Reports from GIA 2007 Conference

Grantmakers in the Arts, USA, June 2008

Grantmakers in the Arts Reader volume 19, number 1 contains reports on sessions from the Grantmakers in the Arts 2007 Conference. Reports include:

Funding Mid-Sized Organizations: How can funders apply what they know about changes in the external environment — in demographics, use of free time, use of disposable income — to best serve and stabilize theaters and other mid-sized arts groups?

Operating Support Grants: A continuation of the discussion on strategic operating support grants. Do these grants improve an organization’s accountability and stability? How do private and public grantmakers sustain the arts ecosystem without creating an over-dependence on any one funder? When providing strategic operating support for organizational change, where does the funder’s role end and the arts organization’s board of directors’ role begin and end?

Endowments and Arts Organizations: A discussion of “The Grasshopper or the Ant: A Review of Endowment Giving Policy Options,” a paper by Russell Willis Taylor that challenges assumptions, examines costs and benefits of raising and managing an endowment, and considers the capacity and expertise needed to do it well.

For-profit Experience and Foundation Leadership: Is a trend developing that favours drawing foundation leaders from the for-profit sector rather than from philanthropy or the nonprofit sector? If so, does it change senior grantmaking staff’s challenges and opportunities? Would a more corporate view of private philanthropy affect how foundations view the arts?

Evaluation. Good to Great: When assessing the results of the work of arts organizations, do we measure the right things? Can we measure whether the art itself is good?

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