 Yes. Hello everybody. I am going to set my stopwatch for 40 minutes instead of 50 minutes. So we are ago at 40 minutes. My name is Kathy Edwards. I am the director of the New England Foundation for the arts, which is headquartered in Boston, works in New England around the country and internationally. Thank you Simon for the invitation to join you here today. Thank you for all of you. It's been an incredibly inspiring day and so fantastic to hear from some of the current Arts Link Fellows as well. I'll be candid. I accepted this invitation in part because early in my career I had some amazingly deeply influential opportunities as a result of Arts Link and that was the opportunity to host three different Arts Link Fellows. When I was at Dance Theatre Workshop I learned so much from those individuals and I think I also learned honestly how to be a host and in an international context truly of reciprocity. So I owe a lot to the program and it's a way to pay it forward just a tiny bit. I'm excited to moderate a discussion of four brilliant women. Their bios are in your program but super briefly I'm going to give you like one sentence on each of them. And I'm going out well now I'm going to go in order of where they're sitting. We have Zaba Rahman, a senior program officer for the Building Bridges program of the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art who also has a storied career as a producer of complex arts initiatives and projects both in the U.S. and internationally. Next to Zaba Michelle Coffey. Michelle is the director of the Lambent Foundation and an experienced philanthropist who has focused on a number of arenas including health and justice and human rights as well as arts and culture. Next to Michelle is Rashida Bumbray who's a senior program manager of the Arts Exchange, the Open Society Foundation's Global Arts for Social Justice Initiative. I am a dance lover first and foremost so I'm also going to share that she's an accomplished choreographer as well as curator. And next to Rashida Barbara Lanciers who might need no introduction here, the director of the Trust for Mutual Understanding, a longtime supporter of international exchange related to the arts and to the environment and a theater artist in her own right. We're here today to share with you our experience working as funders with an international commitment. What are the principles of our work? Why do we engage actively with international work? Zaba said to me last week when we were on a planning phone call, the why of this work is clear. It's the how of this work that keeps us up at night which I think is really true and we certainly just heard a really beautiful statement from Simone Brough about the why of international exchange. From my own perspective at NIFA we invest in international collaboration and understanding because it is so closely connected to, it is the same as our belief in equity and access to culture for all people and it is really at the heart of our core values that artists and cultural production are essential to a thriving and open society. We also invest in artists and cultural workers as leaders and like all humans they benefit from the learning new perspective and relationships they develop when they engage in global conversations and as others have said so eloquently today artists are leaders who contribute uniquely to building cultural citizenship, sharing and exchanging stories, building participation and inclusion, connecting us to being more human and more innovative. At NIFA this year we've just supported five months of international U.S. residencies for artistic ensembles from Ukraine and Egypt. Under the auspices of the center stage program I'm so glad Nina showed a few photographs in her presentation. This is a program that we produce with support from the U.S. Department of State. So that's it for my introduction and we are going to as I said we'll shorten this discussion a little bit. We have 35 minutes to hear from our panelists and I'm going to start by asking each of you to share maybe the most innovative and exciting project that you are currently working on in your portfolio that gives you the most hope in terms of what you're doing in your international exchange work. And if you speak for five minutes each I think that will give you enough time to not only share some specifics about this project and initiative but to talk about why you designed it and what the outcomes are that you hope to see. Seva will you start us off? Absolutely, a whole thing written but I'm going to nix that and just talk extemporaneously to tell you that the Building Bridges program which is housed under the Charitable Foundation is focused on supporting projects of organizations here in the U.S. we're a national funder that build connections and understandings between American Muslims and the broader non-Muslim community. So we may be the outlier here in terms of actual work but what our grantees do is actually engage artists that are based internationally. So that's us and I'm going to talk about one particular grantee in Minneapolis called the Cedar Cultural Center and the Cedar Cultural Center is a mid-sized concert presenting organization that lives in the middle of little Mogadishu the Cedar Riverside community which is where the largest Somali diaspora refugee community lives and the Cedar decided that it was going to focus on Somali music as and center their project of connecting with connecting the two communities Somali and non-Somali in this area in this neighborhood. So they partnered with Augsburg College which is a small private institution and they began on the planning phase but they realized very quickly that they could find vocalists in the diaspora Somali vocalists but they couldn't find practicing musicians and the reason for that is that with decades of civil war and the banning of music in Somalia many of the musicians had either abandoned their practice or had been harassed or worse and it just stopped. So the Cedar found that they had this grant and they couldn't proceed so their academic partner Augsburg College you know their music professor the head of the music department decided that he was going to learn Somali music and then because it's an oral tradition that he was going to notate it and then teach it to a handful of students at Augsburg College and join with some musicians who would stop their practice in the Cedar Riverside community and create a house band the backing band and then and then they would invite the vocalists from the diaspora and that's how it started and it became an incredible project because a lot of the concerts were live streamed into refugee camps that around the world where the Somali diaspora was clustered and it was really I was very touched by one of the presentations they're one of the fellows I think fellows talked about fragmentation and trauma and collective memory and what these concerts did was really invite the diaspora to remind them of who they are and to empower them so I'm going to stop here Shelly jump next great maybe I should provide a little bit of context about Lambert Foundation and I'll speak about what is exciting me now so Lambert funds in three specific areas New York New Orleans and Nairobi New Orleans New York because it's our home I work with one individual donor so there's a lot more freedom and liberation and experimentation than with other funding institutions so New York is our home New Orleans we wanted to do a national work but I didn't want to build or play keep money with inside the foundation I always think you have to move money as fast as you can before we get caught so we keep it really small but we chose New Orleans for two reasons art and culture is infused in the daily fabric so there wasn't any justification that we needed to do with others and because there are very few philanthropic dollars that go below the Mason-Dixon line that acknowledges the south and so it was a political statement for us with that we were excited about the conversation but we realized that we couldn't really have a national dialogue without a global context so that's why we selected Nairobi and one of the reasons for Nairobi is that the states has a better understanding of a West African aesthetic signature and not a lot from East Africa and East Africa is so vibrant in terms of an Indian Arabic and African connotation mixture so that's how we get to have fun I'm excited I'm totally moved every day by our partners but I'm excited by the disruption of our own practice so I'm going to use this opportunity to actually talk about philanthropic practice instead of some of our grantee partners if you guys don't mind and we're disrupting things a little bit we are questioning that we don't think money is the most important thing that we're leaving so much on the table if we're only focusing on the grant making so spending much more time thinking about what influence might we have with our sector what are the relationships that we can illuminate and foster and so I think that's why I was invited on this panel we really think about network theory as our practice so one of the things that we've done is increased the amount of money that we give to core grantee partners over more significant years and that we make this general operating support and that we've done away with proposals and reports and that we're recognizing that this is actually a mutual agreement and so we're spending a lot more time thinking in conversation with the leadership of the organization that includes board members so that we collectively hold the intention of the four years of how we're working together yeah so we're and this is all being made up as we go and so we're practicing this out what excites me the most is a relationship with a philanthropic partner from the Netherlands so we have been intentional about a relationship with dune foundation and dune foundation has been a significant funder beyond behind a network called the arts collaboratory which is about 32 arts-centered organizations from the global south and the relationship between lambent and dune has allowed lambent to peer in almost like a fly on the wall to see how a network across multiple continents and different sizes and different languages really build a collective community with hopes that lambents community if we can organize it and if we can organize it can stand alongside in solidarity and have some intersecting touch points along the way and what I'm appreciative of the partnership with dune foundation and lambent are just the values that we're leading our work with and so this idea of mutual accountability between the funder and grantee partner and the different foundations the two different foundations that are coming together the idea of solidarity what does solidarity look like with the philanthropic practice that local relevance is really critical and important so the new york or us lens is not the only lens that we are leading through so how does one learn and listen better actually would say listen and this idea of openness and transparency which is in a challenging thing within philanthropy especially when dealing with wealth um but we're willing to try it so I wanted to offer that um as what is exciting me without it looking egocentric so it's really exciting for me to be on this panel one because um I've been on the receiving end and when I worked at the kitchen we got a grant from the lambent foundation so um it's just you know really thrilling as someone who's potentially um you know thinking about how to continue to complicate your relationship with philanthropy but also I'm only three years in so the arts exchange is a relatively new initiative at the open society foundations which historically has had quite a schizophrenic relationship with arts in general and I think you know that's sort of based on the fact that many people um you know that the foundation was founded by george soros and founded you know really thinking about how to avoid the world turning back the way it has now right and and sort of the linkage between propaganda and fascism so I think there's been a sort of anxiety around you know how do we support artists without um sort of really telling people what to think and so you know we've had to um complicate it which is really simple for people who are immersed in the arts to sort of dispel that but it's been um a little bit of a hurdle so hopefully we're beyond that moment um now but really um we exist to actually support and encourage our colleagues who are doing arts philanthropy who are doing social justice and and um human rights philanthropy throughout many global contexts to include artists and arts organizations in their strategies so that is very much an internal project but one of the things that has been exciting about that is we actually do have the opportunity to do some direct grant making and that has materialized as the soros arts fellowship which this is the very first cohort of the soros arts fellowship there about 10 months into an 18 month fellowship and it really was developed through a posture of deep listening to artists around many global contexts about what kind of support would actually allow them to think deeply about their local contexts and it was really developed around this idea of art public space and closing societies and sort of you know what are the various conditions that artists are working under and how can philanthropy actually be supportive of that and also not be putting them in in further danger so we have a group of eight artists I'll just sort of mention the context that they're working um Vostanlin Likula who um you know has a history with many of us in New York including Simon Dove um is is from the DRC and we know him because he is sort of a choreographic hero and superstar especially in New York in many European contexts but you know thinking about what does it actually mean for him to have the time space resources to actually focus on a local project and you know many artists as we know that are working in in closing contexts or closed contexts become the institution right and so in the case of Vostan he's developed um you know residency space and the project that he's doing for the fellowship is really a film it's a citizen film about a man who was sort of encouraged by two women in Kailisha in his town to run for a public office and the reason they did that was really because they wanted to get one person out of poverty not that they had a lot of confidence in what it would mean for this person to be um you know an elected official um so it really sort of talks about the sort of crossroads of hope and despair in many ways and sort of um you know the other thing that's really amazing about his kind of practice is that he's also teaching people along the way um like I said building an institution and so how to you know how do you create a contemporary dance company you teach people contemporary dance how do you make a film um in that kind of context teaching people film making while he's learning it himself um so that's just one example um and we have um two four other fellows in Africa Nana O'Friata Ayim in Ghana um and Hassan Darcy and Lila Hita in Morocco um we have Guy Régis Jr in Haiti um Laurie Jo Reynolds in Chicago um I'm leaving people out but anyway it's a quite diverse group of eight artists um Khaled Albea who is a Sudanese political cartoonist living in exile in Copenhagen but really sort of thinking about how do we create a network for those artists and also support them so they get an 80 000 fellowship over 18 months to make an ambitiously scaled um public art project or a project that engages the public and we thought about this idea of public space really from the lens of um artists that we talked to in a gathering that we organized called the OSF arts forum which was in Morocco in 2017 and it was around this concept of art public space and closing societies and a lot of what we heard was really that safety and security was one of the most important um things that artists were concerned with um and so within that we wanted to sort of explore well what does it mean to work in exile what does it mean to have an underground practice um like the Belarus free theater for example and what does it mean to um you know really need peers when you're working in that kind of deep isolation and so this fellowship is really uh developed to sort of um construct that kind of circle around a small group of artists over 18 months and then as it grows this year the fellows will be focusing on art migration and public space um that that community will continue to grow so that's the most exciting thing that i'm working on thank you um something that i am hearing a lot from all of you is listening and and deep listening and i that resonates with me because the thing that excites me the most about what i get to do at the trust for mutual understanding is listen to grantees um so to give you just a little bit of context of who we are um we're a small small but mighty foundation we were started in 1985 by an anonymous member of the Rockefeller family and we fund arts and environmental exchanges in 30 countries that encompass central eastern southeastern europe central asia the baltic states the caucuses mongolia russia and the united states so we have a wide wide geographic purview and something that is collectively happening uh across the board so i'll talk about the region i'll say the region and what i'm talking about are those parts of the world that i just mentioned um that's our geographic region there's a collective anxiety that's happening right now and it and it means that we have to do a lot of really deep listening and and we have to uh in many ways be a thought partner not a micromanager but maybe a reflect our back um so one way that we've been deeply listening and trying to be responsive to that listening is that um particularly for our grantees in the region the part of the world that i'm talking about um you know we only have four staff people um we only had three staff people and uh we cover such a huge geographic territory that we felt like you know we the three of us were on airplanes all the time which is which is wonderful and important um but we really felt like we needed a presence closer to the part of the world where we work so we hired a regional representative and she's now based in Berlin um and we have a small office for her in Berlin that we rent at the Aspen Institute Germany and they become a very great partner of ours and um that's been important for us because we have access also to their facilities so we are able to uh convene in a way that uh we are being constantly asked to do because we have the privilege of sitting in a place where uh we can see trends that are happening here in the united states that are reflective of trends that are happening in the part of the world where you work and the grantees keep asking us please we want to talk to each other you guys are nice as staff people but we really want to be in the room with each other we really want to talk to each other we're all in similar situations now and and we need uh time and space to to strategize and to just be in solidarity um so that is something that uh is exciting and also just touch on a little bit Michelle what you were saying is financial support is obviously really really really important but we're also trying to look at what are forms of non financial support and advocacy that we can provide so one of those is new for us it's called grantee voices it's a newsletter essentially but it's um uh we're sort of obsessed with magazine and the interview structure of bomb so we ask grantees to interview each other and then we transcribe and edit those interviews um and uh areola just participated in one of those that's coming out soon I promise yeah yeah no it's fine uh so um that's really about uh raising awareness and um trying to to introduce people and ideas and practices to to a wider audience and then we're also uh curating I guess is the right word I don't know we're having more public events at our office um and that is you know because we grant making the arts in the environmental sphere there's so much intersection between those um and we are trying to uh draw artists and environmentalists together to to learn across disciplines and also just to to to raise awareness um for people that are coming from um really difficult challenging situations and need a lifeline and networking is so important so we're trying to provide that sort of informal networking too thank you all so appreciate those answers um I'm going to ask one question then if we have a few minutes we'll open it up to everyone I was going to ask you all where you sort of thought some of the biggest opportunities lay that maybe you know or sort of um that any number of of folks in this ecosystem system could step into and also what you thought the biggest challenges were to working internationally right now some opportunities surface just among you already convening grantees thinking about ways to provide critical non-financial support um and also solidarity networks listening to grantees but throw some other opportunities out there and also if each of you could share like this is the big risk slash challenge that keeps me keeps me up at night um Sabah can we start with you again um biggest risk I'll start with that is um what has already been touched upon which is physical risk um I it does keep me up at night I worry about uh grantees doing this very brave work I worry about um my colleagues at the foundation and the risk that I am opening them up to I worry about um scaling the projects this wonderful work that our grantees do and putting at risk the the communities that they that participate in the project so I'm worried a lot but at the same time in this um very risky but rather fluid era that we're in there's also great opportunity and one of the things that we do that we made a decision to do in the program is to provide strategic communication support by engaging a community a communications company that actually um is the consultant to each grantee for the life of the grant period so um it teaches strategic messaging um and it's not just about writing press press releases that that they can do very well but actually strategic messaging and ways in which to amplify amplify their stories and to use the tools of larger networks to reach across the arts audience the the the choir as it were and another thing that we're doing is that inspired by our grantees and the communication support the program itself our staff of 1.7 uh people I know what's a 0.7 person it's um um our program associate who's um who is split yes um with another department she's shared um we um have actually taken on um the production with a production company of two videos two films two short films that are shareable and one of them um which is called a secret history of muslims in america um is an animation and it's going to premiere on a rather large platform in early december so um this is not a boast but it's actually to say that um we're finding subversive ways we're sort of ideas are like water they just flow over constraints which is the beauty of exchanges right and that indomitable human spirit that will be subversive and just um go around or over under constraints um that we see ourselves as advocates for the work for our grantees yes we bring the funding piece but we also bring our ideas and we we use we hope to use these videos as a way to really amplify our grantees voices and their work and reach communities especially in that purple zone um i'm not doing this but i'm excited by this moment of intersectionality um you know we were fighting for eight to ten years kind of building where we could have the intersection of art and culture and justice issues and finally criminal justice reform environment thanks to tambu reproductive rights everyone is now recognizing the power and the necessity of artists and cultural makers at the forefront alongside of organizers so that's my optimistic excitement um i'm fearful of the art market and its consumption have no idea how to address that and i'm scared by um the us lens and our limitations around race and gender normative realities and that dominating um how we continue to engage in the world and it's destructive um afraid of i feel like it's a little bit of what you all both said one um just continuing to be in this market driven extractive way of interacting with artists um and just on a personal level two very good friends of mine that artists passed away in the past week under 50 years old and i really attribute it to just yeah just like a basquiat situation you know where like how much more can we take from one person um and in order to engage and be successful which they both were prolific um but it what is it what is the toll that that actually takes on humanity at large really you know individuals but also humanity so really really thinking about how do we develop the different kind of relationship with cultural production that is also about surrounding people with support surrounding people with resources and not just monetary resources but also thinking about them as full people so i feel like that's sort of core to why i even do this work but it's it's um you know really um that makes me feel ashamed to actually be a part of the art world sometimes you know and so i'm really thankful similar to what you're saying that we are coming around to a different political reality and sometimes i say like maybe the silver lining of the global rise of fascism is that we realize that all of us have to participate in um freedom fighting all of us have to participate in um sort of coming together on on the sort of reality of where we could go which is why i think this kind of exchange is so important and we were um able to bring the Belarus Free Theater to do a production in our office which is appropriate because they're always working in garages and then you know these contexts where um you know audiences can sort of sneak in to see this work but it really was about how do we um have a moment of dystopic visioning to see where we are going right so that we can be conscious enough to either pump the brakes or get ahead of that and really fight on behalf of of freedom of expression and also on behalf of artists who are doing this kind of brave work and who are putting themselves on the very front lines of this kind of work so i feel like i'm in this moment of of both um terror and inspiration i think there's opportunity and disruption i think that this global climate that we're living in right now where everything is so interconnected and there's actually a time and space to be disrupted we're all disrupted the current moment and it forces us to reach out for each other it forces us to work collaboratively i think more um listen more deeply um and to um you know i i think as foundation staff people we're disrupted from our usual way of thinking about things and and our boxes that we get in and our assumptions that we make um we have to think more flexibly we have to think more uh more fluidly um and i think for for particularly for our grantees we're seeing intersectionality in the sense of we're seeing people reach out for each other and talk to each other across disciplines across geographic borders across cultural borders there's a again the word solidarity keeps coming up but there's a solidarity there that is um uniting people in a way that i uh i have i've been at the trust for mutual understanding 10 years and i haven't seen it like this before on the other hand i haven't seen it like this before and um the thing that keeps me up at night are faces people's faces um people's stories people that i care about people that i've known for a very long time this part of the world where where we work at the trust for mutual understanding is very dear to me i'm half hungarian my family lives in hungary the situation there is very very difficult so it's not just my family it's our grantees it's it's the staff it's my my colleagues like you said say i worry about them when they travel i make them um constantly check in with me when they're traveling i'm constantly checking in with them um so this is a really uh difficult time and i think when you care and are open-hearted uh it's going to keep you up at night right now simon it's 450 which is when we were supposed to end shall we okay we're gonna we're gonna take some questions and because our time is so short and we'd love to get a few questions in just gonna ask you to try really hard to ask your question in 15 seconds thank you yeah raise your hand if you have a question you will take it shy shy audience we've answered all yes thank you um maybe it's not a question you can actually answer right now but how are you incorporating this reality that we have 12 years left in your work yeah can i can i jump for a second so um the reality of the 12 years left is is very prominent in our work because we're actually we're making environment we're involved in environmental grant making so we actually the field scientists that are out in the Arctic and watching the ice melt are coming in and giving us reports and showing us photos and uh showing us videos of what they're seeing um so we are trying to balance our grant making in the sense of um for a long time we've been thinking about it there's the arts and there's the environment and we're trying not to think about it that way so much anymore and for a long time it was well 70 percent of our grant making is in the arts and 30 percent is in the environment and now it's um okay well 60 40 and we're working toward 50 50 but really what we're just trying to work toward is um it's not i'm not impact is not the word because we're a foundation that doesn't believe in measuring impact um which i know is a pretty rare thing but um urgency urgency and working and working together and working across sectors to tell the story because there's so much scientific data that we have but those stories aren't being told in a way that's motivating people particularly lawmakers so that's i would love to answer that um we're working with a question and a question was posed to us by our network theory coach and he asked um what ancestor are we in training to be and it really rocked us and so it's forcing us to think about our own selves how we love how we live in our work generations ahead and to find those characteristics and hone on those right now and so yeah i think it's important for all of us to think about um what are we in training for what are the ancestral qualities that we are wanting to leave with our children and grandchildren i don't think we can end any better than that so i'm going to give you back your your your time um or do we have one more question okay 15 seconds or less hi i'm claud grinitzky i'm the president of the watermill foundation and at the watermill center we've had issues obviously of artists who've had visas denied and so do you find that these very important foundations that you represent you're able to lobby the state department or the embassies or does it not affect anything ever because i saw nina murray was here earlier uh yes i could can you do some i mean is it possible for you to have some sort of sway anybody want to take that i would like to to answer um i'd like to give you an example of what one of our grantees did it's georgetown university and they had a project with syrian women refugees and they were opening their season with this um theater piece and they didn't get their visas so what they did is that they decided to Skype in um the the actors the syrian refugee ladies from um jordan from their refugee camp um and have the audience in the theater and so um they talked about the project and the difficulties and the challenges and then one of the um ladies asked why their visa was denied and in the audience i don't know if you were there that day nina but in the audience was a state department person representative um and uh the facilitator of the conversation turned to the to the state department rep and said please go ahead and answer the question and uh live they this person said it was just a bad day so uh that can be many things but um that was one kind of moment in which um this art center um you know actually turned a really um you know impossible situation over basically um not having um the work open to a conversation which got actually a lot more engagement not just with the audience but in terms of media and attention uh much more broadly in different um communities beyond just the art space taking my cue from you simon because nina do you want to answer yeah into the scrum which is also live there's no tougher job than answering counselor questions on live stream i applaud zenab and your group that found this solution it is difficult to operate within the constraints that the immigration law puts on us overseas you are unlikely ever to get the answer about why something happened because there is legal protection for the adjudicator the protection is there for their safety and also for the safety of the public all that said work with us early get in touch with us there's there's my retired colleague there in the audience as well especially if you're working with people with nations that with states that are sort of in the public view and in the political public view get in touch with us early get in touch with the embassy and have a plan b and also i know there is an ongoing effort uh with and with naa so it is also important to advocate domestically this is another thing that we cannot do we are an executive agency in terms of managing immigration and in that regard we do not advocate for changes in policy we implement the policy we rely on you to tell our lawmakers what is necessary so please do that shall we thank you so much this was a fantastic discussion and thanks to all of you you are so inspiring those we've heard from on stage and just our friends and colleagues in the audience thank you