The New Presidential Administration: Lessons for Us All
By now, we have all seen the new presidential administration’s announcement of pauses in federal grants and executive orders attacking racialized people, Trans people, women, people with disabilities, poor people, and the environment. Grantmakers in the Arts is monitoring the actions of our nation's federal executive branch and the field’s responses. Please find HERE GIA’s evolving document developed to capture emerging information. This is a living document to which you can add information.
We are writing to remind you not to get distracted, deflated or frozen. Continue to grant generous, flexible support for self-determination for impacted communities. You have been working for years for this moment. Every crisis can be an opportunity and this presidential administration’s earliest days have lessons for us.
This new presidential administration’s entre presents an essential lesson: Do what you think is most important regardless of the rules. Why? It communicates to your community that you care. We are seeing commentary that various executive orders are illegal, not administratively feasible, or will be challenged, possibly even struck down, in court. The perfection of these attempts was never the point. The point was to communicate to their supporters that they were willing to act even if their actions were imperfect.
This brings us to another lesson: Act imperfectly and forgive imperfection in light of positive intent. This administration’s supporters have forgiven the imperfection of their past attempts and will likely do so in the future in light of what they perceive as positive intent. Why? Their efforts signal their shared values and vision.
Values and vision matter more than strategy. When we got to Grantmakers in the Arts, the first thing we did with our board of directors was articulate a vision for the future of the field that was grounded in our values. How do you keep your responses to circumstance strategy? By rooting them in your vision, instilled in your values.
Without a grounding in our vision and values, we shift directions in response to every crisis. That’s what this administration is hoping we’ll do. We won’t. The nation’s arts grantmaking community has worked too hard for too long laying the groundwork for this moment to be distracted. We have seen fast action like this from our own grantmaking communities – during the early days of the pandemic and the Los Angeles wildfires, for instance. We can continue fast, flexible support.
For years we have come together to learn to support racial equity (you may register for our April workshop here) and financial health (you may register for our June workshop here) and to support individual artists. It has made a difference. Arts grantmakers have increasingly supported equity and financial health as our member surveys have shown. You may find an article reflecting on the impact that racially equitable grantmaking has had on organizations of color during the pandemic here.
GIA has worked on our federal advocacy for years; not just for the arts, but for workers across the board. We didn’t do this alone but also in collaboration with United Philanthropy Forum, among other partners.
GIA planned strategically, partnering with Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees (GCIR) in our programming and inviting their president to join the 2025 cohort of our board of directors. GCIR’s policy agenda is here and you may also find their advice for responding to this presidential administration here. We join GCIR in encouraging you to continue to grant generous, flexible support for self-determination for impacted communities.
As another element of our strategy, in 2025, GIA is piloting the GIA Public Sector & Cultural Policy Committee, knowing that much of the harm to our communities is coming from local and state governments. The committee will be an incubator for state and local funder organizing and cultural advocacy, cross-sector collaboration, and intersectional equity toward economic justice. This committee follows GIA’s first public policy track at our 2024 national conference and the Cultural Policy Learning Series & Action Lab, a leadership and professional development community of practice program for public sector workers. These are all steps toward realizing the recommendations in the GIA-commissioned report, Opportunities at the Intersections: Advancing Racial Equity via Arts and Culture in the Public Sector, written by Jen Cole and Rebecca Kinslow.
GIA will continue to share information on this presidential administration’s actions, what they mean for our field, and how we’re responding. I’d like to end with one final lesson we can learn from this presidential administration: Emotional presence matters. Some are energized by hatred of people different from them. Some are energized by learning and by love. We must focus on what energizes us. For us, that’s arts and culture and each other.
This is personal for me. My father was an investigator for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, fighting for diversity, inclusion, and justice in the workplace, while the administration of then-president Ronald Reagan was actively trying to hobble the work of the agency. My father believed in what he did and was constantly, bitterly seething with frustration.
I work in the arts because the arts are a source of renewal, transformation, and joy. We can share values and vision while having different strategies.
Thank you for being in my life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eddie Torres is president & CEO of Grantmakers in the Arts
