Vision Led by Our Values
From the President’s Blog
Eddie Torres
Welcome — Grantmakers in the Arts is excited to launch our new GIA Reader, a community of learning for arts grantmakers, dedicated to creating a more just future in the field.
Our intention is to have a more interactive experience, keeping with our work to complement advocacy with action to realize our vision for the future. We have increased hands-on work with our partners, organizing grantmakers to support artists as workers, and allowing ourselves to be organized by working artists. This is a process GIA is committed to continuing and deepening.
GIA’s vision is led by our values. We believe the future is one in which our field becomes investors in culture – broadening who receives grants beyond nonprofit organizations to include artists, activists, and small business and solidarity economy communities. To make this vision a reality, GIA has engaged the national grantmaking field on the Solidarity Economy and how to support it. In 2021, we released our commissioned Solidarity Not Charity: Arts & Culture Grantmaking in the Solidarity Economy report to broad national attention and influence. GIA has since partnered on Art.Coop’s Study into Action and Move the Money, a series of funder discussions in which scholars, advocates, organizers, and artists make tangible the principles laid out in the report to more directly influence change in grantmakers’ practices. GIA is also working to broaden the means, and tools of support to include investments, not just grants. We partnered with Mission Investors Exchange and Upstart Co-Lab to present the first Mission Investing Institute: Arts and the Creative Economy. Now, GIA is partnering with Kenneth Rainin Foundation and the Surdna Foundation in an Impact Investing Learning Community. The group will meet regularly for continued education. It will serve as a space for peer dialogue on one another’s impact investing, and to collectively strategize future investing.
“We believe the future is one in which our field becomes investors in culture – broadening who receives grants beyond nonprofit organizations to include artists, activists, and small business and solidarity economy communities.”
Our vision for the future shows measurably increased resources for BIPOC communities. As we share in this blog post and podcast series, GIA is participating with a series of grantmakers in the Racial Equity Coding Project, along with Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. The project includes a new measurement framework that seeks to help grantmakers track their own progress in racially equitable grantmaking.
We also seek to engage with advocacy and public policy and practice. The Cultural Policy Action Lab is a leadership and professional development community of practice program for public sector workers who seek to advance racial equity through arts, culture, and public policy. It launched in Spring 2022 and continues through our annual conference in New York City this October.
These efforts are just the start. GIA will continue to collaborate with artists as workers and activists in order to organize grantmakers and other stakeholders to support their art and social change. GIA will deepen our partnerships, advocacy, and organizing, including our engagement with Puerto Rico. The most valuable resource required for these efforts is time.
For GIA to make this vision a reality, we need your support. We need your partnership, advocacy, and financial contribution. Thank you for helping make our vision for intersectional economic justice for artists and all workers a reality.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eddie Torres is President & CEO of Grantmakers in the Arts.
