The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has announced nearly $1 million in grant funding through its Creative Inflections program, a first-of-its-kind initiative to support leading jazz artists and presenting organizations in innovative collaborations that enable artists to take creative risks and expand the genre’s listenership by attracting younger and more diverse audiences. Each grant of up to $200,000 supports alliances between the selected artists and institutions to explore novel, interdisciplinary approaches to the way that jazz can be delivered to the next generation of audiences. The Creative Inflections program works to position jazz artists and presenting institutions as equal partners, support risk-taking by both artists and presenters, and cultivate audiences of millennials as jazz consumers.

Learn more about the new grantees here.

“The Open Society Foundations are proud to announce their Justice Rising Awards, a new investment in leaders working towards racial justice and equality in the Black community in the United States,” according to the press release. “The 16 awardees from across the country are being recognized for their long-term contributions to advancing change in their communities, tireless commitment to civil rights, and capacity to inspire, innovate, and mobilize people despite considerable odds.”

More than a dozen Black social justice activists will be awarded $150,000 each to continue their often decades-long work for civil rights and to perhaps worry less about paying their bills. Two notable artists/activists selected as award recipients are Monica Raye Simpson — a Black, Southern, lesbian, artist/organizer and executive director of SisterSong — and Prentiss Haney — co-founder of Midwest Culture Lab as an urgent political intervention needed to center and support young artists of color as trusted communicators, organizers, and cultural strategists with the intent of increasing youth civic participation during elections.

Read more about the Justice Rising Awards and the awardees.

Zakiya Harris is in the process of group of co-founding BlacSpace Cooperative, organizations led by Black women in Oakland working to create a business development ecosystem to uplift the city’s Black arts community. Harris – a cultural architect who grew up in East Oakland and has worked for more than two decades on projects that explore the intersections of art, activism, and entrepreneurship – says, “We, as a collective community, recognized that we were at a critical moment, and we could leverage the opportunity of the pandemic and the uprising toward a cultural reset.”

In response to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the coinciding global uprising following George Floyd’s murder, BlacSpace Cooperative, is in its early stages. “There is a growing conversation nationally around the importance of reallocating funding to the artists and culture-bearers who are oftentimes overlooked, but who are at the cutting edge of cultural and economic innovation-these include groups like BIPOC, trans people, queer people, strippers and single moms,” reports April M. Short in Big News Network.com. As detailed in the 2021 Grantmakers in the Arts’ report, Solidarity Not Charity: Arts & Culture Grantmaking in the Solidarity Economy, “artists are very often the source of local solutions to the large-scale problems that many people face today-and that many more will face in the future.”

Harris says she allotted funds from work with Alameda County’s Arts Web (which Community Vision, SVCreates and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation joined forces to develop) into founding the cooperative. BlacSpace has also received funding through the Center for Cultural Innovation and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA)/Culture Bank. In the fall of 2021, the project transitioned into fiscal sponsorship with Haven of Hope, a Black-led fiscal organization led by Darcelle Lahr.

Read Zakiya Harris’ interview with April M. Short here.

“It is too early to determine whether the waves of protests of recent years as part of the Black Lives Matter movement will actually constitute a ‘racial reckoning’ (as the media dubbed it) or not, but awareness of the role of systemic inequality and structural racism appears to be at or near its historical peak, especially among White Americans. This means that the aperture for meaningful policy change has opened,” writes Stephen Menedian in an essay on the Othering & Belonging Institute blog. Menedian’s essay provides an overview of the new open-source, searchable repository of policy-based recommendations for addressing structural and systemic racism or advancing racial equity drawn from a vast array of published material.

The Othering & Belonging Institute scoured a vast array of materials, including books, reports, civic organizational platforms, and other sources, to compile roughly 1,000 policy recommendations in many areas where structural racism is most prevalent, including policing, criminal justice, housing, transportation, voting rights, education, and many others. “We hope this project will be useful to advocacy groups, researchers, foundations, and local, state, and federal officials who are seeking ways to address systemic racism in their communities,” the team shared in the official announcement this week.

Read the full essay here.

“When I think of the phrase ‘You’re always a day late and a dollar short,’ I also think about resilience—the ability to recover from or adjust easily to, despite hard luck or change,” writes Helanius J. Wilkins in a poignant essay published in the National Performance Network (NPN) blog. “One of my earliest lessons about resilience came through observing my father.”

Wilkins shares an intimate story about his relationship with his father, learning to unlearn and relearn, and how a practice of walking in solace became essential for navigating a pandemic. “His experience taught me that resilience is a cyclical process of learning, unlearning, relearning, and how in the relearning, new insights can be gained about the self, others, and the world around us,” Wilkins reflects.

Read the full essay here.

“After the catalyzing uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, many cultural institutions have sought to represent themselves more equitably — that is to say, more diversely — to the Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) community at large,” reports Frederica Simmons in Hyperallergic. “This pursuit of equity has fallen heavily on the shoulders of BIPOC cultural workers, as institutions rush to communicate their inclusivity to majority White audiences.”

Simmons, writing from the Twin Cities, asks, “Surrounded by outdated practices and bare-minimum standards, what does conscious curation look like?” Fostering a community of care and “welcoming BIPOC artists, curators, and others into the curatorial process creates a space for accountability,” Simmons offers.

Performative efforts by White curators to create connections in the BIPOC community have resulted primarily in single exhibitions rather than continuing dialogues. Curators are critical in providing narratives and influence to the public that is often taken for granted by museum and gallery visitors. Curation can be both invisible and omnipotent: without the curatorial guidance, there is no meaning, no story. When curatorial work is viewed as preeminent, practitioners risk falling into patterns of self-assured superiority and operate from positions of power hoarding, assuming, as a result of their specialization within a particular field, the role of universal authority on such topics. This rapidly individualizes and isolates the process, often with negative consequences for diverse populations. When White curators seek to express BIPOC stories from their own perspectives, what is lost? Any opportunity for authentic truth to be conveyed.

Read here.

“For those of us who have participated in a half-century of powerful activism by people with disabilities, a familiar slogan summarizes our call to action: Nothing about us without us.” Nikki Brown-Booker writes in the Winter 2022 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review.

In her piece, Brown-Booker discusses the Disability Inclusion Fund (DIF) at Borealis Philanthropy. She writes, “If we want to serve people with disabilities, our work must be directly informed by them. Most of the grantmaking advocates I work with…are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) with disabilities.”

“As a woman of color with a disability and the former executive director of a nonprofit organization serving people with disabilities, I have seen the disconnect between funder strategies and the needs of community-based nonprofits,” Brown-Booker shares from her professional and personal expertise. “Quite often, funding does not come with a cultural understanding of the disability community, and this ignorance can impede direct and efficient service.”

Read here.

“Conventional banking hasn’t worked for businesses owned by people of color. But a new network is designed to get money flowing fairly to BIPOC economies.” Common Future’s CEO, Rodney Foxworth, speaks with Yes! magazine about their strategy to disrupt traditional lending models, which are neither racially neutral nor adequate for BIPOC communities or businesses.

Character-based lending is “the practice of issuing loans based primarily on the borrower’s character—their involvement in and ties to the community, or their reputation and track record therein—relegating financial criteria to a smaller role in decision-making,” reports Chris Winters. Common Future is working with several community partners for the launch of this approach including ConnectUp! Institute in St. Paul, Minnesota, a networking and business development group. that builds on personal relationships with community. Elaine Rasmussen, the organization’s founder, reflects, “In the U.S., that kind of relationship historically was restricted to White business owners. But globally…it’s not anything new, particularly when you look at African countries and you look at the concept of sou-sou—shared funds.”

“The plan is to grow the program with capital obtained from repaid loans and from more philanthropic sources, to include other partner organizations who are best positioned to serve their communities,” says Foxworth. “The whole purpose of character-based lending is in fact to strengthen the power and capacities of the folks in our network to maintain and build on these things themselves.”

Read the full discussion here.