The video archive of the NEA’s Cultural Workforce Forum, a day-long presentation of research by primarily East-coast academics, and short on front-line practitioners, is now available in its entirety. – Tommer
Craft Emergency Relief Fund has published Studio Protector: An Artist’s Guide to Emergencies. The fun-to-use, indispensable wall guide and companion web site, www.studioprotector.org, is for artists who want to cover their A’s (their art, assets and archives, that is) in the event of an emergency.
Nationally known paper engineer Carol Barton and a team of artists designed the pop-up style disaster readiness kit for creative types of all stripes craft and studio artists, photographers and media artists. It features two spinning wheel charts that explain how artists can plan ahead for emergencies and reduce the impact of a fire, flood, hurricane or tornado.In addition,five pocket protectors or pullout guides provide detailed information about what to do in the minutes before a disaster strikes, how to clean up after a calamitous event and how to salvage fire and water damaged items.
CERF staff worked with experts in art conservation, arts business management, and emergency relief services to develop easy-to-follow instructions and guidelines about how to prevent losses due to fires, floods, tornadoes and other disasters.
The Studio Protector is available for $16, plus $4 shipping and handling from www.studioprotector.org. Proceeds from the sale of the Studio Protector support the production and distribution of artists emergency resources.
Through their private foundations, many notable individuals have made significant contributions to help underserved populations and provide support for medical research, green technology, and countless other causes they care about. This new directory, in downloadable PDF format, includes detailed descriptions of more than 1,600 foundations started by VIPs in the fields of business, entertainment, politics, and sports.
A major new survey of American artists and how they are weathering the economic downturn has found that slightly more than half experienced a drop in income from 2008 to 2009, a blow to an already struggling group, two thirds of whose members reported that they earned less than $40,000 last year.
Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts, and the Brain, the culmination of a summit sponsored by The Johns Hopkins University School of Education’s Neuro-Education Initiative, focuses on the convergence of neuroscientific research and teaching and learning, with an emphasis on the arts.
This free publication features a prolegomenon by the late Dana Chairman William Safire and full text of the keynote address given by Jerome Kagan, Ph.D., Harvard University, at the Hopkins summit. Highlights of the symposium are featured in an executive summary, edited transcripts of panel presentations, and a synthesis of roundtable discussions.
Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts, and the Brain is available free by written request on institutional letterhead.
On Friday, November 20, 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will present a live webcast on www.arts.gov of a forum about America’s artists and other cultural workers who are part of this country’s real economy. Academics, foundation professionals, and service organization representatives will come together to discuss improving the collection and reporting of statistics about arts and cultural workers, and to develop future research agendas and approaches.
A short post on the Artful Manager that addresses some big questions…
When a for-profit enterprise wants to build its capacity to do something (manufacture a product, launch a new service, provide a new option for their clients, or the like), they face a classic business question — should we rent the capacity, buy the capacity, or build the capacity?…..
The answer to a rent, buy, or build question is usually determined by the math (which pays the highest return on investment over an identified period) and by the strategy (will owning the process give us a strategic advantage, or will renting keep us quick on our feet). But smart businesses recognize and engage the choice whenever such decisions present themselves.
From the Executive Summary ( Link below)
“Priority 2. Competitive Preference Priority – Emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)”
Dept. of Education announcement
Executive Summary of Race to the Top guidelines for applicants
In the press:
Foundation giving will likely decline by more than 10 percent in 2009, closer to the higher end of the 8 to 13 percent range estimated by the Foundation Center earlier this year. According to September 2009 survey findings released today in Foundations’ Year-end Outlook for Giving and the Sector, foundation giving will also decline further in 2010, as previously predicted by the Center.
This exploration of best practices, by Lydia D. Bell, draws on the studied observations of nine leading arts and culture funders to ascertain opportunities for encouraging increased diversity, inclusion and equity in society through grant making in the creative fields. Grantmakers in the Arts and its former president Claire Peeps, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Durfee Foundation, greatly assisted the completion of this report, along with a number of other GIA members.
(Scroll down after the jump. The report is nearthe bottom of the menu.)
“We believe strongly that the arts aren’t somehow an ‘extra’ part of our national life, but instead we feel that the arts are at the heart of our national life. It is through our music, our literature, our art, drama and dance that we tell the story of our past and we express our hopes for the future. Our artists challenge our assumptions in ways that many cannot and do not. They expand our understandings, and push us to view our world in new and very unexpected ways…..
Full text of the President’s opening address here.
And text of his closing remarks here.
Memorandum to heads of executive departments and agencies here.
In the NYTimes….
President Obama told hundreds of tribal leaders at an Interior Department summit today that he knows what it means to feel ignored and forgotten, pledging to work with them on issues including energy development and climate change.
Delivering the opening remarks at a daylong White House Tribal Nations Conference, Obama told representatives from the 564 federally recognized tribes that the promise was more than just lip service. He vowed that his administration will develop a comprehensive outreach and response on tribal issues.
“You will not be forgotten as long as I’m in this White House,” Obama said to a standing ovation.
A new research advisory from the Foundation Center suggests that foundation giving will decline by more than 10 percent in 2009, a bit closer to the high end of the range estimated by the center earlier this year, and that it will fall further in 2010.
Based on a September follow-up survey of large U.S. foundations, the advisory, Foundations’ Year-End Outlook for Giving and the Sector (5 pages, PDF), found that about 70 percent of the nearly 600 respondents said they expect to distribute what they had budgeted for grants earlier this year, while 20 percent said they would give less than the budgeted amount and only 11 percent said they expected to give more. In addition, more than two-thirds of respondents said they had reduced their operating expenses since the beginning of the financial crisis, with just over half reporting that they had frozen or cut salaries and 20 percent saying they had eliminated open staff positions, laid off staff, and/or offered staff buyouts and early retirement packages.
Veteran Broadway theater producer Rocco Landesman, off to a rocky start in his new gig as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), demonstrated at a meeting of arts funders in Brooklyn two weeks ago that he had no plans to change his act. In the first major speech since assuming his post in mid-August (a keynote address at the annual conference of Grantmakers in the Arts), the chairman acknowledged the “reconstructive” work of his predecessors, Dana Gioia and Bill Ivey, in rebuilding the agency’s “credibility—good grant by good grant.”
He then said: “It’s time now to move the ball down the field.”
Several stars of stage, screen and fashion runways will join the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, a largely ceremonial, blue-ribbon group that advises President Obama on arts and cultural issues.
Yo-Yo Ma, who played at Obama’s inauguration, will join the panel, along with actor Edward Norton, “Sex and the City” star Sarah Jessica Parker, actress and Democratic Party activist Kerry Washington, “Last King of Scotland” and “Good Morning Vietnam” star Forest Whitaker, Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour and movie and TV regular Alfre Woodard.
The Arts & Civic Engagement Impact Initiative is informed and guided by a Working Group of arts practitioners, researchers, evaluators, and funders with keen interest in understanding the social and civic impact of arts-based civic engagement work. This briefing paper, prepared by Chris Dwyer of RMC Research, offered the Working Group a “springboard” for discussion at the outset of the initiative, guiding examination of the “lived” experiences of Working Group members. For the purposes of the Initiative, the paper helped establish common terminology; surface core questions and interests in areas of social impact evaluation and case making for arts-based civic engagement work; fine tune purpose and focus; and prioritize the research agenda.
Based on a literature review drawing from the social sciences, humanities, and public policy, this new report by by Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert of the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania suggest documentation and evaluation strategies that artists, cultural and community organizations, philanthropists, and public agencies could take to improve the quality of knowledge about the social impact of arts-based civic engagement work.
