FOREWORD “Culture, like food, is necessary to sustain us. It molds us and shapes our relations to each other. An inequitable culture is one in which people do not have the same power to create, access or circulate their practices, works, ideas and stories. It is one in which people cannot represent themselves equally. To say that American culture is inequitable is to say that it moves us away from seeing each other in our full humanity. It is to say that the culture does not paint a more just society.” — Jeff Chang, We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation Leeway Foundation celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2018. This important birthday seemed a good time to celebrate, reflect on and learn from what led us to this point in the foundation’s development. This milestone provided an opportunity to share what we’ve learned about developing a more equitable and community-engaged philanthropic practice, and its potential to have a deep and positive impact in the communities we serve. A big shift began in 2004, when after a generational transfer of Leeway’s leadership, the foundation began an exploration of what it would mean to focus its resources on supporting artists who were interested in creating work with community transformation as its core intent. It’s important to remember the context this work began in. This was before the field of arts philanthropy had widely embraced practitioners working at the intersection of arts, culture and social change. When Leeway began this work in earnest, there were a few arts funders explicitly supporting this work, among them the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Lambent Foundation (formerly the Starry Night Fund) and the Ford Foundation. Social practice or socially engaged art as a field was gaining momentum in academia, but many of the artists and cultural producers we think of as exemplars of the kind of practices the foundation wanted to support identified in other ways — as community arts practitioners, as cultural workers and organizers, as political artists, and more. Though a number of the people involved in the foundation at the time were artists, we were also cultural organizers, invested in constructing a practice that engaged with questions of racial and cultural equity and framed philanthropy as a form of movement building, beginning with the baseline that relationships are central to this practice. It was clear to us that centering relationship and community-building is the most effective way to amplify the impact of our limited grantmaking resources. We hoped shifting power away from the foundation by involving community members in the organizational leadership and decision-making processes: •• Would open up the world of philanthropy to more challenge •• Expand the definitions of the form this work could take •• Create more opportunities in terms of access — not just who is funded, but the how of funding Our experience has taught us that funders have to be willing to use resources, both human and monetary, to achieve their vision for change. Over a decade ago, we set out to identify Amplifying a cultural community: Leeway’s impact | Foreword
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