From UNESCO: “This monthly Tracker is produced by UNESCO to monitor culture in public policy with regards to the UN Sustainable Development Agenda. It highlights developments within national and regional contexts, as well as emerging debates on culture’s contribution to sustainable development. Drawing on a variety of sources, it provides a broad overview of cultural policy trends worldwide at the national, regional and international level and looks at ways in which countries integrate culture into other policy areas.”

“Culture and education together are the backbone of human development. Yet culture and education are insufficiently harnessed together as complementary dimensions that can leverage social inclusion, skills acquisition as well as the enhancement of knowledge.”

“Today’s increased multicultural societies marked by growing mobility, the interdependence of countries and the transversality of public policies, as well as the acceleration of digital technologies have prompted the need for more adaptive and agile societies equipped with the knowledge and skills to engage in a fast evolving environment. This fourth part of the special series counting down to the UNESCO World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development – MONDIACULT 2022, explores the opportunities and priorities raised by Member States and other stakeholders on this topic.”

Read the full report here.

From NextCity: Join Culture Surge, Harness and the Native American Community Development Institute on Wednesday, October 5 at 1pm EST for a conversation on how culture and creativity are being used to develop culturally relevant strategies in partnership with artists, culture bearers, cultural strategists and community organizers.

This webinar is sponsored by The Kresge Foundation. The event will provide an opportunity to learn from three organizations working at the intersection of civic engagement and cultural strategy and will highlight how creative practices can contribute to a more just and engaged democratic process.

Learn more and register here.

“The Jerome Foundation today announces that earlier this year President Ben Cameron shared his intention of retiring early in 2023 and that a search for his successor has now begun. The Foundation has chosen Korn Ferry, the global organizational consulting firm, to lead this process.” Cameron was also a former GIA Board Member.

“Board Chair Kate Barr said, ‘Ben has embodied the foundation’s values in his leadership throughout his tenure and brought insight and vision to every aspect of the organization. He has led the team in re-imagining and implementing grant programs and internal systems that respond to seismic changes in the arts ecosystem. We are well positioned to continue to build on the foundation that Ben has put in place.'”

“Cameron said, ‘It has been an honor to work with the Jerome Foundation and its superb staff. I am especially grateful for the stewardship of the Members of the Jerome Corporation and for the insight, collegiality and passion of our Board of Directors, who represent true thought leaders in the arts world. Being in the same space with them all and hearing them think and share has been the highlight of my career.'”

Read the full announcement here.

“Philanthropy is no stranger to the ways that ableism is deeply embedded in the perceptions and treatment of disabled people. Historically, many charitable foundations have solicited or made donations intending to ‘cure’ disabled people, based on the so-called ‘medical model’ of disability,” said Sandy Ho and Jen Bokoff for Stanford Social Innovation Review. “While some of these organizations enabled access to services, much of their work framed disability in a way that contributed to notions that disabled people are in pitiable positions and are in need of fixing—also known as the ‘charity model’ of disability. Both the medical and charity models portray people with disabilities as objects rather than subjects, which can contribute to ableism and impede the achievement of and access to rights and justice.”

“Rooting out embedded systematic oppression will take more than one program officer, funding priority, or call for proposals. It requires a collaborative and dedicated multilayered strategy. Based on our experiences, here are seven ideas for philanthropy to consider:

Ableism doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Hire, support, and promote disabled talent.
Ensure that your grantmaking processes and technologies are accessible.
Be in active partnership with disability communities.
Build data about disability.
Proactively support disabled-led initiatives and organizations.
Call peers and stakeholders into learning and constant improvement.”

“Dismantling ableism in philanthropy is not a nice-to-do; it’s a must-do. Without concerted efforts to root out ableist oppression, we cannot meaningfully address injustice and inequality. The ideas we offer here are just some steps that philanthropy can take to become anti-ableist to move toward transformation.”

Read the full article here.

Five years after the devastation of Hurricane Maria, Hurricane Fiona has caused catastrophic destruction in Puerto Rico, killing at least two people and leaving nearly the entire island archipelago without power and water. Below you will find opportunities to lend your support to Puerto Rico.

Post-Maria, the US federal government set aside billions for reconstruction, but communities in Puerto Rico remain vulnerable. Puerto Rico’s vulnerability stems from a combination of factors, including the Fiscal Control Board’s requirement that Puerto Rico privatize its power grid.

The Fiscal Control Board’s oversight of Puerto Rico’s budget is an element of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA). PROMESA is a US federal law enacted in 2016 that established a US financial oversight board for Puerto Rico, a process for restructuring debt the Puerto Rican government owed to corporate creditors. The FCB’s approved fiscal austerity plan for 2017-2026 cut deeply into Puerto Rico’s public service budget, including cuts to health care, pensions, and education, in order to prioritize repaying corporate creditors.

Puerto Rico’s vulnerability is also rooted in its status as a US territory with no electoral votes for the presidency and no voting representation in Congress. Puerto Rico has an advocate in the U.S. Congress, who has no voting authority. At a Congressional hearing less than a week before Hurricane Fiona, Puerto Rico’s non-voting congressional representative questioned the effectiveness of Puerto Rico’s privatized electric grid, considering its history of poor performance, and whether it should even remain in the hands of a private company.

Grantmakers in the Arts joins friends across the nation in a call for our federal government to cancel Puerto Rico’s debt, and end private oversight of its budget to ensure that Puerto Rico may recover in the spirit of self-determination.

Ways To Give in Support of Puerto Rico:

María Fund
María Fund’s Fiona Community Response Fund
Taller Salud
Hispanics in Philanthropy’s Fiona Community Response Fund
Hispanic Federations’ Unidos Disaster Relief & Recovery Program to Support Puerto Rico
Fundación Comunitaria de Puerto Rico
Filantropía Puerto Rico’s FORWARD Puerto Rico Fund
Filantropía Puerto Rico’s Philanthropic Call to Action Towards a Just & Resilient Puerto Rico

Information on Puerto Rico:

Latino Rebels: Hurricane Fiona Batters Puerto Rico Still Recovering 5 Years After María 
Politico: Fiona’s Outages Rekindle Anger Over Puerto Rico’s Privatized Electric Grid
The Washington Post: Puerto Rico’s Bankruptcy Is Ending: What Comes Next?
MSNBC: Puerto Rico’s New Bankruptcy Plan Does Nothing for Most of the Island
Common Dreams: Critics Warn Puerto Rico Debt Plan Will Leader to More Austerity
Open Society Foundations: The Right Way to Help Rebuild Puerto Rico
The Center for Popular Democracy: Organizing for a Just Recovery in Puerto Rico and Beyond
Latino Rebels: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Others Seek Silver Lining in Puerto Rico

Please continue to share resources with us by emailing Eddie@GIArts.org

“Borealis Philanthropy is pleased to announce the Request for Proposals (RFP) for the Black-led Movement Fund’s (BLMF) first year of participatory grantmaking. This announcement includes background information about the BLMF and important details about how to apply for funding.”

“Funding will provide general operating support for U.S. based Black-led organizations or projects working within the Movement for Black Lives ecosystem, or within other movement ecosystems that are aligned with the M4BL Values.”

“Borealis Philanthropy believes that directly affected communities are the essential creative force in the larger arc of social change. As a Borealis fund leading the resourcing of social change within Black communities and larger ecosystems, BLMF defines “Black-led” as any organization with 75% or more of its organizational composition self-identifying as Black.”

“$200,000 general operating support grants will be awarded ($100,000 per year) over a two year period, 2023-2025.”

Learn more and submit a RFP here. The deadline for proposals is October 28 at 11:59pm EST.

“Remember, this was before TV, and just as radio was getting off the ground. Film productions were novelty shorts in a world of vaudeville and live theatre, musicals, opera, and dance,” said M L Clark for Only Sky Media. “So how did one make money as a creator? Well, in part through royalties off live performance, and in part by selling the music directly, to a market of households that usually had at least one person who could play an instrument or sing. But if someone figured out how to bypass purchasing sheet music, on a mass scale? Well, then they’d be affecting music publishers’ profits, and by extension the artists. How would creators survive, if no one was paying for their work?”

“Sheet music is still a niche industry today, but technology over the last 120 years has routinely required creators (and their capitalists) to rethink how they’ll get paid from making art. In the 1980s, blank audio cassettes gave us homemade mixtapes, and the music industry fought hard against the practice, while radio stations cut over song intros and endings to foil recording attempts. In the 2000s, file-sharing platforms like Napster became the scourge of most musicians, and a lot more of their income started to ride on concert and merchandise sales.”

“What’s the solution? Not playing into the narrative of inevitable loss. Not making the same, determinist mistake that stories like Guns, Germs, & Steel invite us to assume. Yes, historically, people of greater means and hardier resources very often and quite devastatingly wielded new technology and its innovations against one another.

But that was always a human choice, not an inevitable outcome.

Giving into ‘replacement’ or ‘oppression’ myths around AI is simply a way of offloading that choice to our creations. Some humans choose to use advanced technologies to dehumanize others. Others don’t.

And still others recognize that, wherever new technology stands ready to supplant some aspect of human industry, it behooves us to respond by building more robust political innovations to match. The tech isn’t the problem. Our civic failure to grow along with it is. Only by surmounting that failure—instead of trying to turn back the clock on invention—can we ever ensure that humans will still be able to support themselves, and each other, as we transition into all our strange new worlds ahead.”

Read the full article here.

“The Center for Disaster Philanthropy is hosting a webinar to help foundations, corporations and individual donors learn about the storm, the impact of the devastating flooding and how they can help affected communities.” The webinar takes place on Thursday, September 22 at 2pm ET. Registration is required.

Regine Webster, vice president of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, and guest experts will also discuss the differences in island-based disaster recovery.

At the end of the webinar, funders will:

Have an overview of the flooding and damage impacts from Hurricane Fiona.
Understand how to best support community organizations working on the ground.
Learn about the unique needs of disaster response in island communities.
While aimed at funders, it may also be of interest to emergency managers, academics, disaster responders and NGO staff interested in or working on disasters and other crises.

Register here.

From Filantropic Puerto Rico: “Today, five years after Hurricane María, Hurricane Fiona has caused catastrophic rainfalls, major mudslides that have left whole communities inaccessible, rivers have overflowed causing tragedies and debris has blocked some of the main streets and highways across Puerto Rico. The hurricane also caused the fragile power grid to shut down, provoking an islandwide blackout that also left the majority of the population without access to clean water.”

“The FORWARD PUERTO RICO Fund has spent the last five years supporting key nonprofit organizations and innovative projects that advocate addressing the layered crises facing Puerto Rico in an equitable manner, while increasing the resilience of vulnerable populations on the island. Once more, the FORWARD Fund of Filantropía Puerto Rico is present in the disaster and recovery response after Hurricane Fiona. We recognize that today’s mobilization comes from long before 2017, and we remain committed to moving FORWARD towards a better and stronger Puerto Rico.”

“Donations to the FORWARD Fund will focus on immediate relief, while supporting community organizations that contribute to moving Puerto Rico into a transparent, just and equitable process of recovery. As organizations deeply rooted in local communities, they pursue equal treatment, advocate for the most vulnerable, create innovative initiatives, mobilize volunteers and address basic needs. Their proximity and knowledge of their communities and people enable them to quickly and efficiently provide necessary services during the Fiona relief for an equitable response.”

As immediate needs of the population are met, the funds raised will be used to ensure that these organizations help move Puerto Rico FORWARD.

Different ways to give to the Forward Fund: Fiona Relief

Credit Card and others
Wire Transfer: ACH Information
Name of Bank: Banco Popular
Bank Address: PO Box 362708 San Juan, PR 00936-2708
Name of Account Holder: Filantropía Puerto Rico, Inc.
Account Number: 011837934
ABA Routing Number: 021502011
Grant: If your institution would like to make a grant, needs more information, or would like to join other funders in supporting – please reach out to the Forward Fund Operations and Financial Director Anja Paonessa anja@filantropiapr.org 786-973-4548

“In our minds, constructing a better and stronger Puerto Rico is possible, and your support can help us make this possible. Keep in touch so you can join the conversation and strategize how to best support the social sector.”