 Welcome and thank you for joining us on the 2020 webinar, Emergency Preparedness and Response, COVID-19 and the Arts Ecosystem. I'm Sherilyn Sealy, Program Manager for Grantmakers in the Arts. The arts and culture sectors are seeing the negative impacts from strategies of social distancing and limiting travels in the midst of the coronavirus situation. However, we are curious about a few things. What should funders be thinking about related to how they should be supporting grantees? What's the long-term strategy for resiliency? On this webinar, we will hear from those who have already started to repurpose their grants, become fundraising campaigns, and those who have experienced with emergency responses for arts and culture communities when unexpected events occur like this one. We look forward to hearing from Daylana R.A. Dameron, Artist and Founder, Red Olive Creative Consulting and Black Art Futures Fund, Randy Engstrom, Director of the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, James Haferman, Deputy Director of CERF Plus, Tanya Gulliver-Garcia, Assistant Director of Major Initiatives for the Center of Disaster Philanthropy, Laura Aiden-Packer, Executive Director of the Howard Fouckelman Foundation, Mark Rozier, the Director of Grants at the New York Foundation for the Arts, Kaitlyn Strokhosh, President and CEO of the National Performance Network, Eddie Torres, President and CEO of Grantmakers in the Arts, San San Wong, Director of Arts and Creativity at the Bar Foundation, and Christine Yoon, the Senior Program Officer of Arts at the Wallace Foundation and the Co-Chair of the New York Chapter of the Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy. We're glad to have them joining us today. At the very end of the presentation, I will be joining to facilitate a Q&A. With that, I will turn it over to our presenters. Welcome all. Eddie, why don't you get us started? Yep, you're great. There's no audio. There's no audio. There's huge lag. Yeah. Thank you, Sherilyn. Can you hear me okay? Okay, good. So first off, I want to thank you, Sherilyn, for organizing this webinar so quickly, really outstanding as always. I want to thank our Vice President and Director of Programs, the incomparable Nadia Alokta, and I'd like to thank Steve Klein and Carmen Graciela Diaz for all the work they've put into this. I especially want to thank all of our presenters for participating on such short notice. I'd like to thank HowlRound for streaming, excuse me, streaming, and thank you, B.J. Matthew and all the rest of you. Now, obviously, the requirements of engaging in physical social distancing and of limiting travel are resulting in canceled or postponed performances and events, declines in ticket revenues, and artists losing income. Now, is trust-based philanthropy in action? Just get the money out the door with as little red tape as possible and not just to cut red tape for applicants, whether they're organizations or artists, but to make sure that we inspire our colleagues and peers to do likewise. Also, the issue of grants to artist-driven projects is essential, particularly as organizations and artists move their work online. Now, some of us are supporting organizations, supporting artists, and some are supporting artists through organizations. In terms of the sources of money, there's money coming out of, in some instances, other grant-making pools, so those other monies won't go out the door. But in some instances, this completely evens out. For instance, touring support right now should start becoming general offering support because people can't tour the way they once did. They can't travel the way they once did, and they can't gather the way they once did. Some private foundations will pull money out of their investment corpus. Again, we think this is bold, and this is a moment that requires bold action. When we panic, we close our minds. This is worth in just not thinking outside of the box and not thinking quickly. But sometimes we're seeing racialized communities being scapegoated and targeted. You know, we're really appreciative of the work that's coming out of the Asian American Pacific Islanders in philanthropy, and we're really excited that we have Christine Yoon from the Wallace Foundation here as a representative. They, for instance, inspired the Nellie May Education Foundation to create a fund called Rapid Response Racism is a Virus II that responds to xenophobia and bias against Asian American communities. What we're also seeing is the desire for collaboration. We've gotten the Grand Makers and the Arts' request to be connected to one another and to find out what others are doing for the sake of collaboration and adaptation. That's why we're all here together like this. Now, this is a crisis moment, and the effects of this are going to last. But the most essential thing is that we look at this moment as an opportunity to make sure that we build this field back more resilient than it was before. Now, we've exceeded capacity this year in response to requests for a capitalization workshop, and the ugly irony is we've had to cancel a bunch of these workshops because of COVID-19. Now, providing flexible funding is central to what we teach as responsive capitalization artists and organizations. General operating support that pays for overhead, that pays for salaries, is necessary. Funding for operating reserves is necessary. We have an article in the GIA reader that just came out a little while ago that explains that if we've recovered from the great recession, organizations have progressively moved their liquid resources into facilities and other fixed assets. Their endowments have expanded along with the financial markets. In other words, many have locked up their limited liquid capital leaving leaders to struggle to manage their organizations. Now, this is not cultural organization's fault, certainly not exclusively. Too many boards and donors continue to believe in this that scale equals success. And that fixed assets lend stability. The field is too seldom funding cultural organizations to save like every other kind of business. Without overhead and operating reserves, we see the kind of vulnerability that we're experiencing. This crisis has to force us to change to build the field and the future that we want. First, we must provide immediately help, and that's the focus of our discussion today. Welcome. I'm glad you're all here. Sholan. On the occasion, however, with predictions of unemployment levels and volatile financial markets, we don't know how this is going to affect donor giving in the mid to long term frame. For those of us who rely on individual donors, earned income and fundraising events, this will cause serious financial threats to organizations and the communities we serve. The last point in the long term, we need to make a commitment to readiness. And pandemics by no means are a threat to our society, but this is the first test of preparedness and modern history at this scale. And it's not an easy sell to the individual or to funders. However, we see more than ever that investing in it over the long term will help our artists, communities and arts organizations build the resiliency they need. Inevitably, there will be lessons learned from all this. The unprecedented nature of this particular emergency will require that we all in some ways rethink our models, our mode of communication, coordination, and most of all, collaboration, which will require a commitment to readiness and resources to do that. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. This is Sholan. I'm Ms. Barr Pound. We're based in Austin and that's program service in Massachusetts. We also have some Luglum International Initiative. We've been trying to move quickly in response to COVID-19, but even then it feels too slow. So first, I want to express my appreciation to all of you for the work you're doing in your community at this challenging time, and I encourage you to take care of yourselves. I want to share some actions and ideas that we've deployed, and I'm looking forward to hearing your ideas. Filling in lines of communication, early on, we initiated communications with our entities, sending out resource lists around emergency preparedness. We have invited people to be in contact with us, and we also hosted a series of webinars and a series of open conference talks. We're doing the key communication work that has been around crisis communications. These guys' minds are pretty simple and easy to use. They include to be brief and direct, to lead with the news, focus on facts, acknowledge what we don't know and what's unknown, and to be consistent with the cadence of your messages. Ultimately, you don't want people to wonder, will you be disappeared? Support grantee partners. We need to be compassionate, calm, kind, and patient with our entities and partners. We're finding that our organizations are trying to consume all the information they can. There's so much information out there, and we're finding that people are getting overwhelmed. Some are making financial planning tools. Some need a kind of passionate sounding board to make the hard decisions about what, when, to cut. And some need practices to get ready for that difficult board conversation. So the combination of increased flexibility around grants and reporting, coupled with customized expert advice, has been much appreciated. Smaller organizations, they may not have the cash reserve to keep their doors open. We're helping them assess their cash flow. And they stay open 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. We buy them enough time to get plans in place and for them to talk with their donors and their community. This is where mitigation funds might be targeted. Creating response and recovery funds with an equity lens. As far as we reviewed our 2020 budget and deferred new initiatives and grants in order to create a pool of funds for mitigation and recovery. As we're creating priorities for recovery, we're trying to appropriately size our response with an equity lens. Some of our considerations include smaller organizations that may not have the reserve to weather this period. Vulnerable communities that have lacked historic investment. Organizations that may be much loved with loss of social capital, but their communities don't have those deep financial pockets with sizable recovery capital. We're looking at places where there are fewer philanthropic resources that we can help inspect them. And because we're statewide, we acknowledge that we don't know all the communities deeply. We need to work with partners who are trusted by their communities and who know where interventions will be more successful. We need to be ready to apply this equity lens as we develop the medium and long term. Coordinating efforts. We've been working with the city of Boston to hire a coordinator to help the chief of arts and culture. The authority figure of local government is super critical right now. This coordinator serves as central point person for the community and frees up the chief to focus and coordinate with other city departments. Our advocacy organizations are getting those immediate impact numbers to legislators so that arts can be included in relief packages. We're also trying to understand what are the potential medium and long term impacts on the arts sector. Our service organizations are coming together to coordinate data analysis and case thinking. Lastly, how can we use this crisis moment as an opportunity to build a stronger arts sector? In addition to funding artists and organizations, we might see opportunities to build sector infrastructure like our advocacy organizations, networks, collaboration, muscle. So keeping our eye on the future is helping to guide all of our communities as well. On that note, I want to end and express my gratitude for GIA for pulling us together. And I hope that through this crisis, we grow stronger as a funding community. Thank you. Hello, my name is Margaret. I'm the director of grants at the New York Foundation for the arts. And I will speak based on experiences we had when we administered a fund after Hurricane Sandy, where we made about 463 grants totaling $1.3 million. The first thing is speed routes. The need is real and immediate. And any support stops the bleeding, but also gives people hope, which is very important. For Hurricane Sandy, we have four separate panels, so no one group became too overwhelmed, and we had at least one panel meet every single week. And in the first round, we had the panels meet every day that allowed us to make decisions quickly and get the money out fast. Keep it simple. People are fast, so making it easy to apply is better for them and better for you as grantmakers. Think about just the key questions you need to ask. For Sandy, we asked what was the loss? Case provided any documentation and then artists resonated. And I know some places usually offering smaller grants of, say, $500 are not even asking for documentation. Make the guidelines crystal clear. And if you have a bandwidth, set up a separate email for eligibility questions. People who don't normally apply for grants would hear about this. And also, people hear through a big find, and they may only, they may not be able to look at the guidelines. We just launched a grant with the Rauschenberg Foundation, which is not about COVID. It's about medical expenses, but because we have a line where people can email us with questions, I'm able to field all of that. We're, in fact, not getting a lot of ineligible applications that are coming in. We're able to let people know, excuse me, let people know via the email line. In addition to that, share opportunities. If you have specific disciplines, specific geographic regions for your grant, if you can let people know of other opportunities they can look at, it's enormously helpful. Again, on the email line that I have for the Rauschenberg grant, I've given people a link to all of the COVID application information that we know about, and people are incredibly grateful to get that. The people most in need may be the least experienced in asking. People are scared and desperate, and sometimes the applications become overly emotional because people think they really need to feed their case. Sometimes people are angry and resentful that they need to be asking for help, and that comes out. Some people try to be very professional and take a just-the-facts approach, and so they seem a bit detached or perfunctory, and sometimes people are just all over the place. They're venting. They include a lot of extraneous information that you don't really need. People who never think of asking money will do so now. So be prepared for a wide variety of applications, and the normal grant writing protocols break down and are frequently just tossed out the window. Because of that, you need to have a really clear decision-making criteria that is universally understood by panelists and evaluators. They need to be sympathetic, but also be able to navigate the wide variety of approaches and writing styles that are going to come in and be able to fairly and equitably delineate based on the criteria. There may also be times when only a certain portion of what people are asking for is fundable, and that's fine. People would rather get partial funding than no funding at all. Also think about finance and infrastructure. You may be processing a lot more clients than you are used to. Do you have the capacity to do that? Can you do wire transfers? Can you do direct deposits? Just consider all of that. Decline people with dignity and when possible, offer feedback. Since these are not typical artist grants, rejecting people feels like a fraught and complicated thing. Giving feedback about why they were declined can be incredibly helpful. It can mitigate certain anger that they may feel. It will let them know that there was a clear, specific process and a specific reason. And again, if you can refer them to other places, that's incredibly helpful. And finally, have short, medium, and long-term plans. What can you do immediately? How do things look for the grants you've already made in 2020 or may make in your next cycle? And what will the impact be on grants in 2021 and even in 2022? This is a real opportunity for us to plan and think about what the landscape may look like over the next several years. So that's all I have. Thank you for doing this GIA and I will now turn it over to the next person. This is Laura Aiden-Packer. I'm the executive director of the Howard Gilman Foundation, which is based in New York City and funds the performing arts in New York City. I know a lot of my peers fund this call, but I also am aware that a lot of my keys are on the call. So I send greetings from Mark and just to remind you that we are here for you if you want to give us a call or send us an email. So basically, I have here primarily what we've already done. And so we're hoping that a lot of our fellow peer funders will be doing the same. The first thing that we did was we realized right away that our grantees were all working from home now. And they had no way, a lot of them communicate with one another. So we offered all of our grantees free Zoom licenses for the foreseeable future so that they could have those video conferencing with their staff, board, artists throughout this time. And so far, more than half of our grantees have already taken us up on this offer. This was something that was really simple, not that expensive, and they were very, very grateful. So I recommend you look into doing that. Obviously, this is the time when everyone's nerves are totally frayed. So if you're able to assure your grantees as soon as possible about what their future funding looks like, you will be doing a great favor to them. We are letting all of our grantees know that they can anticipate receiving the same amount of general operating support from us in 2020 as they did in 2019. And that's sort of the least we can do for them. And notification of that has been able to give them a little bit of breathing room knowing that they can expect to get at least what we gave them last year. Like everyone else, we are letting our grantees know that anything that they put into their last application to us is off the board. And we realize that all the shows that they were planning on doing when they submitted their proposals, whatever they said they were going to be doing, they're not going to be doing. And we just want to let them know that they can use those grant dollars for whatever they need during this crisis, especially retaining their artists and staff as best they can. What we've done with our current grant application, we have grants that are due in a couple of weeks. We've reached out to all those grantees who normally apply in this cycle and told them that we have discarded the grant application. Basically, we are only asking our grantees one question, which is, how is the COVID-19 virus impacting your organization? That's the only thing we're going to ask them. We're not asking them any of those other questions. And when our staff have our, you know, probably via Zoom site visits with our grantees, that's all we're really going to be talking to them about. So we've tossed out all the other questions. We want them to be able to answer one question and they can submit this now on a rolling basis. We've just totally changed the way that we normally do it, change deadlines, change the application, all those things, the flexibility that our grantees need. Obviously, we primarily provide general operating support. Almost all of our grants are general operating support. And if for my foundation colleagues, if your foundation does not currently make general operating support grants, now is the time to start doing that. We are converting whatever program grants we do have, which are not very many, but we do have some. We are speaking with our grantees about converting those to general operating support grants as well. We already have very minimal reporting requirements, but we would urge everyone to really loosen or eliminate a lot of the onerous reporting requirements that we put our grantees through. We're just planning on talking to our grantees when we do our, you know, probably, again, video conference site visits. We're just going to talk to them about what's been going on and our staff will record the notes and that will be their report. That will be the only kind of reporting that they need to do. Our foundation does not fund individual artists and we are keenly and painfully aware of how this is just a tremendously awful time for individual artists. So we are looking for ways to get funds to them quickly through intermediaries and service organizations that we have worked with. For example, DanceNYC, an exemplar in the field, has already established a fund to provide immediate relief to dance workers and small dance companies. We have made a grant to them already and I know a couple other foundations have as well. They're trying to put together, you know, a nice pool of money there. So if you don't know about that, you can look into that with DanceNYC. And finally, I would say the most important thing is to convince your boards if you are the person who has that ability, if you're the executive director, you know, that this is not the time to reduce the foundations grant making budget. This is not the time to say, well, our endowments are falling apart and we're losing so much money. I've heard a couple of foundations saying that and that is just the wrong tactic. And I'm glad to say that when we spoke with our trustees last night, we made the case that our portfolio will come back. It's going to come back. It came back after 9-11. It came back after 2008-2009. You know, our portfolio will come back now. It's not the time to cut our grant making budget. And fortunately, you know, our board totally was 100% on board with that and recognized that the appeal to their, you know, that where we need to be making our investments now is with our grantees. And hopefully, boards around the country will realize that this is not the time to reduce grant making budgets. And in fact, should be a time to consider increasing your grant making budget. The last thing I'd say is we've gotten a lot of surveys. We know a lot of service organizations that are doing surveys, funders that are doing surveys. There are a million surveys. So I think everyone should sort of be sensitive to that and try and avoid duplication when at all possible. Our grantees are already totally overstressed. And I think the service organizations both nationally and regionally and certainly for us here in the city are doing a tremendous job of gathering information from artists and arts organizations. So hopefully, you know, we will be able to respond to the needs of our grantees during this unprecedented crisis. So thank you, Eddie, and all our friends over at GIA for putting this together. And thank you to all our colleagues in the funding community and in the nonprofit arts world that are on this call today. And we're thinking about everybody and we're trying to do everything we possibly can. Thank you. We'll turn it over now. Hi. Good afternoon, everybody. What a strange year this week has been. On Monday morning, I went to the station coffee shop. It's the coffee shop in my neighborhood that I've gotten to every morning. So the last eight years and Leona and Louise, who are the owners, were in a state. This is eight hours after the restaurant ban went into effect here in Seattle and there were handwritten signs about COVID-19. And there was a curell everywhere and all the chairs were on top of all the tables. It was chaos. They had obviously been crying and they were reckoning with losing everything. And when I looked to the left-hand side of the room, they had stockpiled a massive amount of food and it said, take what you need. That is the city and the spirit and the community that we're fighting for right now. And we are fighting for our life. Nine days ago, the writer, author, leader, thinker, shero, Ijeoma Oluo launched a GoFundMe page in Seattle. And it was the first beacon of light I saw in the last three weeks. And it was an artist using their platform not to help themselves but to help other people. And I really think that it is in the DNA of our community to imagine the way out of this. Also, nine days ago, I was asked to write a messaging framework for the mayor and the cabinet for how we were going to move through this. The speed at which this crisis has hit us is unprecedented. In addition to the fact that it's 9-11 meets the recession, meets the natural disaster, it's also happening at just an astonishing speed. A design that's framework, clarify, mitigate, redeploy, recover, reimagine as sort of a tent that we could organize our collective civic, public, community, philanthropic efforts towards. Seven days ago, I was asked to step in as the sort of lead of philanthropy and civic recovery for the city of Seattle. Five days ago, our office here at King Street Station became the relief and recovery headquarters for the Emergency Operations Center at the city. It's fascinating to manage a real-time disaster and practice social distancing because you can't use your emergency infrastructure in the way that it was designed. So we're doing it here and we're doing what artists do, which is figuring it out in real time. Clarify is just all about an aligned public sector message that responds to the gravity of the situation and it is clear, it is transparent, it is accountable. We are collecting and continuously updating information so that the city knows how to respond. We are building solutions in real time and we're keeping and maintaining a dashboard of what we're learning along the way. Information moves at a speed of trust and so giving information to the paper isn't enough. We have to give information in language to trusted community leaders and we have to trust each other. Mitigation is about how you get every dollar you can find out the door today. What are the short-term harm reduction strategies? And I could talk a little bit about that from both the city-wide level where we are pushing $5 million out the door in food vouchers, $2.5 million out the door for small business mitigation, and $1.5 million for our cultural and non-profit community. And in the office, the way we're trying to do that short-term is we gave $50,000 to Yoma's Artist Relief Fund. We have another $50,000 to the Artist Trust, the statewide individual artist funder, to a previous presenter's point about finding the intermediaries that can do it quickly. We can fund individual artists but we are dividing and conquering. We repurposed our million-dollar cultural facilities fund and just went ahead and increased our general operating fund by 50%. No application, we're just amending everyone's contract and increasing the amount. They're going to get an email with how much that money is, how much that amount is, and then they can invite us for the check. We are working with all of our local credit unions to secure zero-interest loans for individuals, contractors, and small businesses. We hope that that's the way that we can really leverage private support. We also convinced the city – well, we are the city – we convinced ourselves to forgive rent for everyone that rents space from us for two months. We signed a residential eviction ban, a commercial eviction ban for the next two months. So how can we keep people sheltered? Mitigation is really about immediate hierarchy of needs, which is food, shelter, now childcare, housing, and interestingly, culture. Because in this moment of social distancing, the impact of isolation is really profound and we don't know how long we're going to be in this. Redeployment is an interesting space that the arts community has been very helpful in because it's about the rapid restilling and the rapid redistribution of people and goods in almost an improvisational way. Can we put 1,000 laid-off restaurant workers to work delivering meals to vulnerable seniors who are unable to go to congregate meals? Can we put our special events production community, who are no longer allowed to produce special events, to work building mobile testing sites throughout the county when we have tests? Let's talk about that one offline. There's a lot of creativity and everybody wants to help and setting up a framework by which we can triage that and essentially do matchmaking has been an important part of our strategy. We're halfway between mitigation and redeployment right now. I will say I'm incredibly proud to live in a city that has a life science community that figured this out on their own, political leadership that responded with appropriate focus, and a community that chose to lean in and help neighbors. It's very inspiring to me. The big one is recover and reimagine. Recover means that we have to think about the restoration of this city at a scale that's never happened. We are going to have to remake our local economy, potentially our education system, our local government, and everything is going to be different. We have a federal stimulus package that is assuming that we can somehow return to normal, but normal is gone. There is a new normal, and we get to build and create that. In 1971, the city of Seattle suffered the worst recession in its history, Boeing, the biggest employer in our city, laid off 65,000 employees, 65% of its workforce. There was a billboard next to Boeing Field that said, will the last person out of Seattle please turn out the lights. And it was in that context in 1971 that the mayor chartered the Seattle Arts Commission, our local arts agency, our office. And when they asked the mayor why he would do that in a recession, he said because we have to give people hope. And I think the thing our community is here to do right now in this moment, in this crisis, is to give the world hope. We need a strong civic narrative that's centered in our values. We have to respect the fact that we had an economy that didn't work for everyone before, so as we build a new one, we have to build it through a lens of racial equity, shared values, possibility, and creativity. When I think about advice to funders, think about mitigation of your program dollars and recovery and reimagination as your endowment dollars. Don't be precious about territory. Don't be precious about credit. It's all hands on deck all the time, and all of us have a role to play in this. And the last thing is just that distance doesn't equal isolation. They don't have to be the same thing. We need to find new ways to bring heart and creativity and passion and love and support for our neighbors in this time. We can't lose our humanity as we are forced to sort of create physical distance with one another. I am so confident that the creative community and the cultural community is going to lead us out of the woods. And I believe that because that's been the experience I've had for my 43 years on this planet. And I believe it because somehow I wound up in this role for civic reconstruction of our city. But mostly I just want to say before I jump off that I hope everyone is staying safe. I hope you are articulating the love that you do. And we got each other. We are in this together and I'm confident that we can do it. Thank you very much. My name is Delana R.A. Dameron. I am a founder of Relative Creative Consulting and Black Art Futures Fund. And I'm super excited about the ways that my colleagues here have articulated what they've already done and are interested in doing. And I'm honored to be in a position to speak towards the chorus of deep thinking and movement making. I'm going to speed through my bullet points which are sketches and diagrams that if you can't see it on your screen. I apologize. I'll describe it a little bit. But hopefully you'll have a chance to see these later. I hope you enjoyed the art that I brought to the conversation today. I'm a South Carolina based fundraiser consultant for small arts nonprofits across the country. I'm not distributing funds for Black Art Futures Fund which is a volunteer collective project. Or serving as my role as board chair for recess, a social justice based art organization in Brooklyn. In this work over the last month as a fundraiser consultant and even still this year I've been chasing grant deadlines with my clients. Trying to push folks to understand as best as they can to take care of themselves first. What I mean by this is that folks right now are putting emotional, mental and financial resources into grant writing. I understand in some respects the intention could be well-meaning, right, like advocating for folks for future money. However, even the emotional and psychological space our groups have to occupy to even answer any future leading questions should be considered at this moment. And as the crisis heightened, this work highlighted for me as an arts funder with Black Art Futures Fund, how futile applying for grants right now for 21 and 22 fields, right? How could groups be able to focus on its most valuable asset, its people? A question I was thinking of is how can we think so far ahead when the government does not even know what's in store for any of us? And how can we alleviate this tension? I took these questions to the board of Black Art Futures Fund and our applications were already in the middle of our funding cycle, which was two phases. And even if we believed it was an easy application said we had to stop this process, we needed to redirect, we needed to create an emergency grant fund and empty out the bucket that we had. What would have been a May, June funding announcement date turned into moving upwards of 35,000 in the next two weeks, which is our full fund right now. And we sent it out on Tuesday night of this week. And as of this webinar, we've already received $24,000 in funding requests, all from orgs with a budget of less than $300,000 all across the country. This moment allowed for us to practice Occam's razor theory, right? The simplest answer to a complicated moment or question is probably the right one. Occam's razor for us on this call could be thinking about what we might be able to do in the source slide says move as many resources as we can quickly, right? We at Black Art Futures Fund are in an active discussions with some foundations and welcome conversations with us to act as intermediaries to be able to get necessary philanthropic funds to the small arts community. The little triangle and the next thing is my version of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's needed for me to be able to exercise my Occam's razor right for most questions. When I think about philanthropy and its work, I think before we ask what's next, maybe we can ask organizations what do you need now? And maybe that's the only question. It's probably money to secure health, food, shelter and security, right at the bottom of the pyramid for its people. Once that's done, organizations can continue up the pyramid and can often provide all of the other components, right, community, even if it's virtually belonging and still spaces for creativity, even as we are in a crisis flexion point. The grant that I spoke about that's due Friday from my client has asked us yesterday to articulate a plan of action for summer or fall. This funder started this conversation with a caveat even that there is no guarantee for future funding and still asking the group to use its limited resources on a timeline that no one can speak to right now. This funder has supported this organization for several years in the past. And I just can't understand an equation that continues to ask organizations to occupy the top of the pyramid of self-factualization and realization without ensuring, especially now in this crisis, that the people who will do the things and administer the grant run the organization have what they need. And that's near to the bottom. One of the images in the next image is the image of the bell curve defines this COVID moment for us and ask us to do very uncomfortable things, right? How do we flatten the curve of the epidemic? How do we flatten the curve of this impending crisis, right, this art and culture impending crisis? And I think to flatten that curve or we have to shoulder in place, right, social distance. And in the work of philanthropy, one of the things that we can do is that influx the field with generous operating support from funders. It's also super important that we communicate quickly, even if the executable plan is not perfect. Our weight increases our organization's anxiety. I'm up to believe that this is not the time for us at Block Art Futures Fund, right, to let the perfect be the enemy of just sending an email with updates and opportunities to move resources and money as soon as possible. My cursive writing rates ask us to consider converting all programs related support immediately to generous operating support. And I refer back to my Maslow's cultural philanthropic hierarchy of needs. There are simply no programs, no art, now I'm thinking of the art holding us up right now in this moment, even virtually without the bottom of the pyramid secure. We have asked the field to exist in the 10 to 20% of administrative margins for way too long. And what if our radical response was to do this differently, provide generous operating support now and maybe continue that into our new reality. And finally, if not us in the philanthropic space, who? Truly the other revenue streams, right, individuals for the most part, earned income, et cetera, just can't intervene right now. Again, I think about all of the art, how art will help us get through this and art will document and art will help us make sense of all of this later maybe. When we study ancient civilizations, I think about how we look at their art and their culture, and we have the resources to make sure groups are with us on the other side of this. We have to want to save it, though, take risks and then reflect. Right now, I am fully stepping in and I urge my colleagues to understand that we are the emergency response team for the field. I'm thinking of how medical response teams are moving on autopilot outcomes razor showing up again and trying to ensure that the highest population of individuals make it through this crisis rate. So this requires doctors and nurses to act first, understanding my instinct and reflexes are pushing them into that action, not necessarily the reason. Reason asks us to pause and to hesitate. Think about how we can flatten the curve of this particular crisis in the field. And I hope that we can act swiftly and together. And I'll stop there. Thank you so much for your time. Hi, y'all. This is Caitlin Sturkosh from the National Performance Network. The National Performance Network, otherwise known as NPN, is a hybrid grant maker association and movement builder focused on advancing racial and cultural justice in the nonprofit performing arts field. Our work supports artists directly in partnership with the organizations in our network. And supports artists, particularly in the creation and boring of new original work. We also work to build a capacity, particularly for organizations of color and advocate for more artists and send artists and community centered practices in our field overall. While we are a national funder, providing resources in almost every state in the country, we are based in New Orleans in a community that is no stranger to crisis. I just have a few bullet points and I'll try to move quickly, especially because some of my colleagues have already said so many of these things better than I'm sure I will. In thinking about our short term actions right now and setting priorities, one of the questions I think has helped us in guiding our response is, what is our organization poised to do particularly well? I think in a time like this, we all want to do everything for everyone. And it's been important for us to take a moment to pause and remember what it is each of us does really well. So for us, there are three, three particularly salient points. One is offering stability and certainty. NPN has long term relationships with organizations and artists who count on it for annual support. Those relationships are at the core of everything we do. So ensuring that some of our funding deadlines and some of our funding mechanisms are moving forward is particularly important for us to communicate right now as well. So for example, the commissioning fund deadline that we had already scheduled for May is moving forward so that organizations and artists who do have plans underway for next year can feel like not everything is up in the air. Obviously with the caveat as well that we will be adapting and be flexible to what those programs actually look like. Another way we're thinking about the stability that we can offer is making sure that artists get paid for projects we were expecting to fund even if those projects are canceled or postponed. One of the other things I think we do particularly well are requests to do is to leverage our intermediary relationships. So NPN was founded to foster reciprocity and arts and community centered practices and performing arts presenting. So we're used to serving as an intermediary in the relationships between artists and arts organizations, whether that means assisting with contract negotiations, setting equitable fee structures, offering expectations around community engagement guidelines, things like that. So most of the grants that we provide to organizations are specifically allocated for artist fees. So the fact that we are encouraging the organizations to continue to pay those artists regardless of whether those projects are canceled or postponed right now is the position that we're used to being in. And I think recognizing when we as funders can leverage that relationship is really important. We're also encouraging those organizations to find other ways to get money into the hands of artists right now. For example, can you reimburse now for travel expenses that artists have already incurred for performances that may not happen so that artists aren't carrying that debt even for things that are going to be rescheduled. Also, as many folks have already mentioned, cutting down on bureaucracy, NPN is relatively small and nimble, and we're doing what we can along with so many of you others to mobilize resources quickly. So it's a good time to ask what processes really matter, what processes really matter now and also what processes really matter after a crisis. Do we really need to be as bureaucratic as we are sometimes. So for example, we awarded 40 plus new grants last month before this crisis, and we're accelerating the contract process for those grants so we can get money out the doors quickly as possible for those funds. In the longer term, I'm thinking about how we do not just go back to normal. If you had me on video, you would see normal in air clothes enthusiastically. NPN works towards system change in arts and philanthropy, and I think these kinds of moments are when systems of inequity can either become even more entrenched or they can be disrupted for positive change. So one notion that really underscores all of our work is to center racial and cultural justice, not just in a crisis, but everyday inequities are amplified in a crisis, even when they sometimes become less visible because it seems like everybody is struggling. So whether racial justice is the core of our everyday work or not, I think we can start from where we stand right now in this moment. Lots of folks have talked about trust based philanthropy and it's a notion I think we as funders are more comfortable with in a crisis, but how can we make trust based practices part of our work all the time and trust the lived experiences of individuals and communities who experience oppression and trauma daily. The second long term notion we're thinking about is how do we support artistic programming and capacity all the time. This moment is a perfect example of why GenOp support is so important, and as NPN support is primarily for artistic programming, we're really thinking through how we can change some of our funding structures that support the overall resiliency of our constituents all the time. And the last thing that we've been talking a bit about here at NPN is in particular how do we challenge the performing arts presenting model overall. What does it mean that our work focuses on a model of travel and in person performances, not only in the face of a pandemic, but also what does this mean in forces like climate change, nationalistic and racist travel bands, detention and deportation and limited accessibility for people with disabilities or for remote, rural and tribal communities. How do we deeply invest in real engagement and exchange that is not just about face to face, not only all the really amazing virtual stuff that's happening right now in a crisis, but all the time. Artists shouldn't be limited to only sharing their work on a stage, nor should any communities access to the live arts and artists be limited by access to a performance in person. I'm really grateful to GIA and for all of our colleagues here for the leadership in this moment. And we'll turn this over to Christine. Hi, everyone. I really want to thank GIA and any for convening this group and express gratitude to all the speakers. I've been taking furious notes. I'm Christine you and senior program officer for the arts at Wallace. I'm also co-chair of the New York City chapter of Asian American specific Islanders and philanthropy. And I'm going to pick up on the quote that Caitlyn just said, inequities are amplified and a crisis. I'm here to talk about three things. First is the scapegoating of AAPI and Chinese people of Chinese heritage in particular. While the origin of COVID-19 has been traced to China, let's be clear, the virus is not race based. But like every other time before this, fear fueled by xenophobia and racism is surfacing and spreading more quickly than a virus itself. Just like after 9-11 you saw anti-muslim violence spikes, Asian Americans went from being a model minority back to being the yellow peril. All of this is rooted in anti-blackness and none of this is helpful or excusable in any light. And a couple quick anecdotes, our own president and some elected officials refer to the coronavirus as the Chinese virus and kung-fu. Media outlets are using photos of Asians wearing face masks as the visual spread of this virus when it's impacting all people. In the UK, a Vietnamese art curator was dropped from an art fair because they feared she would be seen as carrying the virus. All over this country, Asian Americans, adults and children are experiencing hate-based situations. Earlier today, I learned that in New York alone, there were over 1,000 reported hate crimes in recent weeks. My second point, coronavirus affects us all and it makes some of us even more vulnerable. And I'll talk about immigrants, women and the census. Immigrants are on the front lines of this crisis. Many are unable to work from home in the jobs that they hold, or they work for Asian-owned businesses that have already been forced to close. Of course, immigrants are at risk of deportation, being like green cars. Citizens can be at risk of being denaturalized based on the public charge rule that went into effect, which is about whether people are using public benefit such as my key. The public charge rule went into effect at the same time as the coronavirus was evidently spreading in the US. Women are impacted differently, particularly low-wage workers are women of color. 75% of healthcare workers are women who are on the front lines of the virus, and women make up 90% of home-care workers. These people are at greater risk of exposure to the virus, with less opportunity to care for themselves and their families. And here I want to give a quick shout-out to an HPI leader, Ijem Hu, and other people at the National Domestic Workers Reliance. And you can find out more at domesticworkers.org. Last week, I know we've all been talking about there's the immediate crisis right now, and then we'll come out of this into a more longer-term crisis. The virus throws a wrench into our best efforts to organize around this emphasis, and it's making the harder to reach people that much harder to reach. When we come out of this first urgent phase of the pandemic, the census figures will add a total longer-term inequitable phase for our communities of color and for our AAPIs in particular. So third, what can we do in this rapidly changing climate? Number one, practice anti-racism. I know this is something that we all do daily, but I wanted to say proactively remind ourselves and others not to project fears of coronavirus onto marginalized groups and spread unfounded associations. Number two, solidarity matters. Be an ally. Speak out against spatially-charged aggression, or outbreak-related jokes that perpetuate stereotypes. And lastly, what any of us are doing already, reaching out to grantees and impacted communities. In addition to asking how grantees are doing and asking about their finances, also check to see if they are experiencing racial profiling. And if people that have grantees whose work today are focused specifically within AAPI communities, there are plenty of organizations that can help direct you, including the AAPI of our AAPIP chapters about across the country, can direct you to community-based organizations and communities that you care most about. And remember that prevention and intervention options are not always equitably distributed across the workforce, and disparities are often cut off along racial and gender lines, with women bearing the brunt of burdens. I rushed through what I wanted to say, but I will end the visit. I believe our health is strengthened by our humanity, and I really believe that the arts brings out our common communities. So I just wanted to add something about common sense, goodwill, definitely art, and humanity, and about communities to heal us all. Sure. Our county, I assume that's lodging tax, the TAA. Our office is funded through an eviction tax, which is down 40% and dropping, because if you can't buy fixed anything, there you go, you can't have admissions tax. But that's no better than the general fund, which is supported by sales tax, and also you can't buy anything except the grocery stores. So, I mean, when I said the new normal, I think that's part of what I was talking about. Even when this pandemic is over, we're going to be able to go back outside, and there are no cruise ships, there are no conferences, there are no tourists in the hotels, there's a very urgent moment on the other side of this. When I say we're going to have to recreate our economy, not being hyperbolic, I think we're going to have to really drive folks back out into community when we're able to be on the other side of this. And so, the impact on lodging tax, sales tax, all of the sector resources is probably going to be extremely severe. Ergo, we're going to have to have some pretty bold strategies. My intent, just to be really candid, is around this civic recovery concept to try to raise something on the magnitude of $10 billion. Hi everyone, this is Daylana. One of the things that I think that might be universal for folks who have multi-year funding practices, and even if they have grantees within the multi-year cycle, is to just initiate the next cycles. So not having them go through the application process again, but really truly thinking about what are the barriers to moving the money, and how can we lessen them? This is Laura's foundation because of their board. But, you know, our board was fun with us just asking that one question. You know, how is COVID-19 impacting your organization? And I think that's all we really need to know. Right now for minorities, and so most of the other questions in any application that any foundation currently uses is pointless, I think, at the moment. So I would encourage, you know, all the funders out there to consider just totally streamlining your application to ask basically that one question. The question? Oh, right. Well, our question was how is the COVID-19 crisis impacting your organization? That's our question to our grantees going forward. Great. Well, any of our grantees, any of our grantees, you know, can contact us and we'll get back to them with that information ASAP. This is Caitlin. You know, we're all in a bind, and I think as funders, it's important for us to leverage what we can. You know, we can't just ask our institutional grantees to go ahead and make those payments to artists if we aren't willing to step up into that space ourselves. So I think that's a really important thing. I think also, like I had mentioned, trying to encourage folks to meet halfway in some way. You know, for example, like reimbursing for expenses that artists have already incurred that they're now carrying the debt on a credit card, you know, just figuring out some different kinds of payment schedules. I think it's the fact that folks are just taking, some folks are taking an either-or approach and taking force to major causes and artists aren't getting anything for work that's already been done. I think that we as funders need to figure out how to step into that space. And yeah, I'll stop there. This is Christine. This is Randy. One thing that I know people are looking for is work. So in that rapid redeployment, we are, because all the schools are closed, we are hiring teaching artists using education dollars to build streaming content that parents can use at home to educate their kids while they are home from school. Similarly to that redeployment, as you're on Children's Precers Billing testing sites, people want general operating support, but they also want to contribute. They want to do something and they want to work. So how can we use other dollars from other places for people to work in a unique way? I'm going to underscore what San Juan opened up with about open minds of community inclusion. That's something that I've heard as well. Sorry, but I'm speaking from my wall, it's something that I've heard as well. Grantees know that we are trying to move as quickly and as flexibly as we can. But for us it's not a headache. But at the same time what I'm hearing is just appreciation for knowing that I'm over here, I'm thinking of them and I'm willing to listen to them. Even if I can't, I'm not in a position to offer anything concrete right now. I think it's a general question, kind of the phrase of like people are looking for work or you know, trying to think through like the ways in which the field has been asked to continue to perform in order to have the money keep flowing, right? Like people thinking that like if they show some level of productivity then like they can earn their keep, which means that like money could still flow in their direction. And I wonder if it's really just about like access or the proximity to the resources through work, right? Work is tied to the acquisition of those resources. So just kind of just want to throw that out into the ether question. Thank you, Shannon. I guess for me I think that what we've been hearing is that people may have some funds. They're not necessarily sure how to deploy them well right now given that there's so much coming at them. And so what we're finding is that they're asking for help in terms of expert consultants to just sort of walk through cash flow, emergency planning, those kinds of efforts so that they know what they need to pay attention to this moment, what they next need to pay attention to next week and what they can pay attention to the week after. So we're finding that our folks are being overwhelmed. Some of them might find the emergency that they have from so many different places, boards, staff, constituencies. So I think that that convoys that funders can play or that consultants can play. Let me know if you can. And so our next question, this is for anyone who's presenting here. So can funders think about universal applications shared across grant makers? And is this a strategy that funders would consider to truly ease stress on grantees? How feasible is that type of a strategy? Anyone can dive in or multiple can share. Jane, there are specifically on the granting side. I know there are organizations that CIRF Plus has partnered with and are doing a revamping their current emergency relief protocols or establishing relief funds. I know Springboard for the arts, for instance, has set up so you want to start an emergency relief fund. Here are the things you need to consider. And certainly that what the question addresses is addressed in some of that. And also just as an organization that's been granting for a long time, certainly these are questions that we're asking ourselves throughout this process as we evaluate what the needs are versus we'll be able to meet that. And happy to talk to anyone offline about that. This is Caitlin from NPN. I think there are a lot of great examples of how folks are doing kind of virtual promotions of things, virtual festivals. And as I mentioned, for us, since the work that we were founded to do with the touring of artists, it's a fundamental thing that we really need to challenge now, whether that is right in a pandemic or right in the face of climate change or any of those other things. So one of the things NPN is doing is we just reached out to all the artists that we fund and asked them to send us what they're working on right now or to tag us on social media and we're going to start creating a kind of virtual festival but just a lot more promotion virtually than we might normally do and a lot more stuff that's in process and thinking about the ways that we can support the stories that artists are telling, not just finished work that they may have ready to show but just getting to know them and what their work is about, their ideas are and how their practice is changing in these times. So I think, again, just being really adaptive, we have so many incredible technology platforms to do within that right now. And again, to do that all the time and not just in a crisis like now.