The Wallace Foundation has announced a five-year, $53 million initiative in support of arts organizations founded by and for Black, Indigenous, Hispanic/Latinx, Arab American, or Asian American/Pacific Islander communities.

The initiative will explore the question: "Facing strategic challenges, how can and do arts organizations of color leverage their experience and histories of community orientation to increase their resilience, while sustaining their relevance?" Acknowledging that the core expertise lies with arts organizations of color themselves, the foundation is seeking letters of interest for the first of two cohorts of organizations and has issued a request for proposals for arts researchers for a study of community orientation — that is, a deep understanding of and connection to the people they serve. Over the course of a planning year, grant recipients will work with the foundation to help name the initiative, develop plans for new projects or pursue existing ones, and choose the kind of technical supports they wish to receive.

The organizations also will collaborate with researchers to develop a logic model that defines the scope of the grantee's projects; work closely with an ethnographer to document the organization's history, culture, and context; participate in interviews and focus groups and coordinate the participation of other stakeholders, such as staff and board members; and participate in two conferences a year where senior executives collaborate and learn from one another, quarterly meetings with Wallace program officers, and monthly meetings with Wallace staffers, consultants, or independent researchers. Later this year the foundation will select ten to twelve organizations with annual budgets of $500,000 to $5 million for the first cohort, and in late 2022, a second, larger cohort that will include organizations with budgets below $500,000.

"We know that as members of the field of institutional philanthropy, it will take time to build trusting relationships in a space that has long been underresourced and underacknowledged by those who use their capital to create social good," wrote Wallace Foundation director of arts Bahia Ramos in announcing the initiative. "We all must begin somewhere. It's very likely that elements of our approach will be unsatisfactory to some and that we'll stumble along the way. We fully accept that we do not have all the answers, and we look forward to learning together."