Call to Action
Operationalizing Inclusion
Darryl Chappell, Darryl Chappell Foundation
This August, Grantmakers in the Arts asks that cultural grantmakers look inward and listen outward, to invest in Black artists and communities, commit to listen, learn, and implement anti-racist practices, more widely amplify voices for change, and connect our work with the racial justice organizing. Throughout the month, GIA will share questions and proposals from our members on how cultural grantmaking can interrupt institutional and structural racism while building a more just funding ecosystem that prioritizes Black communities, organizations, and artists.
For our 2023 series, we invited Black philanthropists and creatives to offer a reflection and a call to action, responding to the expanded question: How can cultural grantmaking develop sustainable anti-racist practices while building a more just funding ecosystem that prioritizes Black communities, organizations, and artists? How do we encompass intersectionality to address the complex identities within Blackness?
As the founder, CEO, and chairman of the Darryl Chappell Foundation (“Foundation”), I am responsible for leading a global public charity to empower Afrodescendant artists to achieve their highest potential. In my role as CEO, I work with over 100 artists in our global community, over ten partnership organizations, and several supporters (individual donors, organization funders, and municipal arts agencies). I travel extensively to hear directly from stakeholders. I’m always with notebook and pen in hand to capture the essential thoughts and words that are shared with me during my meet-and-greet, coffee talks, lunch meetings, breakfast talks, or during business meetings. I believe it’s crucial to cultivate personal relationships with artists. I recognize that without artists our Foundation would not exist. It’s my belief that grantmaking organizations really need to understand their recipients to get beyond symbolic representation and to start to incorporate antiracist principles and practices from the recipients’ lived experience.
By design, the Foundation is an artist-centric organization. We put artists first in designing our programs, in selecting mentors, in choosing seminars for artists, and by staying current with what’s next in the world of contemporary art.
By now one should feel a sense of the value that we place on collaborating and helping Afrodescendant artists. One of the Foundation’s core values is collaborating and helping others. Another term that could be used for this value of collaborating with others is “operationalizing inclusion”.
Including the voices, ideas, perspectives, and leadership input of Black leaders at times seems to be waning. During the darkest days of the summer 2020 after the murder of George Floyd there was a tsunami of outreach and talk of seats at the table, no strings attached funding, and many Black women being hired for big jobs in corporate America and in nonprofits. All that seems like a distant memory at present and getting dimmer.
“La Cita” (The Appointment), by Mildor Chevalier
Available for purchase
However, operationalizing inclusion, building inclusion and racial equity into the very policies and practices of grantmaking organizations along with incentives to do the right thing are imperative to achieving the goal of equity, inclusion, and anti-racist policies. Having a seat at the table looks like being included in preparing and establishing the agenda for topics to be discussed during board and committee meetings. Having input on funding priorities. Having a diverse and transparent funding process. The talk and action around trust-based philanthropy has an operationalizing inclusion tone and feel. Time, results, and feedback from recipients of funds from grantmakers that practice trust-based philanthropy will provide a verdict in the years to come on how effective this approach is perceived within the Black community.
By directly and actively including Afrodescendant artists in our program design and operational approaches, we continue to build trust, end up with a better program reflective of the needs of Afrodescendant artists, and gain more meaningful results by focusing on core needs of artists based on what we hear and see.
The Foundation also includes Black artists on our Strategic Advisory Committee. Artists on the strategic advisory committee have the opportunity during our annual board meetings to provide input on how the Foundation could better serve the needs of artists in the community. Strategic Advisors have been effective in calling out our own biases. For example, in our early days of existence, we would use the term “fine art” for just about everything. Unaware that the term potentially signaled our own biases that artistic practices only from Europe could be considered “fine art”. We listened, heard, and discontinued using the term for simply art or in some cases visual arts.
To weather the ebbs and flows of popular opinion, it’s important for grantmakers to build into their business routines gathering input from recipients as a standing practice. At the Foundation, we conduct surveys every 12-18 months to ask what is important and top of mind for artists in our community. We listen carefully to what is said, discuss it during committee meetings, act on it, and report back on what we have done to incorporate feedback from artists. We hold ourselves accountable through these operational protocols; and so do the artists in our community.
“Listening and including people in the process is just one function in a complex web to address long-term, entrenched, systemic racist policies and behaviors.”
Listening and including people in the process is just one function in a complex web to address long-term, entrenched, systemic racist policies and behaviors. By habit or worse intent, those in executive leadership roles may not include nor listen to voices from those who are different from them. Operationalizing inclusion, measuring it, and reporting out on it makes it more visible and harder to refute if results are less than expected.
When it comes to intersectionality of the various identities within the Black community incorporating and listening to the various diverse voices in the community is paramount. It’s important to seek to interconnect all manifestations of oppression within the Black community: colorism, gender bias, heterosexism and transphobia, class, colonialism, neo-colonialism, ageism, and other issues of oppression into our vision of transformation.
“When it comes to intersectionality of the various identities within the Black community incorporating and listening to the various diverse voices in the community is paramount.”
One area of intersectionality is colorism. Colorism is an open secret within the Black community. Artists tell us directly that they benefit from having a lighter complexion than their darker complexion colleagues. On gender, we hear from Black women artists that they feel double marginalization in the art world. Gay people struggle to have a sense of belonging in our communities. Being aware of the various needs of a diverse Black community and taking the appropriate action to address the needs of that segment starts with asking the right questions, being vulnerable and humble as we learn and focus on continuous improvement in our role of being a transformative grantmaking organization.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Darryl Chappell is the founder, CEO & Chairman, of the Darryl Chappell Foundation. The mission of the Foundation is to empower Afrodescendant artists to achieve their highest potential. The Foundation envisions a day where artists in community have a positive, mind-altering, impact on their local community through art. Coincidentally, the Foundation was founded on August 8, 2019.
