I'm incredibly proud of the firm and what we've accomplished in the last year. We had certainly, the year before, a historic year financially, and this year was also historic in being one of our best financial years in history.
The Baltimore Museum of Art landed her highly anticipated exhibition, 'Amy Sherald: American Sublime,' after the painter pulled her show from the National Portrait Gallery due to concerns over censorship. The exhibit has been a significant hit at the BMA: It was completely sold out by late February.
The labor of this kind of organizing was invisible and deeply exhausting. In a precarious workplace, where a so-called 'performance review' could amount to job loss, organizing meant building a bridge while standing on it.
Why do I get to be the runner, and these guys get to be the homeless guys on the corner? Why can't we all be runners? She didn't have an answer. It would've been easy to let that question dissolve with her footsteps. Most people would have. But Mahlum saw something in those men that others had missed.
Most for-profit companies still confine nonprofit relationships to corporate philanthropy. Donations flow through foundations, annual reports highlight community contributions, and nonprofit engagement is framed as evidence of corporate responsibility.
WolfBrown found that Eugene had an abundance of art; however, the town needed more support from the business sector. The results showed that "we punched above our weight for a community our size," said Kelly Johnson, executive director of the nonprofit Arts & Business Alliance of Eugene, which the city created in 2008 to link the arts and business communities.
We can find a middle ground. PSU could reduce the size of its planned theater to between 800 and 1,200 seats, clearing the way for the Keller to be remodeled as a mid-size 1,500 to 1,800 seat venue.
Losing staff could be detrimental to the projects we worked on, and there was a growing dissatisfaction with how meetings were run. These mostly one-sided discussions left the quieter half of us feeling pushed aside, like our thoughts didn't matter much. If things stayed this way, I worried the good people on our team would start quitting one by one.
"A primary goal of this grantmaking is to diversify our funding impact and make ourselves accessible, while developing partnerships with institutions in all 50 states, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands."
These cuts threaten shovel-ready projects, major employers, and rural and urban communities across the state. And they come at a time when [Oregon] arts funding is already among the lowest in the nation. Legislators had been considering cutting nearly $900,000 in arts and culture funding when the session started on Feb. 2.
The change in the administration's tactics in Minneapolis is not a retreat. Instead, they are regrouping and planning another mode of attack, with the hopes that their repression might be met with resistance that is easier to control and contain. People who garner their relevancy and power through the dehumanization and oppression of others will do whatever it takes to cling to their soulless sense of self.
"Are you okay?" These were Alex Pretti's last words, said to a woman after ICE agents had tackled and pepper-sprayed her. Videos from bystanders show Pretti holding up a phone, attempting to document what was happening before he himself was pepper-sprayed, wrestled to the ground, and killed by those officers. He lost his life not for committing violence, but for documenting it, and stepping in to protect someone facing it.
Over the years, I've worked as a consultant on numerous federal grant projects from the US Department of Agriculture and elsewhere that focused on local economic development and were granted to nonprofits serving their communities. But since the 2024 elections, the focus of my work-and that of the small New Mexico-based consulting firm, Prospera Partners, that I lead-has shifted to help nonprofits develop strategies to sustain themselves despite federal cuts in funding and to programs that once supported their work.
I've seen this before-many times, in fact. What you're describing is not unheard of in the nonprofit sector. Founder energy is one of the most powerful forces driving new missions into the world. It can also be one of the riskiest. Many organizations, especially those built from lived experience, passion, and necessity, begin with little more than a vision, a problem to solve.
As if demolishing the East Wing, gutting arts agencies, and slapping his name and face on several federal buildings weren't enough, the US president now wants to do away with a DC building known as the "Sistine Chapel of New Deal art." This week, we reported on a burgeoning campaign to save the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which houses murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, and other major American artists. We will continue to follow this story.
The day after Whitelaw testified, the state economist said that Oregon now has about $300 million more to spend than previously expected. The new revenue forecast does not mean the budget is in the black, however. There are new demands for the available dollars, including $600 million in upgrades to the Moda Center to retain the Portland Trail Blazers, a recently announced $50 million shortfall in Portland Public School funding,
Artists make California vibrant, innovative and culturally rich, yet our state ranks 35th nationally in per capita arts funding. When the state budget allocates just 53 cents per person to the arts, it's clear how little we're investing in the creative workers who shape the state's identity and economy. California's artists are delivering extraordinary value with minimal investment. Imagine what a stronger commitment to the arts could do for our communities, our economy and our future.
It's impossible to imagine New York City without art, or contemporary art without New York City. This is where you come to see the best of the best, or to take part in making it. This country's international standing is down in the gutter, thanks to Trump, but this city is still a living, rolling dream. Right now, we're waiting to see who's going to be Mayor Mamdani's pick for cultural affairs commissioner. It's an important role that determines where the city's budget priorities will lie and who'll get a seat at the table. Gonzalo Casals, who served as culture commissioner under Mayor de Blasio, and Mauricio Delfín, who co-directs the Culture & Arts Policy Institute with Casals, have some urgent thoughts on the matter. It's a must-read not just for Zohran (send him a link if you're on texting terms), but for everyone who cares about art in this city.
Among the museum directors paying keen attention to the ruling, on 3 December, that all federal grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) would be reinstated, the director of the Seattle Art Museum Scott Stulen heaved a sigh of relief. In 2025, the Pacific Northwest's leading art museum saw all its federal funding cut. That represented the loss of an annual income stream, he says, of between $300,000 and $400,000.