• The Los Angeles Times, via music critic Mark Swed, revives the Secretary of Culture talk, this time nominating Peter Sellars and Leon Botstein for the job. It’s an earnest appeal for an idea worthy of consideration, but if it was a political nonstarter four years ago, it’s hard to see how it has more legs now.
• Video game makers are finding themselves in the regulatory crosshairs after the Newtown shooting massacre, despite limited evidence that games played a role in motivating recent shootings. (Certainly a lesser role than…guns.)
• Margy Waller continues the charitable deduction discussion in a guest post over at New Beans.
• The NEA has relaunched the “Your Town” program as the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design, which invites proposals for community-led workshops to improve quality of life in rural areas with the help of creative placemaking experts.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Well, that didn’t take long: Richard Dare, who just left the Brooklyn Philharmonic to take the top job at the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, abruptly stepped down after a New York Times investigation into his past.
• Clayton Lord is leaving Theatre Bay Area, where he pioneered a number of research initiatives, to take the position of Vice President of Local Arts Advancement at Americans for the Arts. Lord replaces Mitch Menchaca, who left to become COO of Chorus America.

IN THE FIELD

• Joe Patti makes some astute observations about convergences between the arts and religion, including ways in which churches are getting into the placemaking game and the tidbit that newly minted pastors are more interested in starting their own flock than in joining established institutions. Fascinating stuff!

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Kickstarter juggernaut continues on, raising an astonishing $274 million for projects in 2012. Yancey Strickler’s prediction that the company would outpace the budget of the NEA proved more than prescient. The Economist has more.
• Artspace, the nonprofit artist housing developer, is the recipient of a new $2.7 million grant from the Ford Foundation. Createquity previously reported on a $3 million program-related investment Artspace received from Ford in 2011.
• “Household incomes in Manhattan are about as evenly distributed as they are in Bolivia or Sierra Leone” – the New York Times on what it means to be “middle class” on the country’s most expensive island.
• Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill wonder why we haven’t yet given up on GDP.
• Need lots of money for a wacky, wildly ambitious and possibly ill-advised art project? Britain’s Artangel might just be your ticket.

BIG IDEAS

• I think Diane Ragsdale has become the arts sector’s “questioner-in-chief.” She’s back after a monthlong hiatus with a doozy of a question.
• Michael Hickey ruminates on scale, efficiency, and what size grants would encourage the most art created per dollar. (But is it about the most, or the best?)
• A year in the life of Collective Impact.
• Phil Buchanan, writing at the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog: “I think this whole aversion to dependency may be yet another example of where analogies to the for-profit world have created confusion in our sector. We’re so enamored with market analogies that we can’t get our heads around the fact that certain work simply requires ongoing philanthropic support. Other than large-scale government support, there is no ‘exit’ event on the horizon for nonprofits, no analog to the IPOs that allow early private sector investors to cash in and get rich.”
• I wholeheartedly endorse this pledge on Andrew Taylor’s part not to discuss “generic topics” in 2013. Taylor identifies three in particular that provoke discussions with “lots of heat, but not much light”: business models, advocacy, and value.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A new research study from Germany appears to show a causal relationship between music training and “verbal memory” (and by extension, speech and language processing). The study seems well-designed although the sample is on the small side.
• The New York Public Library system appears to be more vital and in demand than ever despite budget  cuts over the past decade, according to a new report from the Center for an Urban Future.
• A woman named Amy Webb found her life partner online…data scientist style. She conducted a detailed study of popular women’s behavior on JDate by creating 10 fake male profiles and interacting with 96 women over the course of a month, taking notes all along. It’s all ever so slightly unethical, but it does make for some, ah, engaging reading.
• This is a great example of how a theory of change can illuminate assumptions needing testing. Do more entrepreneurs and more companies = more innovation?

ETC.

• In 2011, Createquity shared the story of Aaron Swartz, who had been indicted by federal authorities for “liberating” some 4.8 million academic journal articles from the online database JSTOR in an act of protest against restrictive copyright policies. In a sad coda, the 26-year-old Swartz, who suffered from depression, committed suicide this month in the face of a potential 35-year prison sentence (although the prosecutor in the case claims that she was only seeking six months). Among the other tributes making their way around the web, it turns out that GiveWell’s Holden Karnofsky (of course) had developed a personal friendship with the kid supergenius.

• Judilee Reed, formerly the executive director of Leveraging Investments in Creativity, joins the Surdna Foundation as director of its Thriving Cultures program. With Reed’s departure, LINC – which was designed from its inception in 2003 as a ten-year program – begins the process of counting down the clock. I suspect it’s no accident that the funder collaborative that makes up ArtPlace, which shares many of its participating foundations with LINC, is gearing up just as LINC is winding down.
• Helena Fruscio is the new Creative Economy Industry Director for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, replacing Jason Schupbach, who had become Design Director for the National Endowment for the Arts last year. Fruscio was formerly director of Berkshire Creative; you can read an interview with her here.

ON PHILANTHROPY

• Lucy Bernholz points us to a database of online giving marketplaces. And explains why asking philanthropists to fund core public services (like roads and bridges) is a very bad idea.
• This Q&A with ArtPlace director Carol Coletta represents the clearest explication of that initiative’s goals and strategies that I’ve yet seen. Kudos to Regina Mahone for asking some good questions.
• Hey, remember the $3 million program-related investment that Artspace got from the Ford Foundation? Well, that’s nothing compared to the $24 million in tax credits it just landed for its PS109 project with El Barrio in East Harlem, New York City. And how’s this for impact?
  

  While named above, one last shout out to ArtPlace, which provided the final philanthropic investment before our tax credit application was reviewed.  Without ArtPlace’s timely and significant support, our application would almost certainly have been denied.  As such, it is also fair to say that ArtPlace’s [$1 million] investment was essential to securing an additional $24 million investment in the arts.

• What? A private foundation actually asking its constituents what its program strategy should be?

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• In addition to Createquity’s Grantmakers in the Arts coverage, there’s also Mike Henry, Marete Wester, Pam Korza, Emily Peck, and the official conference bloggers, Barry Hessenius, Richard Kessler, and Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer. A number of videos from the conference are now online as well.
• Marete Wester reports from the National Arts Policy Roundtable in Aspen, CO.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Cleveland’s Community Partnership for Arts and Culture has released an economic impact study on the local music industry.
• The NEA has a new research report out on artist workforce statistics.
• Whoa! The Gates Foundation is funding the Pew Research Center to conduct a new three-year study on public libraries to the tune of $1.4 million. That’s some expensive research!
• I liked these lists of “intrinsic” benefits of arts education from Elliott Eisner, Lois Hetland, and Ellen Winner, via Americans for the Arts’s Kristen Engebretsen. One that I don’t see fully articulated on either list is the ability to question the assumptions and frames of conventional thinking. I became deeply aware of this during my experience in business school, where most of my classmates did not have a meaningful background or experience in the arts. While they could run rings around me creating discounted cash flow statements, I often sensed a discomfort around ambiguity and alternative frames.
• Great blog post from GiveWell demonstrating how labor-intensive evaluating impact (even without engaging in any primary data collection) truly is. The implication being, of course, that “rating agencies” that don’t put in this kind of time aren’t truly measuring impact.

IN THE FIELD

• Rosetta Thurman has a thoughtful series about four types of nonprofit leaders we need now. Meet the True Believer, the Ruthless Innovator, the Ambassador of Diversity, and the Courageous Advocate. Rosetta also has a sharp new blog theme to complement her sharp intellect.
• On the Art Works blog, Scott Provancher shares some of the background behind the new local crowdfunding platform, Power2Give, that his Arts & Science Council of Charlotte-Mecklenberg has developed.
• National Arts Strategies has been on fire lately. Fresh off the first meeting of its 100 CEOs, the capacity building organization released, in collaboration with the Getty Leadership Institute at Claremont Graduate University, this list of 21 must-reads for arts managers covering topics like leadership, strategy, and organizational culture. Any first-time executive director should definitely take these home. And even better, earlier this month NAS announced that its Business of Arts and Culture seminars will be name-your-price starting in 2012, with National Arts Strategies covering any shortfall in program costs.
• Speaking of all-but-free leadership training programs for arts professionals, the Rockwood Leadership Institute is looking for applicants for its Fellowship for Leaders in Arts and Culture. Hurry up – nominations close November 2!
• Michael Kaiser brings up a good point in discussions of culturally specific organizations:
  

  Individual donors are the bedrock of American arts funding, giving more than 60% of the money received by arts organizations. Yet the average African American, Latino, Asian American or Native American arts organization receives less than 10% of its funding from individual donors.

  To me, this is more evidence that structural inequities in our society are at the root of inequities in cultural budgets. During one of the sessions I attended at GIA, Eugene Rodriguez from Los Cenzontles spoke of how difficult it was to cultivate individual donors for his Latino cultural center serving San Pablo, CA. What with the vast disparities in wealth between white households and black and Latino households, culturally specific organizations have had to either make do with fewer resources or rely on the generosity of white people (or foundations controlled by white people) in order to get by. It’s hard to see how that changes without more wealth creation in communities of color.

• Can’t stop listening to/watching the treasure trove of jazz performance videos from the avant scene in New York City featured on Search & Restore’s new website. This is music that’s always deserved a wider audience but, for so long, has lacked the institutional support or grander vision to make it happen. Props to S&R’s Adam Schatz for taking things a step in the right direction.

Under United States law, a private foundation (i.e., one that relies primarily on an endowment rather than raising its own money from public sources) is required to distribute 5% of its assets each year to charitable causes in order to remain tax-exempt. While most meet this requirement through grantmaking, a growing number of foundations are experimenting with program-related investments as a way to meet the distribution requirement. A few make PRIs a centerpiece of their resource allocation strategy; for example, the F. B. Heron Foundation invests about 10% of its assets in PRIs and nearly half in what it calls “mission-related investments” (market-rate but with substantial social benefit), seeing the strategy as a way to dramatically increase its impact.

The Artspace PRI will primarily be used for pre-development activities (such as hiring architects) for up to a dozen artist housing projects and arts centers across the United States. A list of Artspace’s current developments is available here. Artspace will pay back the debt over ten years at an interest rate of 1%.

Is this the first example of a program-related investment in an arts organization? While it is not uncommon to see PRIs used to support small businesses in economically disadvantaged areas, low-income housing, and the like, I have not previously heard of the tool being applied directly to the arts. (Some predicted that the L3C legal form would be a boon to the arts in the form of providing foundations with a more formalized way of making program-related investments in hybrid businesses, but that promise has yet to materialize in any real way and faces practical roadblocks so long as the IRS fails to give preferential treatment to the L3C.)

[UPDATE: I’ve received several comments in the past couple of weeks indicating that, though PRIs to the arts are not common, this is by no means the first example. Please click through to read them if you’re interested.]