“How do we learn patriarchy?” Said authors Phillip Agnew and Marcus Littles for Nonprofit Quarterly. “That’s like asking how we learn to breathe. In our memories of Black boyhood, we can sense it everywhere. It was all around us all the time—sometimes overt, sometimes just below the surface. Our families were different in many ways, and our experiences unique. But there are patterns.”

The article analyzes the ways in which, “patriarchy is so ubiquitous and so devious that even people and organizations who oppose it in theory can end up colluding with it,” providing a framework for what dismantlement looks like.

“What does that look like? It looks like going to therapy and encouraging and supporting our colleagues in doing the same. It looks like reading Black feminist texts, discussing them with the people we work and organize with, and doing the hard work of making the words live and breathe in our work.”

Read the full article here.

From Exponent Philanthropy: “Building trust has been a key part of philanthropy for years for lean funders. Nevertheless, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, trust and strong relationships have taken on an even greater significance.”

“Building strong relationships with grantees doesn’t happen overnight. But from our research, we know that lean funders are perfectly positioned to develop these strong relationships and provide more significant support to their nonprofit partners. This publication shares our findings on how lean funders work to build strong relationships; how creative, catalytic philanthropy can help support strong relationships; and how long-term, flexible funding can further deepen relationships.”

Read the full report here.

Media Impact Funders hosts the Member Briefing, “Recommendations for documentary impact funders,” on May 24 at 1pm ET. The hour-long zoom meeting features Denae Peters (Perspective Fund), Daniel Forkkio (Represent Justice), and Shaady Salehi (Trust-based Philanthropy Project). It is open to all funders.

“Over a series of sessions hosted in 2020 and 2021, Perspective Fund gathered its current and recent grantees whose work serves as the backbone of the documentary impact field. These grantees, all focused on strengthening and innovating different aspects of the impact ecosystem, gathered not only to build community but to participate in a two-way channel of conversation about what Perspective Fund (and funders like them) can do to elevate their support ‘beyond the check.'”

Learn more and register here.

The Ford Foundation has released a report that, “offers a roadmap to reimagine recovery.”

From Ford Foundation President Darren Walker: “Two years ago, our world changed forever. COVID-19 overwhelmed every facet of our societies, taking more than 6 million lives—and exacerbating crises of inequality, injustice, and intolerance for countless millions more.”

“As the world begins to reopen, we must acknowledge that COVID-19 is not a finite moment in our global past, but an urgent reality of our present—and, undoubtedly, our future. Sustainable recovery and reform requires more than reckoning with the enduring nature of this crisis, its rippling variants, and its indeterminate end.”

“Let this vision inspire us to work together to design responses that not only weather the worst, but allow us all to flourish and thrive, and define a new age of solidarity, connection and justice.”

Read the full report here.

NeuroArts Blueprint has released a new report that explains, “how to grow and share the scientific knowledge showing art to be an extraordinary tool for promoting health and wellbeing in individuals and communities.”

“Scientific studies increasingly confirm what human beings across cultures and throughout time have long recognized: we are wired for art. The arts in all of their modalities can improve our physical and mental health, amplify our ability to prevent, manage, or recover from disease challenges, enhance brain development in children, build more equitable communities, and foster wellbeing through multiple biological systems.”

Read the full report here.

“To create a just and pluralist society, we need to reimagine systems and transform culture.”

Pop Culture Collaborative announced the Becoming America Fund, “launching as an initial $3.5 million year-long initiative, designed to support pop culture artists, entertainment companies, and social justice movements to take hold of the cultural moment…”

“The Fund centers the innovation of Black and Indigenous people, People of Color (BIPOC), immigrants, and Muslim communities, focusing on women, trans, nonbinary, queer, and disabled artists, influencers, activists, and thought leaders,” said Pop Culture Collaborative. “Becoming America is especially timely given the culture war currently being waged by many of our national and local political leaders against these communities—many of whom are marching for their lives while disproportionately reeling from the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Read the full article here.

“Drive across the Midwest and you’ll find cities and interstates peppered with anti-abortion billboards,” said author Cinnamon Janzer. Thus stemmed the Minnesota Billboard Project, born from a, “St. Paul couple [who] decided to take countering the anti-choice messaging into their own hands.”

“The brainchild of Kelly Searle, an epidemiologist and professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, and Kristin Brietzke, a statistician working for the state of Minnesota, the effort is a mission to counter the ubiquitous, guilt-inducing pro-life billboards around the city and state.” The two were able to raise $3,400 in order to put up five billboards, all located within four miles of the State Fair. Leftover funds were donated to planned parenthood.

Read the full article here.

The Mellon Foundation has partnered with Centro de Economía Creativa for, “a newly launched $8 million cultural employment initiative created to facilitate stable employment opportunities for artists while strengthening the administrative bandwidth of community-based cultural organizations across Puerto Rico.”

From the Mellon Foundation: “Puerto Rican artists play critical leadership roles within their communities, yet often live in a state of financial precarity, earning a median annual income of approximately $16,000 for their work, with 46% generating less than $12,000 annually. Through Maniobra, CEC and the Mellon Foundation underscore the labor of artists as valued work, while modeling remuneration that reflects artists’ formal education, experience, and contributions to society.”

Mellon Foundation President, Elizabeth Alexander, looks forward to, “…supporting the archipelago’s artistic and cultural organizations, and broadly fostering the work and preservation of Puerto Rican culture at a time when stable employment and funding for these efforts has been imperiled.”

Read the full announcement here.

From JPMorgan Chase: “New JPMorgan Chase PolicyCenter brief recommends asset and income restriction reforms.”

The new issue brief, “calls for updating and simplifying asset and income limits for SSI to expand economic opportunity and mobility for people with disabilities.” Jim Sinocchi, head of JPMorgan Chase Office of Disability Inclusion said, “he’s advocated for removing these barriers in meetings with government officials and members of Congress,” since his start with the company in 2016.

Read the full announcement here.

Be sure to tune in to GIA’s Disability Justice webinar on May 31, and read the latest President’s Blog, Supporting Intersectionality Through Public Policies, to learn more about how to support disabled artists.