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. 

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.

“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.

From Justice Funders: In 2020, philanthropic institutions in the U.S contributed over 13 times the amount of money to extractive global stock markets as they did to all of their grantmaking focus areas (Source: Climate Justice Alliance).

In response to this horrific imbalance of capital allocation in philanthropy, movement and philanthropic leaders came together to develop a Just Transition Investment Framework that offers a strategy for how philanthropies can shift capital and power to frontline BIPOC communities who are building local regenerative economies.

A Just Transition investment strategy requires philanthropic assets to be divested from the dominant financial system and instead redirected into movement-led, community-controlled institutions that build economic power and self-determination.

Learn more here.

From Seattle Opera: Inspired by a true story, eleventh grade honor roll student Diane Tran is the child of two Vietnamese immigrants who are now divorced. With her father rarely around and her mother gone, Diane feels bound to help provide financially for her family, be both sister and parent to her siblings, and also keep up her honor roll studies. Despite her heroic efforts, a judge sends her to jail for truancy.

Through the lens of an exhausted dream, we follow Diane as she struggles with familial duties, her mother’s abandonment, and the injustices of a system lacking compassion or understanding. As Diane’s mother shares her own reasons for leaving family behind, Diane must make an impossible decision in this “land of laws.”

The piece was composed by GIA’s board treasurer Bao-Long Chu and runs at the Seattle Opera June 9-18. Learn more here.

From Capital Collaborative by Camelback Ventures: In this episode of “It’s Not Your Money,” Capital Collaborative Funder In Residence, Jessamyn Shams-Lau, talks with abdiel j. lópez from Justice Funders, to share what a ‘Just Transition’ for philanthropy looks like, how some funders are already moving their power to communities, and how anyone can take steps towards healing and community-centered practices. 
 

Watch the webinar recording here.

“Until 2020 — the year when George Floyd was murdered, setting off a summer of protests demanding racial justice — civil-rights lawyer Ryan Haygood, CEO of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, had never raised a dime from two of the state’s biggest grant makers, the Geraldine R. Dodge and Robert Wood Johnson foundations.” said Alex Daniels, Marc Gunther, and Sono Motoyama for The Chronicle of Philanthropy. “Nor had the Rev. Charles Boyer, who leads Salvation and Social Justice, a faith-based nonprofit in Trenton, N.J., that organizes Black churches to advocate on issues of criminal justice, health care, and the wealth and income disparities Black Americans face.”

“For example, on the same day in August 2020, the Packard Foundation and the Lilly Endowment each announced $100 million efforts. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation raised $125 million through a social bond, with the goal that more than half the money would fund nonprofits led by people of color. The money has been distributed, and the share ended up being more than 80 percent.”

“Among the nonprofits that benefited from the bond offering was the Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective, a Los Angeles organization that makes grants, trains organizers, and promotes wellness to people often marginalized by the health-care system, which received $500,000. Data for Black Lives also received a $500,000 award. The Cambridge, Mass., organization supports a network of grassroots racial-justice groups that challenge discriminatory uses of data and algorithms.”

“New announcements continue. Last month, the Ballmer Group introduced a five-year, $42.5 million effort to support Black-led nonprofits that aim to improve economic mobility, and the Raikes Foundation created a new grant-making program to support organizations that seek to build a robust multiracial democracy in the United States as part of its plan to distribute its entire endowment by 2038.”

“Foundations rose to the occasion during the first two years of the decade, Hewitt says, but now they’re reverting to their normal practice of parceling out smaller grants and protecting their endowments. Grant declines are simply the back end of the wave that rolled through the nonprofit sector in 2020 and 2021, Hewitt says.”

“Grants run out but when people understand racism better, they become committed to solving the problem — and that is sustainable change, says Charmaine Mercer, a former program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation who became the fund’s first chief of equity and culture.”

Read the full article here.

From Philanthropy News: The Barr, Kresge, and William Penn foundations have announced $13 million in funding to support arts and culture programs that help address systemic and intersectional societal challenges.

The commitments will support the Culture and Community Power Fund (CCPF), a funding collaborative formed in 2022 by Barr, Kresge, and Penn to serve as “a lab for investing in, connecting, and amplifying efforts to help build community power through art and culture.”

CCPF previously awarded unrestricted, multiyear grants totaling $5.8 million to six organizations in five cities—Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans, the Boston Ujima Project, the Center for Transforming Communities in Memphis, Northend Christian CDC in Detroit, and the Asian Arts Initiative and Village of Arts and Humanities in Philadelphia. Over the next two years, the fund will work with those grantee partners to invest an additional $3.6 million in other organizations, individuals, and groups in their communities to launch new experiments or build on existing efforts. In addition, the fund will invest over $1.5 million to provide opportunities for learning and sharing among practitioners, investors, and civic leaders; commission national research; and learn from and amplify the work of its grantee partners.

“The fund’s work builds upon…the efforts of many others working to advance racial equity and the self-determination of communities most impacted by structural oppression,” said CCPF co-director Erik Takeshita. “By sharing broadly what we are learning…we hope to add to this existing body of knowledge, mobilize more investors, and inspire additional practitioners to leverage the power of art and culture to help build community power.”

Read the full announcement here.

From the Field Foundation: In partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, the Field Foundation has launched a new grantmaking program. This program—which we’re calling A Road Together (ART)—is designed specifically for small and mid-sized arts and culture organizations with annual operating budgets up to $1 million and with a strong commitment to equity that are reflective and inclusive of Chicago’s diverse and historically underserved communities. Through this initiative, there will be opportunities to apply for multi-year general operating grants using a participatory grantmaking process, as well as single-year general operating grants outside of the participatory process.

On April 12 & 13, 2023, we held two informational webinars, where Field and MacArthur representatives described our aspiration, working together with future ART grantees, to make a sustainable impact in advancing racial equity by enabling more Chicagoans to dream and flourish while accessing platforms for art and cultural expression.

Learn more and view the webinar recordings here.