This report, published by Upstart Co-Lab, details six creative econonmy investments by the Upstart member community in 2020 and 2021. Their member community possesses Upstart Co-Lab’s proprietary knowledge of funds, direct company investment opportunities, and real estate projects while maintaining discretion over their investment decisions.

The report describes how Upstart Co-Lab evaluates impact in five specific dimensions and then explores each of the six funds to see how they met those goals. The reports deep exploration of these six funds is intended to provide a small-sample glimpse into the much larger set of investment opportunities sourced and screened by Upstart over the past four years.

Read the report here.

The Canada Council for the Arts – Canada’s public arts funder – has a new strategic plan for 2021-26: Art, now more than ever. The plan has a strong focus on rebuilding a more just and equitable arts sector in Canada.

The plan builds on decades of equity-related work at the Council. Already in place, for example, was the organization’s Expanding the Arts II: Deaf and Disability Expression and Engagement Strategy. This strategy advances Deaf and disability arts, recognizing fundamental human rights and addressing power imbalances and inequities that are the result of political, social, and economic discrimination. The Council supports Deaf and disability arts as a distinct field of practice that brings unique perspectives and ways of being into the common cultural experience and shifts perceptions and understanding of the human condition and artistic experience.

The Council’s new strategic plan deepens support to equity in several new ways – including its $200 million Strategic Innovation Fund. Among other things, organizations can apply to the fund for activities that address systemic problems in the arts sector, including those related to equity, diversity, and inclusion and the impacts of colonization.

All this runs parallel to the Council’s ongoing journey toward a decolonized future for the arts. Indigenous staff at the Council, with the support of Indigenous peoples across the country, are leading these efforts. Toward these efforts, the Council has committed $100M over five years for Indigenous arts and culture, including through its ongoing program Creating, Knowing and Sharing: The Arts and Cultures of First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples.

Explore the Canada Council for the Arts 2021-26 Strategic Plan, Art, now more than ever, and its vision for a more just and equitable arts sector.

You can also visit Canada Council for the Arts photo gallery on GIA’s Photo Credits page.

Image: Frédérick Duchesne.

“We have to stop being afraid of the critique,” Joe Scantlebury, CEO of Living Cities says in the Chronical of Philanthropy. “We don’t improve in silence.”

“Scantlebury is one of many nonprofit leaders of color who have stepped in to lead organizations over the past two years as the effort to end racism has been taken up with renewed vigor,” Alex Daniels reports. “Since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, many nonprofits, particularly those that serve and advocate for people of color, felt like outsiders in the struggle. For many of those groups, part of the answer has been to replace White leaders with people of color. Those leaders were often charged with changing the culture of the organization to ensure it was a place employees of all backgrounds could thrive.”

According to the Building Movement Project’s recent report, Trading Glass Ceilings for Glass Cliffs: A Race to Lead Report on Nonprofit Executives of Color, there has been an influx of leaders of color who have taken jobs previously held by White leaders in the last year. “The survey found that executives of color did not have the same support as leaders as their White counterparts when they entered their roles. They were asked to do more, and often paid less.”

Read here.

“If you’ve taken a leap, what was the runway you needed? If you wanted to take a leap, but didn’t, what held you back?” writes guest editor Donita Volkwijn about the prompts for the latest edition of Nonprofit Wakanda Quarterly.

“Most people growing up in the United States, either from birth or as settlers from other lands, have heard some form of the adage, “leap and the net will appear,'” Volkwjin continues …”Those of us in the BIPOC community know that there is no such thing as a magical net. If we’ve ever benefitted from a soft landing, we know that every thread of our net was crafted from the wisdom, joy, fear and pain of those who came before us. “

Read the Winter 2021-2022 issue here.

The Henry Luce Foundation announced recently the commitment of $14 Million in new grants intended to amplify diverse experiences and fund community-engaged projects.

“These commitments include projects selected in three grant competitions: American Art Loan Exhibitions; Advancing Public Knowledge on Race, Justice, and Religion; and Democracy, Ethics, and Public Trust Initiative,” the announcement shared of the Board’s decision. “In addition to the work supported through these competitions, the Foundation continued its emphasis on strengthening and disseminating knowledge by and about underrepresented communities and encouraging innovative approaches to research and teaching in emerging areas of study.”

Read more about these new grants here.

“Our work here in Chinatown,” Yin Kong, director and co-founder of Think!Chinatown, says, “Is about place-keeping. It’s about celebrating, strengthening and amplifying,” in an interview with NextCity. The article continues, “For a neighborhood relatively compact in size — Chinatown covers roughly two square miles in Lower Manhattan — it boasts an impressive and dedicated collective of cultural organizers,” and more than $200 million announced in public dollars just in the past two years, after decades of “pigeon-holing” and insufficient funding.

“The questions are urgent, and resonate far beyond Chinatown: When the cultural and artistic work has long been under-resourced and marginalized by institutional and government funders, how should that money be distributed when it finally comes in? What are the trade-offs for government and establishment funding — and are they worth it?”

Read more here.

“We’re moving beyond DEI (bodies at the table), racial equity (measuring POC against white people), and perhaps even racial justice (the righting of racial wrongs), to an actual focus on what Black people need to thrive (building pro-Black),” Cyndi Suarez writes in the latest issue of NonProfit Quarterly (NPQ). “These parallel realities exist right now. But there is a gap between the leaders of color and radical white conspirators at the edge—and the funders who claim to be.”

“At the end of 2021, NPQ convened an advisory committee on racial justice and asked the question: What is the edge of current racial justice work? The group converged around “building pro-Black organizations,”.

Read the full story here.

In a new report, “Pulse Checking Progress Toward Operationalizing REI: Arts, Culture & Healing,” from LivingCities revisits learnings and progress from internal racial equity work over the part five years in response to a 2017 internal learning report, “What Does it Take to Embed a Racial Equity & Inclusion Lens?”

“There were twelve themes we uncovered in our scan of practices being used by organizations to operationalize racial equity,” the authors, Hafizah Omar and Joanna Carrasco, explain in the Pulse Check. “These twelve recommendations have guided our internal racial equity work in the last five years and we want to update you on what we have learned along the way and what we are continuing to test and practice.”

Read the recommendations and progress report here.

“Color Congress, a national collective of majority people of color (POC) and POC-led organizations aimed at centering and strengthening nonfiction storytelling by, for and about people of color in the US, has launched in advance of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival,” Filmmaker magazine reported this January leading up to the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. “Founded by documentary impact and field-building strategists Sahar Driver and Sonya Childress, the collective will invite POC-led doc-serving organizations to apply for unrestricted two-year funding from a $1.35 million fund, and later in the year, they’ll be invited to join the Congress and direct over $1 million in grants aimed at addressing field challenges.”

“After spending the last two decades leveraging the power of documentary film, I understood the power — and the limits — of what a single film can accomplish,” said Color Congress co-founder Sonya Childress in a press release. “Today’s existential challenges require a sea-change in thought and action; so to truly catalyze social change we need robust cinema authored by people closest to the most critical issues of our time. By supporting the organizations that nurture filmmakers of color, we can ensure impactful nonfiction storytelling will flourish.”

Read the full story here.