the Arts President Eddie Torres will be joined by Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre Founder and Artistic Director Rosalba Rolón in a session that will engage personal narrative to illuminate pathways of activism in the performing arts. Listen in as Eddie and Rosalba grapple with the tension between the individual and the societal as related to decisions on cultural values and funding. Come curious. Leave inspired. Learn more here.

From Third Wave Fund: There is too much at stake right now. Every day there are escalating political attacks and legislative curtailing of bodily autonomy and human rights. It is critical that gender justice movements are able to focus on the work ahead, instead of jumping through hoops and bureaucracy in philanthropy.  

Organizations that make up these powerful movements need and deserve consistent support to build new skills, to build power, to grow their own vision, and to experiment, fail, iterate, and try again. And they need this space without the risk of losing their institutional partners or funding. That’s why in 2016 Third Wave started the Grow Power Fund, our long-term support fund that awards six-year grants meeting youth-led grassroots gender justice organizations wherever they’re at in support of their sustainability and long haul visions for community liberation. 

In our new report, Resourcing Movements for the Long Haul: Lessons from the Grow Power Fund’s First Six Years, we document key lessons from the Grow Power Fund’s first cycle of long-term funding. 

This report is an invitation to all funders to shift and transform your grantmaking practice to meet the needs that youth-led movement leaders are naming. We hope you’ll join us in evolving your funding, and transforming your relationship with movements to be enriched by mutual trust as we listen to our grantee partners to meet them where we’re needed the most.

From Research Centre for Arts and Wellbeing: In this event we will make the case that the arts can support the wellbeing of all. We will present exciting research of how this can be enabled opening new horizons and creating new possibilities. 

We will launch our manifesto of the Research Centre for Arts and Wellbeing and our strategy of how to scale up place-based arts initiatives that can support mental health and wellbeing, and will benefit a wide range of people including individuals and communities that are disadvantaged or marginalised. 

We will showcase the work we have done in areas with high levels of health, social and economic inequalities offering opportunities for people to connect no matter where they are based.

We will highlight the contribution the arts can make in supporting the care of carers including our work with communities and organisations locally, nationally and internationally.

We will launch the diverse work of the Research Centre for Arts and Wellbeing and this of the Creative Arts Therapies International Research Alliance of which we are founding members.

Performances, workshops, presentations with keynote contributions from the WHO, the Arts Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the National Centre for Arts and Wellbeing will offer rich experiences to participants in person and online. The voices of people with lived experience will frame the presentations to what matters to people participating in the arts.

Learn more and register here.

From Upstart Co-Lab: Upstart is launching a $100 million portfolio of funds and companies comprising the first impact investment strategy for the U.S. creative economy which will focus on fashion, film & TV, video games, food, the creator economy, the visual art market, immersive experiences, health & beauty and other creative industries.

Upstart’s approach will prioritize BIPOC and women entrepreneurs, and deliver people-focused impact: quality jobs, vibrant communities, and sustainable creative lives. To learn more about the impact that investing in the creative economy can create, please read Upstart’s Impact Report.

In tandem, Upstart will conduct an influence strategy focused on unlocking artists, art patrons and endowed cultural institutions as a new cohort of impact investors, and the creative sector as a new source of impact capital.

Upstart is seeking program-related investments from foundations; recoverable grants from donor advised funds; and mission-related investments from endowed nonprofit arts and culture organizations.  

Upstart Co-Lab’s Inclusive Creative Economy Strategy is supported by ImpactAssets. 

“The campaign to win reparations for Black Americans plans to bring broader support for smaller nonprofits advancing the cause, with a new philanthropic funding initiative announced Friday at the ‘Alight Align Arise’ national conference in Atlanta,” said Thalia Beaty for The Chronicle of Philanthropy. “The Decolonizing Wealth Project, an organization dedicated to creating racial equity through education and ‘radical reparative giving,’ is committing $20 million over five years to boost campaigns for reparations across the country, along with a research collaboration with Boston University to map reparation projects.”

“The project’s founder and CEO Edgar Villanueva announced the plans at the Atlanta gathering of advocates, including the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman, the Democratic congressman whose district represent parts of the Bronx and Westchester County in New York.”

‘The nonprofit, which is fiscally sponsored by Allied Media Projects, has not yet fully funded the commitment but has brought in millions of dollars in unrestricted grants from the likes of the Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in recent years. That’s in addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from individuals to their reparations campaign fund, called Liberated Capital, which the MacArthur Foundation supports.”

“Even before the police killing of George Floyd three years ago, institutions and municipalities began examining their own roles in systems that oppressed Black Americans, including slavery, redlining, and gentrification. They also looked at policies impacting other communities of color.’

“Last year, Harvard University pledged $100 million to atone for its extensive ties with slavery. In 2021, the Minnesota-based Bush Foundation committed $100 million, which they raised through issuing emergency bonds during the pandemic, to address economic inequality in Black and Native American communities. Also in 2021, the city of Evanston, Ill., launched a program to pay $10 million to facilitate home repairs or down payments for Black residents, the first of its kind in the United States.”

“Civil-rights lawyer and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, Cornell William Brooks, has a quilt hanging in his office that was made from the clothing of his great-great grandfather, which he points to as just one measure of the present connection to the impact of slavery. His scholarship looks at the many ways the U.S. government compensates groups that have been harmed, though not yet Black Americans.”

“Will Cordery is a philanthropy consultant and directs the Reparative Action Fund at Satterberg Foundation, which supports the Decolonizing Wealth Project. In his experience, individuals and smaller family foundations have been much quicker to grapple with and support reparations than larger foundations, which are more bound by their missions and internal procedures.”

“He hopes that funding more nonprofits to work on reparations campaigns will mean in five years that more people understand that reparations work is not just about handing over money but about healing past harms.”

Read the full article here.