Earlier this spring, I had the pleasure of interviewing Elie Hassenfeld and Tim Telleen-Lawton from GiveWell. GiveWell is a charity rating agency that makes recommendations to donors based on the expected impact of their dollars, rather than more traditional metrics such as how much money is spent on administrative overhead or some squishy notion ofRead More
Around the horn: Madiba edition
Don’t forget about the Createquity Fellowship deadline coming up this Friday! ART AND THE GOVERNMENT The value of the creative sector to the U.S. economy? Half a trillion dollars. The value of the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s official inclusion of our sector in its GDP analysis? Priceless. Responses from the field have been mixed. Some areRead More
Uncomfortable Thoughts: Are We Missing the Point of Effective Altruism?
People who want to do the most amount of good possible with the resources available don’t tend to take the arts very seriously. What if they’re right?
No Strings Attached
A few years ago four grad students from Harvard and M.I.T. decided they wanted to use their brains and dollars to improve the lives of some of the poorest people in the world. They researched different strategies of philanthropy, looked at the data available, and based on the evidence they chose a novel approach. NoRead More
Around the Horn: Marian McPartland edition
Compiled by Talia Gibas, Daniel Reid, Lindsey Cosgrove, Jena Lee, and Ian David Moss ART AND THE GOVERNMENT Australia is relatively fresh off the adoption of a national cultural policy, and with that policy come calls for new ways to measure culture’s intrinsic value. Fractured Atlas has created a simple but useful infographic explaining what ObamaCare meansRead More
Cool jobs of the month
Performing Arts Program Fellow, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation A Hewlett Foundation Fellowship allows an individual to enrich his or her understanding of philanthropy and of specific subject matter by engaging in all phases of grantmaking in the Foundation’s areas of interest. Over a two-year term, Fellows are assigned to one of the Foundation’s fourRead More
Around the horn: fiscal cliff edition
A friendly reminder that the deadline for the Createquity Writing Fellowship is noon Eastern time on Tuesday, January 8. All it takes is a 250-word statement of interest to get started. Look forward to reading your submissions! ART AND THE GOVERNMENT Three perspectives on the fiscal cliff deal: from Nonprofit Quarterly; from Americans for the Arts; fromRead More
Around the horn: Highly Efffective edition
IN THE FIELD RIP Artnet Magazine; more here. I will always be grateful to Artnet’s Ben Davis for being just about the only arts journalist worth his salt during the whole Yosi Sergant debacle. Congratulations to GiveWell, which has announced a not-quite-merger with Good Ventures, an emerging foundation led by Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz (the latter is one of theRead More
Around the horn: It Gets Better edition
ART AND THE GOVERNMENT Weird, the very day that the Huffington Post published my “debate” with Carla Escoda about arts funding, the New York Times published a “Room for Debate” feature on a very similar topic. Something in the water? Anyway, Sean Bowie has a nice summary if you don’t have time to read all eight entries. TheRead More
Around the horn: St. Patty’s edition
ART AND THE GOVERNMENT Over at NewMusicBox, Mark N. Grant has a wonderful history of American Presidents’ and Founding Fathers’ fascination with music and the arts. Did you know that John Quincy Adams studied the flute and Ben Franklin invented a musical instrument? A bill to legalize crowdsourced investment in startup companies is inching closer to passage in Congress.Read More