For the month of July, GIA’s photo banner features work supported by Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona.

This is the text Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona submitted for this Spotlight:

In Southern Arizona, days are longer, as we just experienced the Summer Solstice while temperatures are reaching the highest marks of the season. Meanwhile, as the first monsoon rainfall descends, artists, collectives, cop-ops, and organizations are in the drawing-room and collaborative spaces, stirring up ideas on how to get back to work and back to interfacing in public spaces that unite neighbors and strangers in curated and ephemeral sites. Our service region is dressed in borders, geopolitical including the US/Mexico border, seven Native Sovereign Nations/Arizona cities and towns, and not to mention the gradient-like border of the Chiricahua and Sonoran deserts.

As stewards of local, regional, and national funding, in the service of arts workers and cultural production, the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona strives to deliver an effective, equitable, and accessible suite of services and economic incentives that reach the broadest constituency of artists and organizations in rural towns, suburban hubs, main street, metro arts districts, and tribal nations.

The Arts Foundation team is committed to equity work, leading to experimentation, amassing significant results in our recent grantmaking. We are proud to share that through Project Creosote, a relief effort to support artists, collectives, and arts organizations that demonstrate a commitment to enriching the community through arts and culture, we received 75% BIPOC applicants and funded 75% BIPOC applications.

Part of the strategy called for building community trust by implementing Spanish language outreach and application options with direct multichannel access to the Arts Foundation team via phone, text, WhatsApp, and social media messaging. During the application period, 200+ phone and messaging consultations took place, including 12 call-in applications in English and two call-in applications in Spanish. Additionally, the applicant pool was geographically diverse, with first-time grantees residing in four border communities and five Native Sovereign Nations.

As we turn a corner in our DEI work, we are more clear-eyed in strategizing methods to nurture this moment guided by our dynamic creative workforce, which is becoming more representative of who we are as Southern Arizona.

Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona joined Grantmakers in the Arts in 2011.

You can also visit Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona’s photo gallery on GIA’s Photo Credits page.

Image: Ammi Robles
Project Creosote grantee, BBDanceur artists performing original choreography at the Bination Arts Residency, Shared Spaces program, a binational event that took place on both sides of the US/Mexico border fence in Douglas, AZ and Agua Prieta, SON in 2018.

An article in Chalkbeat discusses efforts that have “attempted to ban critical race theory, the academic framework that examines how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism.”

Read here.

Image: Wokandapix / Pixabay

The Communicative Arts Academy, “a vital hub for a community largely excluded from Los Angeles’s cultural institutions,” is at the center of this New York Times Style Magazine article.

Read here.

In his recent blog post, Backlash: A Sharp Right Turn by a Philanthropy Member Organization, Phil Buchanan, president of Center for Effective Philanthropy, calls out the current critique of pro-BIPOC philanthropy.

Mr. Buchanan’s critique of the current conservative culture war is an example of why Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) supports culture AND why we are pro-BIPOC. This “backlash” (I actually disagree with that specific term, but more on that later) is a culture war – one meant to obfuscate an economic war on low-income whites and BIPOC people by a small number of economic elites who have a loud platform and the resources to buy influence.

In GIA’s Racial Equity in Arts Funding Workshops, our partner from True North EDI shares Zaretta Hammond’s framing of culture as a group’s shared attitudes, values, social forms, customary beliefs, and material traits. The economic elites that are using anti-BIPOC cultural strategies do so knowing that culture – what we believe about ourselves and others and how we express this – matters to us more than statistics ever will. That’s why this small number of economic elites have invested so much money – through the corporate media, law schools, think tanks and public advocacy – into the culture of individualism and against the culture of interdependence.

In his blog post, Mr. Buchanan makes the point that being pro-BIPOC is not mutually exclusive with being pro-low-income white. I agree, PLUS the statistics support that being pro-BIPOC HELPS low-income whites. Why? Because when folks fear BIPOC people and efforts that benefit them, they vote against policies that benefit low-income white families as well.

In Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi tells the story of the management of Tredegar Iron Works’ decision in the late 1800s to place enslaved Blacks in skilled positions to cut labor costs and how white workers protested, arguing that slave labor would depress their wages. Management fired the white workers, replacing them all with slave labor. White men who did not own property were required by law to serve on slave patrols, forced to hunt, capture and return the slaves to the economic elites, who argued that it was only fitting since the slaves had “stolen their jobs.” This narrative continues to this day at our border.

In contemporary America, white people make up the largest share of those helped by such safety-net programs as Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – commonly called food stamps. And yet studies have shown that whites’ decreasing support for social safety-net programs correlates with increasing racial resentment. One study found that when white participants were told that whites continue to be the “largest single ethnic group in the United States,” they proposed cutting $28 million from federal welfare spending. Those told that whites’ population share is “substantially declining” proposed cutting nearly twice as much – $51 million. The study also found that whites were less likely to support social safety-net programs if they had been told that the achievement gap between white and BIPOC incomes is closing.

Studies have shown that in the first decades of affirmative action, the greatest growth in career and education has been experienced by white women, rather than by any racialized group. And yet, according to one study, nearly 70% of the self-identified white women surveyed – those most helped by affirmative action – either somewhat or strongly opposed affirmative action.

The strategy of convincing white people and women to oppose efforts that help them is a cultural narrative strategy executed by economic elites who oppose higher taxes, the expense of consumer and environmental protections and equality for women. The most recent chapter in this long-term strategy includes the opposition to pandemic relief and unemployment insurance masked as opposition to government support for critical race theory in schools. This small number of economic elites know that telling low-income whites that they’d rather not help them wouldn’t work. Instead, the elites insist that social supports help BIPOC people rather than them. They develop fictional versions of BIPOC people that are fabricated but emotionally resonant and scary. These figures include the “welfare queen,” the “super-predator,” and the “terrorist.”

How these narratives are shaped and deployed by financial elites has been well-documented in books such as White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson and Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class by Ian Haney López.

These acts are hateful and harmful, effectively deploying cultural strategies of metanarrative – the virtuous individual (such as the mythical white cowboy), the evil collective (bands of super-predators) – as well as stories (“A BIPOC person stole your job…Is driving up your taxes, etc.”). They do not bore you with statistics or even facts.

Culture matters and moves us more than any statistic could ever hope. This is why support for culture matters.

That is why GIA shares cultural funding strategies that reject the false binaries between supporting rural communities and supporting BIPOC communities. GIA rejects a cultural vision meant to inspire a cowering stinginess and instead embraces cultural support toward positive narrative change – one of celebration, intersectionality, and interdependence that recognizes that being pro-BIPOC is being pro-humanity.

Equity in the Center’s Race Equity Cycle Pulse Check is a free, online tool “to assess where organizations are on the Race Equity Cycle.”

A Race Equity Culture is one that is focused on proactively counteracting race inequities inside and outside of an organization. It requires an adaptive and transformational approach that impacts behaviors and mindsets as well as practices, programs, and processes. The work of building a Race Equity Culture in an organization is focused on transforming organizational culture, practice and process to narrow (and eventually eliminate) race-based disparities in measurable outcomes (composition, compensation, promotion, retention, staff engagement, staff performance, et al.).

To access the tool, click here.

Theatre Communications Group announced the launch of THRIVE!, a regranting program to provide unrestricted funds and professional development and technical assistance for U.S.- based Black Theaters, Indigenous Theaters, and all Theaters of Color (BITOC), according to the Blackfilm.com.

“With $1,635,000 in support from Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, TCG is working in partnership with an Advisory Circle of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) to craft a program that will include regranting, leadership development, convening, and widespread dissemination of learnings,” states Blackfilm.com.

Read here.

NDN Collective expects to open an Indigenous-led, culture-based school in Fall 2022. The school, set to serve 40 students in the first year, “will be the first Indigenous-led school designed specifically for students in the Rapid City community,” as the announcement explains.

Read more here.

The Opportunity Fund announced support totaling $1,112,500 in grants to arts and social and economic justice organizations, the largest cycle in its seventh year of grantmaking. “The increase in amount awarded is a result of the Board of Directors decision to release funds at a rate of 6% of its endowment annually, rather than the minimum requirement of 5%,” states the announcement.

Read more here.