Mile-High Musings on Arts, Culture, Creativity and Philanthropy

I have been silent on my blog for quite a while - a combination of the usual press of work and family obligations that can push writing to the back burner, and a sense of shock and impotence in the face of the political discourse of our times. I am sure I will be back soon, sharing thoughts on the arts and creative enterprise, philanthropy and cultural policy, but for now I share this excerpt from a recent post by Grant Oliphant of the Heinz Endowments: There are truths that need to be spoken now, spoken out loud and unapologetically by people who know them to be true. Spoken with love, yes, but also fierce conviction—truths about the validity of science, the perils of climate change, the nature and price of injustice, the insanity of racism and all the other isms creeping out from beneath their ill-concealed rocks, the importance of civil and human rights and why they matter for all of us, how worsening poverty hurts everyone, the opportunities before us to create and innovate o...

You would have to be living under a rock to not be thinking about equity these days, and all its related terms/concepts - structural racism, inclusiveness, privilege, etc. Just having the conversation can be a minefield, especially as someone who comes to the conversation from a position of privilege. Am I using the "right" language. Am I being aggressive/forceful enough in my approach? Am I being too aggressive? Will I offend someone by being too timid? Will I offend by being too threatening? If I verbally commit, then what will I actually do to make that verbiage actionable? Those charged with looking at the "big picture" of the cultural life of our communities - service organizations, funders, local arts agencies - have a special imperative to think deeply about these issues and take action, both to examine their own operations for bias and inequity, and to foster these values in the field. Over the past few years Grantmakers in the Arts went through an extr...

I recently spent several days in Israel engaged in an initiative to elevate the conversation around creative placemaking in the Negev region of Israel. For context, here is a map of the region: The Negev region is about a 60-90 minute drive south of Tel Aviv. It has historically had a somewhat negative reputation, as a place you would not want to live in unless you had to. Back in the 50's many Russian immigrants were settled there after World War II. Later, it became the home of the Ethiopian Jewish population when they emigrated to Israel, and it is also home to many Bedouins. Coincidentally, the New York Times recently ran a story on the Bedouin population in the Negev and its economic challenges. LtoR - me, Jane Golden, Mayor of Netivot Yechiel Zohar The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia has a "sister city" relationship with the Negev city of Netivot. About three years ago, the Federation helped support a Creative Economy conference in Netivot to r...

Note: This blog post was originally published in the July/August, 2015 issue of Nonprofit Colorado, a publication of the Colorado Nonprofit Association .  I think we all might agree that the most important relationship in the success of a nonprofit organization is that between staff leadership and board leadership: the president or executive director and the chair. Executive directors MUST prioritize this relationship, and realize that its success – or lack thereof, can effectively trump almost everything else they do. Can an ED on their own effectively recruit high-level board prospects? Can they make peer-to-peer asks of major donors? Can they align trustees to support the most effective strategic direction of the organization? Can they effectively motivate and inspire trustees to perform at the highest level as trustees, and to gently but firmly move them off the board when they are not contributing? I would answer to all these questions almost invariably, no – these functi...

In his blog ( CSR Now! , highly recommended) Tim McClimon, President of the American Express Foundation, recently devoted a couple of entries to re-capping an interview he did with Reynold Levy, whose book They Told Me Not to Take That Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center , recently came out. Tim worked at the AT&T Foundation during the time that Levy was president there, before assuming the presidency of Lincoln Center. Tim recaps some of the 25 leadership lessons that Levy lays out in his book. I thought it would be valuable, given the commitment of the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation to leadership (a focus we have in common with the American Express Foundation ), to share some of these by excerpting from Tim’s blog. If you want more visit Tim’s blog, or better yet, buy and read Levy’s book ! I think his advice resonates – perhaps because it mostly mirrors what I have learned in my career. (It's always gratifying, I suppose, to have ...

Recently the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation completed a comprehensive assessment of our programs and operations, and one of the key findings was that we had not adequately told the story - or stories - of our good work and the work of our grantees. The need for more robust and effective communications was made more acute by the relatively recent decision to focus our grantmaking on arts and culture, and nonprofit leadership. We began working with Launch Advertising - which had done similar work for the Denver Foundation - to assess our existing communications assets, strengths and weaknesses. This led to several months of deep work clarifying to whom we wanted to communicate with, to what end, with what messages, and how. We have developed a new web site , a refreshed logo, and will be rolling out an e-newsletter, and more aggressive use of social media. (Interestingly, after lots of experimentation, our new logo is exactly the same as the old logo - same typeface, but with a dif...

New York City has recently been engaged in a debate around cultural planning. The New York City Council is developing legislation that would mandate that a cultural plan be created and then updates every few years. Details are still in development, such as whether a plan might be required every ten years, twenty years, etc., and how much detail should be in the legislation in terms of mandating specific components be included in the plan. Because of the enormous scale of New York City and its cultural sector, this effort has provoked considerable conversation and even contention. Tom Finkelpearl, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, is working to ensure that this plan does not end up creating a complex and expensive "unfunded mandate," and also wants to avoid Council specifying in too much detail the structure or process the plan must use. And a local coalition of funders, led by New York Community Trust, has been working to support the conce...