Community-oriented arts organizations are often the lifeblood of their communities, and support for their work is vital. However, large funders often have difficulty reaching them.
As part of our Advancing Well-Being in the Arts initiative, we sought out to better understand how intermediary regranting organizations, which are a type of nonprofit organization that acts as a bridge between funders and individual artists or smaller arts groups, could play a more pivotal role in bridging this gap. To do this, we are partnering with a number of intermediary organizations, including the six Regional Arts Organizations (RAOs) based across the country, on regranting efforts. The six RAOs are service organizations that support specific geographic regions in the U.S. Their focus is on strengthening the arts infrastructure through grants, programs, and other types of collaborations.
On the Grantmakers in the Arts podcast, Bahia Ramos, Vice President of the Arts at Wallace, sat down with RAO leaders Juan Souki (Mid-Atlantic Arts), Anika Tené (Creative West), and Joy Young (formerly South Arts) to discuss working together to get funding support to organizations where it is most needed.
“Having the gift of working with community members and gathering information from the field in areas like fund distribution or outreach and accessibility, transparency, and making the decision process also a conversation with the communities we were meant to serve was a gift.”
— Juan Souki
For more from their conversation, check out the full episode from Grantmakers in the Arts.
