MUSICAL CHAIRS Lots of movement these past couple of weeks! Shannon Daut, formerly Deputy Director of Western State Arts Federation in Denver, CO, will be the new leader of the Alaska State Council on the Arts. Vincent Stehle has been announced as the new director of Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media. Fidelma McGinn, Executive Director of Artist Trust, isRead More
On Stories vs. Data
(Cross-posted from the Fractured Atlas blog. This is the second in an occasional series on Fractured Atlas’s research approach and philosophy. The first can be found here.) Many of us, especially if we’ve been present at a Rocco Landesman speech in the past year or so, are probably familiar with the quote widely attributed to W.Read More
Around the horn: Japan edition
(OK, here’s the follow-up. Enjoy!) TALKS AND SPEECHES YOU MISSED Marc Vogl and Jeanne Sakamoto of the Hewlett and Irvine Foundations, respectively, hosted a Grantmakers in the Arts webinar on the subject of retaining emerging leaders in the arts field. Here is the full 40-minute presentation, and Marc and Jeanne have also put together aRead More
Why Arts Research is Hard (And Why We Should Do it Anyway)
(Crossposted from the Fractured Atlas blog. This is the first in a series of posts about Fractured Atlas’s research approach and philosophy.) I was a participant in a couple of conversations with fellow arts research nerds recently in which we discussed the notion of cause and effect. You remember that one from grade school, right? Well,Read More
Lessons I Learned in Business School (Or, My Humble Attempt to Save You $150k)
I really didn’t know what to expect when I came to business school in the fall of 2007. I had lived my whole post-college life in the nonprofit sector, and most of that time was spent hanging around musicians. I was brought up by two ex-hippies who, shall we say, did not exactly fit inRead More
Fictional Foundation Fun, part IV
This week, I’ve been writing about the Ortiz Foundation for the Arts, a mock $800 million foundation based in New York, for which I designed a strategic plan along with four of my business school colleagues. Yesterday, I wrote about two of OFA’s programs, Building Infrastructure and Supporting Start-Ups. In this final segment, we’ll exploreRead More
Revisiting GiveWell
I’ve been following the story of GiveWell pretty closely for about a year now, and continue to find the organization a seemingly inexhaustible source of entertainment and life lessons all wrapped up into one. In case you’re joining us late, GiveWell was started in 2007 by a couple of young hedge fund refugees who wereRead More
Yale SOM Philanthropy Conference Wrap-Up
The fourth annual Yale School of Management Philanthropy Conference, which I had the honor of co-chairing, took place on Friday, December 5. One hundred and fifteen students and professionals crowded into the upstairs ballroom of the New Haven Museum and Historical Society to hear speakers including Paul Brest, President of the William and Flora HewlettRead More
Thoughts on “Thoughts on Effective Philanthropy”: Lessons from my Summer Internship
As the twenty or so regular readers of this blog will note, I debuted Createquity last October with a rather brash six-episode litany of “Thoughts on Effective Philanthropy” in the realm of the arts. I say brash because, at the time, I had no experience running a philanthropic program; all I had were my outsiderRead More
Back in action
The last couple of weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind as I traveled back to the East Coast and almost immediately started my second year of business school. This time around, my diet of classes consists entirely of electives, so I’ve been able to tailor my course schedule more closely to my oft-idiosyncraticRead More