Createquity was founded in 2007 by Ian David Moss when he was a first-year student at the Yale School of Management. As one of the first blogs to focus on issues in the arts at a system level, with a special emphasis on philanthropy, Createquity rapidly drew acclaim from readers around the web. In 2009, Moss established the Createquity Arts Policy Library as the culmination of an independent study on public policy and the arts that he designed and completed as part of his MBA degree. Later that year, he was invited to be the first-ever official blogger for the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference, greatly expanding both the size and the influence of Createquity’s audience.
Sensing an opportunity to provide a platform for other emerging writers and thinkers interested in arts policy and related issues, Moss initiated the Createquity Writing Fellowship (later shortened to just the Createquity Fellowship) in 2011. Fellows wrote a minimum of four articles for Createquity during their semester-long tenure, including an entry for the Arts Policy Library. Between 2011 and 2014, Createquity mentored 14 fellows and published articles by more than a dozen guest authors. In 2013, an alumna of the fellowship program, Talia Gibas, joined Daniel Reid to become the first members of an expanded editorial team guiding Createquity forward.
In 2014, Createquity relaunched with a clarified focus aimed at unlocking the power of research to answer the hard questions that matter. Leveraging the site’s longstanding history as a go-to source for smart commentary on the arts, the new Createquity is a virtual think tank and online publication researching the most important issues in the arts and what we, individually and collectively, can do about them. This new mission has come with a dramatic expansion of the editorial team and organizational infrastructure driving the project forward. The best ways to keep up with what we’re learning is to subscribe to our article feed and visit our continually updated Issue pages.
Cover image: plant life history by joseph.stuefer