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San Francisco, CA—Arts organizations are facing unprecedented challenges as they’ve suspended public programming to help our communities adapt to life-saving shelter-in-place orders. The Arts Loan Fund, managed by Northern California Grantmakers, has announced a COVID-19 Emergency Loan to support arts and culture nonprofits and fiscally sponsored organizations in the eleven Bay Area counties. Organizations can apply for these low-interest loans to cover basic expenses such as staff salaries, artist payments, rent, and other operating costs during this challenging time.
Although the missions, strategies, and goals of our foundations are different, we share the belief that the grant application process should be simpler, and it is our responsibility as funders to reduce the burdens we place on grantseekers wherever we can. That is what our newly launched Common Application for the Arts is all about.
We want to extend our deepest gratitude for Alan Kwok for serving as NCG’s and Philanthropy California’s Director of Climate and Disaster Resilience for the past four years. Alan will transition to the new role of Senior Advisor beginning February 2023. Underscoring NCG’s deepening commitment to advancing equity in climate and disaster resilience, we will be growing the team, bringing on a new Climate and Disaster Resilience Director to continue the work.
Navigating the threat of wildfire is an ongoing reality of life in Sonoma County. From 2017 to 2020, fires burned more than 300,000 acres across the county, resulting in devastating losses to ecosystems, homes, communities, and human lives.
The lunar new year of the tiger began on February 1, so it's still a new year which means we have an opportunity for a fresh start. Leaders and staff in organizations from different sectors use the phrase “racial equity” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and talk about it but sometimes there is a disconnect between talking and acting on what it means to operationalize racial equity.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I’ve arrived as NCG’s CEO on the shoulders of many others that came before me. Two of the strongest shoulders belong to my first professional mentor and a heavyweight in philanthropic circles, Joe Brooks. During my seventeen years as a work partner and friend at The San Francisco Foundation and then PolicyLink, I learned more from him than I could ever adequately describe. He had a habit of saying things that were increasingly profound the more you thought about them. One of those sayings was, “how much do you need to know to act?”, often dropped in a setting surrounded by other foundation colleagues where he was about to propose bold action to engage some of the Bay Area’s most vexing social challenges
Working in racial equity and social justice in the philanthropic sector is challenging because the “personal is political,” and there often feels like no break from our 9-5 roles. We don’t get to take off our skin or the grief we feel in our bodies from the years of oppression of racism that our people have endured.