Sector-Wide Capacity: Advocacy and Infrastructure
Matías Muñoz-Rodriguez
To fully realize our strategies over the long-term, we believe we need to build the sector’s capacity in two areas: Advocacy and Infrastructure. These efforts are not separate grantmaking strategies so much as tools to strengthen the overall health of the arts sector in the Bay Area. Our Advocacy and Infrastructure grantmaking and our beyond-the-grant-dollars activities, such as workshops and convenings, are intended to be opportunistic and responsive.
Advocacy. Arts and culture leaders know they must work to overcome the marginal role to which artists and the arts are often relegated, and part of that work is becoming more effective advocates for their organizations and the critical importance of the arts. Even more than that, if Bay Area communities are to renew their support of the arts, arts leaders must see themselves as civic leaders engaged with the hard work of building and sustaining thriving communities, lending their voices and creative energy to efforts to realize their communities’ priorities.
Infrastructure. The arts and culture sector needs resources to support its ongoing effectiveness, including capacity to adapt to changing conditions. Yet today’s economic realities are exceptionally unfriendly when it comes to experimentation and change, whether evolving an existing effort or launching a new one. New and more targeted forms of infrastructure support will encourage activities and ideas that help the sector renew itself and become more adaptive and inclusive.
