Bridging Transitions with Relationship-Centered Leadership
A Conversation with Denise Brown, Leeway Foundation
In this episode, we sit down with Denise Brown, a visionary leader with a rich and varied career spanning organizing, institutional service, and leadership in the arts and philanthropy sectors. She offers insights into the complexities of shifting from a family foundation to a community-led structure, highlighting the importance of developing a new organizational culture and fostering a co-learning environment. As the Executive Director of Leeway Foundation for the past eighteen years, Denise reflects on her career, sharing the wisdom she has gained and her hopes for the legacy she leaves behind. Join us for this enlightening conversation with a trailblazing leader dedicated to fostering equity and inclusion in the arts and philanthropy.
Recorded on June 20, 2024
To listen to the full episode, click here.
Jaime Sharp: Hello everyone and welcome to a podcast by Grantmakers in the Arts, a national member association of private and public arts and culture funders. My name is Jaime Sharp and I'm the program manager here at GIA. I use she/they pronouns and I'm located on the unceded territories of the Three Fire peoples, also known as Chicago, Illinois. While this is an audio medium, I do want to take a moment and provide a visual description of myself. I am a light skinned black femme with shoulder-length, dark, curly, natural hair. Thank you so much for listening in today. In this episode, I sit down with Denise Brown, a visionary leader with a rich and varied career spanning organizing, institutional service and leadership in the arts and philanthropic sectors.
She offers insights into the complexities of shifting from a family foundation to a community-led structure, highlighting the importance of developing a new organizational culture and fostering a co-learning environment. As the executive director of the Leeway Foundation for the past 18 years, Denise reflects on her career, sharing the wisdom she has gained and her hopes for the legacy she leaves behind. Join us for this enlightening conversation with a trailblazing leader dedicated to fostering equity and inclusion in arts and philanthropy. All right, well, we'll go ahead and get started. I'm here today with Denise Brown. Denise, if you wouldn't mind just giving us a quick introduction before we dive into our conversation.
Denise Brown: Good afternoon everyone. My name is Denise Brown. I am currently the executive director of the Leeway Foundation in Philadelphia. Leeway supports women, trans and gender-nonconforming artists whose creative practices intersect with social justice issues. My pronouns are she/her and I am an African-American woman of a certain age, fairly light skinned with salt and pepper dreadlocks. I wear glasses and lots of bangles and jewelry.
Jaime Sharp: Wonderful. So Denise, you've had such a rich and varied career spanning organizing, institutional service and leadership in the field. Could you just share your journey and what motivated you from really moving from organizing to working within institutions like the Leeway Foundation and then also during your board service with Grantmakers in the Arts?
Denise Brown: I guess I should begin by saying that truly most of my organizing experience has been as a volunteer through a variety of different kinds of committee and board service for different organizations starting in my teams and then continuing on in a variety of different ways with organizations that were more specifically focused on, directly focused on issues that have an impact on the quality of our lives in terms of housing and access to resources. Then sort of moving more towards cultural organizing is how I would describe some of my work. Some of that work I think was within organizations. As an example, I worked for a number of years for an organization that did a year round film program series and then initiated an international film festival. The framing of that work was really around engaging with communities in a variety of different ways and having them participate in our curatorial process. So I think of that as one of my introductions into the world of cultural organizing.
I think that it's likely, I often say to people, it's likely I would not be working in philanthropy had I not entered through an organization that was part of something called the funding exchange. The funding exchange, which actually no longer exists, was started in the seventies and it was a group of funds around the country that were focused on supporting organizations that were doing issue-based organizing. At one point there were 16 of these funds and I worked for Bread and Roses Community Fund here in Philadelphia, which was founded as something called the People's Fund, where all of the money every year was raised to be able to give grants to organizations. I think that in many ways, Bread and Roses was sort of the first funder for a lot of things in terms of the kinds of organizing that was going on here in Philadelphia and elsewhere.
For example, they were one of the first funders for an organization like ACT UP or were really sort of early on providing resources to organizations that were doing youth organizing and also included art and culture as part of that. So some of what we do at Leeway in terms of the ways in which the grant making is framed really comes out of my experience as part of the funding exchange where it was really people who were part of the communities that were being served, who made the decisions through a body that was called the Community Funding Board. So the model has shifted a little bit in the last five to 10 years into something they call giving project models, but it's still, the people who are engaged are people from the communities here in Philadelphia who are most impacted by the organizing that's going on.
Jaime Sharp: I would love to hear a little bit more about in regards to Leeway, now knowing where that influence came from. But when you got to the foundation, of course it had a history of being specifically for women artists and then also it was structured as a family foundation, but you shifted it really to being this more community centric foundation structure and also being a trans inclusive organization. I would just love to hear some more insight of what that process looked like. I know as regular guest in our racial equity workshops, I've heard you speak on it there just about the whole culture that really needed to take, really took a lot of time to develop and required a lot of co-learning and then also if you wouldn't mind defining what trans inclusive means per our listeners as well.
Denise Brown: Yeah, there's a lot packed in there right now. So I'm trying to think of how to break it into parts. First of all, let me say that it wasn't just me. There were a lot of people who were responsible for the shifts at Leeway, beginning with the founder and her daughter Lee Alter and her daughter Sara Milly. Sara actually was a volunteer at Bread and Roses during my time there, and I think was inspired by some of the learning from Bread and Roses in her experiences being a member of this community funding board and got intrigued with the idea of what it would mean to support individual artists who were interested in community transformation, is the way that she described it. So sort of embarked on a multi-year process of investigating what that shift would be and did that by talking to different people and engaging in different spaces where there were folks who were working at these intersections.
For example, they spent time going to alternate routes and then worked with a group of consultants, some of whom are familiar to people at Grantmakers in the Arts, Kathie De Nobriga and Karen Atlas and others sort of built a consulting team that worked with Leeway and what was being called the program redesign process. So through that process of really looking at what it meant to support artists who were working at the intersections of change and culture in a variety of different ways, what would it mean for Leeway to make that shift, from going from supporting people who are working in fairly traditional disciplines to really opening themselves up? I often say it's the artists that define what disciplines are out there for us, we don't define it for them. It's looked like a lot of different things for us over the years. So really being willing to take risks I think is part of it. That was also part of the learning and working within the community to develop partnerships with organizations that were trusted and respected organizations in Philadelphia, I think was really another part of what supported Leeway's transition.
I'm trying to pick apart all the different things you sort of asked me about, within that context, but I think it was, also during this time when we were making this transition and really thinking about what should guidelines look like? So I was originally part of an advisory group that was invited to work with the leadership of Leeway as they were going through this transition. One of the things that we looked at and we're in conversation with artists in this community about was how do we create a set of guidelines and an application that really invites folks who don't see themselves as being, that don't define as artists really, who are actually out here doing that work, who feel like they can enter? So we did things like we don't accept resumes at Leeway.
We have something called an experience page where people are able to articulate personal, professional or educational experiences that they feel have informed their practice. Because the reality is, is that for most of them, the kinds of work they're doing, you're not going to learn in an MFA program in terms of the sort of deep people based, neighborhood based work that they're doing. We created a process so that we have various kinds of panels and most of them are comprised from people from this community who are making these grant decisions and it's multidisciplinary, so it's not as though only dancers are reviewing the dancers applications and so on. So the idea is that these panels are representative of people in your community and their decisions are based on their value of the work or the way that they're reacting to the work and engaging with the work.
That form, it's sort of the container remains the same. What happens within the container shifts from year to year. So the process becomes very iterative and we are constantly learning from the people who engage with it and have created a set of considerations that we offer as part of a panel orientation, excuse me, that are comprised of the big juicy questions that people get stuck on or engage around in panel. As I say, we never offer answers. We only offer the questions for how is this group going to deal with a certain set of issues. I think that's been a valuable part of our process. In terms of the decision to expand Leeway's criteria to move from a narrow definition of women. But Lee Alter has always said that anyone who identified as a woman was eligible to apply to Leeway, but it was never named explicitly.
There were two staff people who came on right after this transition who made the suggestion that since Leeway had started as a result of what was seen as offering more opportunity to women, as a result of them not having the same kind of access as their male counterparts in terms of funding and exhibition opportunities and so on, that they suggested that Leeway should consider the inclusion of trans and gender-nonconforming folks who are being kept on the outside of these realms of cultural production and of the ability to access resources for their practices.
Because Leeway was at the time a small family foundation, the ability to make those kinds of decisions, you really only required the founder to say yes to it, right? There was a board of directors, but the board was really, they were advisory. They didn't have any voting authority. It was something that was called a one member structure, and Lee was the member. So a proposal was put together and presented to Lee who approved it, and then the organization engaged in a series of trainings over a period of time around what was at the time called trans inclusion. Now we think of ourselves more of a trans affirming organization.
I also say to people that Leeway is not an exclusively trans organization. Our intention is to create a community of people who would identify in a variety of different ways and to affirm people have a variety of different gender identities. So we've tried to create an environment both in terms of the people who are making decisions, we try to make sure that there's a mix of identities on our panels and decision-making bodies. We created an office space that, for example, Leeway has its own bathrooms within its office to try to create an environment that is welcoming to everyone that comes under the umbrella of Leeway.
I think this has been something that we've been engaged with for almost 20 years now. So the kind of conversation that we were having in 2005 or 2006 is very different than the conversation that folks are having today around gender and gender identity. I could go back and look through my archive and come up with some of the outrageous comments that people would make or responses that people had. There was a fair amount of resistance to the idea of Leeway making these changes. But we have moved through it and developed a fairly strong community of folks certainly here in Philadelphia and elsewhere that are interested in investing resources and energy into supporting people who claim a variety of different identities.
I just had the privilege of being in conversation with two very dear colleagues of mine, Gabriel Foster, who's one of the founders of the Trans Justice Funding Project, which is sort of a national funder of trans organizations and V Chaudhry, who spent some time as Leeway, when they were in Philadelphia doing research around funding for trans communities and helped us put together a document called Transforming Inclusion that sort of speaks to Leeway's experience in becoming a trans-affirming organization. But also V was able to interview some of our colleagues in the Philadelphia area and spoke to their experiences as well. So we try to hold our experience up as a model for people to look to and have over the years shared our experience with a lot of different organizations and our materials with a variety of different organizations, foundations and otherwise. Yeah.
Jaime Sharp: Yeah. Awesome. We will be sure to also add links to the content that you're referring to on the linking page where this podcast will live so that folks can check that out. So now shifting a little bit, because you served on the board of Grantmakers in the Arts and you were really integral part of the racial equity strategy and bringing that to GIA, how do you see those efforts paralleling with the work that you did at Leeway in a similar transition? What comparisons do you have of just driving board accountability to support leadership and also institutional transitions?
Denise Brown: That's a big question. I think Leeway is a little bit different than Grantmakers in the Arts as a membership organization, Grantmakers in the Arts has a group of people who may or may not share core values or they share an interest certainly in supporting arts and cultural producers, organizations, individuals, otherwise. But in terms of the core values of the organization or the people within the organization, they may not be the same. Within a membership organization, I think people come for a variety of different reasons. Some folks may be feeling sort of isolated and are looking for like-minded people to be in conversation with and sort of strategize with in a variety of different ways and more practical reasons to be engaged and to stay on top of what's happening in the field by attending conferences and sessions and so on.
So it's not necessarily that we all came to it interested in pursuing this idea of racial equity versus Leeway, which is a smaller, more intimate organization, was going through a series of really large transitions within the organization in terms of not core mission. I think it's a refashioning of this desire to support female identified artists in this case. So that intention remains in terms of supporting the individual artists, but who those artists are is what shifted. As a part of that shift, there was also at the same time this process of moving from this one member structure to a community-based board of directors. So there was more of a sense of shared values, I think in that case. Even within that, there was a lot of work done regarding racial equity. Leeway embarked on a multi-year, anti-racism process with a set of consultants called dRworks.
We went through caucuses, white caucus, POC caucus, ongoing trainings and retreats to establish values, vision and mission going forward. So I think, so there was this baseline of agreement around these things as we move forward. I think there were more tensions within GIA in terms of how to frame it, what to do, how to do it, what kind of resources to put behind it. I think those were some very rich, juicy and complicated conversations to have. I think we were embarking and moving towards this diversity, equity, and inclusion moment that we still experience and to a greater or lesser degree now. This is of course before George Floyd that we initiated these conversations, but I give credit to the people who participated in these conversations.
Maurine Knighton was a big leader, and all of a sudden you start thinking about other names, and I'm having a blank moment here, but there were sort of a core group of people who were instrumental in moving this forward, who really pushed to make sure that we were earmarking resources to support this work. I come out of a way of thinking about budget. It's sort of like if it's not a line item in the budget, it doesn't really exist.
So there were all these kind of discussions around, is this a project? Is this a discrete project? Are we talking about this being something that's going to be embedded within the culture of this organization? I think we leaned into this idea of it being embedded within the culture of Grantmakers in the Arts. So really began to build the training and workshop series. That's gone through a few different iterations, but I think it's been really well received. I've had the privilege of being part of the early workshopping the workshop. Preliminary audiences and reacting and responding to that to what it's become now and who the people are in the room. I think also has shifted a little bit over the years. How many years has it been now that we've been doing these trainings? Has it been 10 years yet? I'm not sure.
Jaime Sharp: I actually would have to double check that as well, but I believe they officially kicked off in 2017.
Denise Brown: Okay.
Jaime Sharp: Yeah, so about seven years.
Denise Brown: Oh, okay. All right. But yeah, so I mean, I think, and there seems to be a hunger for it, so I really have appreciated the ways in which people are engaging with the work now. I also think part of what's interesting also is that even within organizations that may be majority people of color, there's still work to be done. We are not a monolith, and I think that needs to be acknowledged. So there are cultural nuance and other kinds of nuance that really inform our relationship to this work. So I think there's, even within an organization like Leeway, which is majority POC, there's still work that we can do.
Jaime Sharp: Yeah, a hundred percent. You mentioned a little bit earlier in that response that a lot of folks come to GIA maybe seeking community, and we also hear a lot that our members, they feel like they finally found their people here. I'm just wondering if you could speak to the importance of community care and just finding your people for support in the larger sector and how that's helped you shape your strategy and vision for the future, either at Leeway or GIA or just in general in the scope of your career.
Denise Brown: I mean, I think I certainly found a wonderful community of folks at Greatmakers in the Arts and this idea of finding your people, I am someone who talks to think, and so it's important for me to have thought partnership and to be in conversation with people about the work that we're doing. As I said before, I think of this as being a really iterative process. So there's ways in which those conversations can spark new ideas and new approaches to things. GIA has really been a place for me for those kinds of connections.
It's also been a place that people who weren't necessarily part of the membership of GIA, but were brought in as presenters or for a variety of different reasons to engage with the membership around things. I've developed a number of really long-term relationships with some of those folks as well, because for me it was really about narrowing it down and focusing in on folks who are interested in supporting work or working at these intersections that Leeway is interested in. So it's how do I build this, not just regional, but national community of folks who are engaging in these conversations. So that coming to GIA then introduced me to others who invited me into other spaces.
Animating Democracy, I think was, I was introduced to through Grantmakers in the Arts, there were individuals, the beloved Claudine Brown, who was at Nathan Cummings at the time that I started here at Leeway, may she rest in peace, was really instrumental in a really wonderful mentor to many of us who were interested in this idea of art and social change. Claudine would bring groups of us together, and she was someone who was very active within Grantmakers in the Arts. I can name a lot of other people, and I can remember my first conference in subsequent, my first conference was in Boston, and I went to the pre-conference, which was in Provincetown, and there were a group of people who were presenting about a project that was going on in Boston, that was very much the kind of work that Leeway was interested in supporting that.
Had organized around community gardens in a neighborhood that was being gentrified in Boston in primarily Asian communities, where they called themselves the Bitter Melon Council. They would develop these menus and different spaces that were based on bitter melon, which was being grown in most of these gardens in Boston. The two artists who co-founded what was called the Bitter Melon Council at the time, are people, well, one is now living in China. I haven't seen her in a number of years, but the other I still am in communication with. That was 16 years ago or something like that. So I was introduced to folks from alternate routes, NPN and other places, other funders who I've really learned a lot from over the years. I think it's been the best of those kinds of relationships or exchanges. So I would hope that they learn some things from Leeway as well. So it's been a very fertile ground for me, personally.
Jaime Sharp: Awesome. You touched on this a little bit, but when you think about mentorship and the role that it's played, people serving as a mentor to you in this work, what has that looked like? Conversely, I guess your role of being a mentor to the next generation and just in general as we think about intergenerational connections and the importance of ensuring sustainability during leadership transitions, seeing as Leeway is about to undertake a really significant one. Denise, correct me if I'm wrong, you've been there for the past 18 years, right?
Denise Brown: That's correct.
Jaime Sharp: Yeah, a big shift. So what has that all looked like, that role of you being a mentor, also just approaching leadership transitions, either if you want to talk about this transition in specific or just throughout? Yeah.
Denise Brown: In terms of this transition, when we're in relationship with anything, anyone, we sort of build up to the moment of transition. So it's certainly something that I've been considering and thinking about for a number of years. I think it was a conversation I was beginning to initiate with my board of directors before the pandemic and then the pandemic happened, and that sort of shifted my focus certainly in a way where I felt like I couldn't or didn't want to, let me put it that way, didn't want to transition in such an uncertain time. Let me see if I can hang on while things stabilize a little bit. I think that we began to reach that point, and I initiated the conversation again to move forward. But I am feeling a lot of things, and I think we do in transition.
I'm really curious and excited for the potential of what can come next. I'm fairly emotional about leaving this thing that had such an impact on me personally and my life, and really having the opportunity to acknowledge what I and a group of other people, board members from the staff members, current staff members have built. So I'm feeling good, really good about my time at Leeway, but ready to go at the same time. It's like that combination of things and excited for the potential of what the future can hold and really have made clear that my investment in this organization and success has made me willing to support this transition in whatever way I can and make myself available to whoever comes into a new leadership role here.
I think mentorship looks like a lot of different things, and it happens in a lot of different ways. I think of some of the staff at Leeway as being mentors to me in a variety of different ways. There's, as a result of certain age and access differences, there's always things that I'm learning. I always refer to myself as being slightly more analog. So there's always an opportunity for me to learn and engage around issues related to technology and various kinds of social media and so on. So I'm learning all the time. I think when I think about what I'll miss, I think that's one of the things I'll miss the most is being constantly surrounded by so much creative energy, both internal to the organization and externally in terms of the people who apply or engage with Leeway in a variety of different ways from applicants, grantees, panelists, to have been part of this very interesting conversation for 18 years with all these different voices. I don't know how I'll replicate that going forward, but it should be fun to try to figure it out.
Jaime Sharp: I just wanted to add, I find it so admirable and also so important that you started preparing for that transition ahead of time and just knowing when it felt, I guess was there a moment, rather, let me not speak for you, but was there a moment that it was like, okay, yeah, this makes sense for me. You said closing out and finishing things, but this makes sense for me to continue on and they're solid and where this is at. Does that makes sense? Did you just sense it was that time to?
Denise Brown: I think that I just sort of sense that it was that time.
Jaime Sharp: Or what-
Denise Brown: Kind of, you know what I mean? I think, I'm trying to think of what the signals are, how you know. I've been here 18 years, and in those 18 years, I believe it is true that I have read every application that's been submitted to this organization in the last 18 years. That's a lot of applications. Sometimes you get to a point where you don't want to be the person who starts talking about, yeah, I remember, it becomes less about what's in the future than what was in the past.
So I think during the time of the pandemic was a little challenging for me because I'm someone who is engaged by a future, a vision of the future, holding and moving towards a vision of the future. Initially in the pandemic, I would say to people, I can't see the future right now. The focus shifted because there was so much going on and so much need in our communities during the time of the pandemic that it became, that became the focus on the work, engaging and maintaining and supporting people who were struggling during that time. Then slowly but surely, you start shifting to this point where it's like, okay, I can kind of see it. Then I think what may happen, and I think this happened to me, is you get to a point where it's sort of like, I'm not sure I'm the person for that.
That I've had the honor and privilege of being in this organization for the last 18 years, and I really got to do my thing. I really, with the support of many others, got to achieve my vision of what this organization could be and play to my strengths in a particular way. I think going forward, I think that many of us are, organizationally are dealing with this, we're still kind of figuring out what it means to be a hybrid organization. I, my time at Leeway, the bulk of my time at Leeway was really about building relationship, being in community with people and being in the same room with each other, being in physical relationship with one another.
Now we've moved to a place where we're trying to figure out how to incorporate the learning we gained during the pandemic, about using a variety of different tools to still be in community, a form of community with each other. That doesn't necessarily replace what it means to be in physical community, to be in physical space with each other. Goodness knows, we've tried a lot of different things to replicate the experience of what it means to share space with people you share values with.
There are a lot of tools that we use in our online meetings and mural and this, there are these different ways that we try and there are gifted facilitators who could move us through that process, but I'm old school, I'm analog. I like being in rooms with people, and I think I'm at my best when I'm in a room with someone and I can respond to the cues and nuances that happen when you're across the table from someone as opposed to being on a screen. I think Leeway deserves somebody who really understands how to work that screen in a way that I don't, because we're never going to go back completely to what was, we're only going to move forward to building this new thing. I think Leeway deserves someone for whom that's their vernacular, that's their language, and they can work within that framework.
They can bring to that what I believe I was able to bring to the other. The same expertise, enthusiasm, all those things that we need to build on our ideas. So I'm just not the one, and that's okay. I'm okay with that because you also realize you get to a point where there are things you don't necessarily want to learn. You might be curious about it, but it's sort of like in someone else's work. That doesn't mean that there isn't work for me to do, but it'll just take a different shape. But I think it's a really exciting time and a wonderful opportunity for whoever comes next, and I will support that in whatever way I can.
Jaime Sharp: As you prepare for your transition out of Leeway, what have you gained from this experience that you hope stays with you, but then also what do you hope stays with the foundation as you leave?
Denise Brown: What stays with me, I've been working over the past few months with someone who used to be a staff person at Leeway who's helping me, we'll call it archives to be polite, but go through drawers and boxes and organize things and sort of prepare to turn over things to someone else who's coming in. As we were going through this process, she said to me that she wanted to plan for a couple of events where I would be in conversation with people to talk about my work at Leeway, because she said, I don't want this to just be about admin work for you. I don't want this just to be about throwing away paper and organizing computer files. You need to have the experience in community with people of what your time and your impact has been at Leeway. So I thought, yeah, okay, whatever. Sure
So the first conversation happened at the end of May, and it was with someone who's a dear friend, but also formerly an employee here at Leeway who has started something called the BlackStar Film Festival here in Philly. Her name is Maori Holmes. So Maori and I had a conversation with each other in front of 75 people, but it felt really intimate. Because there's such trust there, she could talk to me. It was just the two of us in the room, and it was really lovely, and I couldn't really tell who was in the room until afterwards, but certainly there were people who I know from my time in Leeway, but there were people who I knew from a job I had 25 years.
The room was just sort of full of this community of people who I've known in a variety of different ways. I will be forever grateful for that moment because I think sometimes we sort of get so caught up in the work. We don't have a moment to really appreciate the community that we've been part of and helped build. Then I had a conversation with Gabriel and V via Zoom, and that also was lovely. Again, so I'll take that away with me. I'll take that kindness and that energy and the love away with me, and also everything that I've learned here about myself and certainly about philanthropy. But I think the best of it is the ways in which we get to grow in these environments. I've grown an immense amount while I've been here, and I hope I maintain my curiosity.
I think that's what keeps us alive and in terms of what gets left behind, the thing that gets said at Leeway, and the thing that I believe very deeply is that relationships are everything, and that Leeway's impact, our engagement in a lot of different spaces, and our ability to do the work in the way that we do is based on the relationships that we've built over this last 18 to 20 years. So it's sort of like what is the first rule at Leeway? That is the first rule at Leeway is that relationships are everything. That's what I hope remains right, is that we devised a process that really requires that people expose themselves and are vulnerable. Like I said, we don't ask for a resume. We ask people to share with us up to 10 experiences that have really informed how they've built their practice over time. Those are often very intimate things that occur to us that are the source of our creative energy. So the relationships and trust that we've built with the community over time is the thing that I hope remains.
Jaime Sharp: Yeah, that's beautiful. I love that. Well, we're coming to the end of our time, but I just wanted to give some space, especially seeing as you've had a lot of these conversations about your legacy and impact at Leeway. Is there anything that you would like to add or any questions that you're like, no one's asked me this and I really want to share about X, Y, and Z? I just want to leave some space for you if there's anything else you'd like to bring to this conversation.
Denise Brown: I mean, I think what would I like to bring to the conversation? I think that we saw a lot of things open up as a result of the pandemic and the sort of social and economic impacts that it had. The death of George Floyd, the murder of George Floyd created these openings within philanthropy in terms of focus and process and risk tolerance. I think in the last year or two, we've seen that roll back. So I would encourage my colleagues in the field to really consider this question of risk adversity or risk tolerance. How do we create frameworks in a process and that invites as many people as possible to engage with it?
There was a period of time where people simplified their application process and rethought how people report about the grants right there. People opened up to doing recording interviews or really thinking creatively about the ways in which people could engage with their institutions, and I think people need to keep thinking as expansively as possible and not return to these more complicated and formal ways of being. It's sort of like, what is this idea of trust-based philanthropy? Trust, is it, do we want people to trust us or do we trust them or right? If it wasn't based on trust before, what was it based on? Maybe we need to think about that as well.
Jaime Sharp: Thank you for listening to the Grantmakers in the Arts podcast. If you have any feedback about today's episode or the podcast in general, please contact me at Jaime@giarts.org. That's Jaime, J-A-I-M-E at giarts.org. Or visit our website www.giarts.org. Be sure to out the other episodes of our podcast on reader.giarts.org and find us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram at Grantmakers in the Arts. Thank you again for listening.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Denise Brown - Denise (pronouns: she/her) is currently Co-Chair of Bread and Roses Community Fund. In addition, she serves on the advisory committee of Philadelphia Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts and the boards of Philadelphia’s newly formed Philadelphia Public Access Corporation, Delaware Valley Grantmakers, the Henrietta Wurts Memorial Fund, and Scribe Video Center, a Philadelphia-based media arts organization. She served as Associate Director of the Bread and Roses Community Fund from 1998 to 2005 and was a part of Leeway's program redesign process in 2001. In addition to consulting with the Foundation on a number of projects, she has served as a member of Leeway's Advisory Council and interim Board of Directors, officially joining the staff in July 2006. She previously served on the board of the Funding Exchange and the Women's Community Revitalization Project. A graduate of Brown University, Denise was a film programmer for the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, from its debut until 1998. She has also served as a panelist for the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Pennsylvania Humanities Council.
