Tuesday closed out with a panel featuring the Montana Arts Council‘s experience with a Wallace Foundation-led initiative to cultivate new audiences for the arts. With folksy aplomb, Cinda Holt took us into the heart of the Montana frontier and described the initiative’s successes and failures with Wallace’s Ann Stone looking on. Stone began with anRead More

Tuesday afternoon featured a session on advocacy for arts organizations and foundations, organized by Janet Brown of Grantmakers in the Arts and Bob Lynch of Americans for the Arts. Lynch could not attend as scheduled, but sent Chief Counsel of Government and Public Affairs Nina Ozlu Tunceli in his stead. Brown and Tunceli were joinedRead More

(crossposted from the GIA Conference Blog) Following the conclusion of the Sewing Sails in a Perfect Storm panel, we headed to the ballroom for a lunchtime plenary session with Kakuna Kerina, former executive director of Harlem School of the Arts. Grantmakers in the Arts executive director Janet Brown opened the session with a brief annualRead More

(crossposted from the GIA Conference Blog) Moderated by Bill Cleveland of the Center for the Study of Art and Community, this session focused on two foundations that have made sweeping changes to their program strategy in the past year. The Boston Foundation, represented by Ann McQueen, recently announced a foundation-wide move toward a venture philanthropyRead More

(crossposted from the GIA Conference Blog) The third day of the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference opened with another set of breakfast roundtables. I attended “Not Asking Nonprofits to Do More with Less, Or the Uneasy Art of Communicating with Our Grantees During a Downturn,” facilitated by my former colleague Julie Fry of the WilliamRead More

(cross-posted at the GIA Conference Blog) The jam-packed days of the 2009 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference are now in full swing, and yesterday’s was especially full to the brim. Our morning started bright and early at 8:00 with a selection of “breakfast roundtables”: informal topical discussions over croissants, yogurts, and coffee. I attended theRead More

(Cross-posted at the GIA 2009 Conference Blog) The 2009 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference officially opened on Sunday night with a half-salmon-half-chicken dinner (something for everyone, I guess?), welcoming remarks, housekeeping notes, a performance, and a keynote by pollster and author John Zogby. The strange tensions of the times we live in were in fullRead More