Giving Compass' Take:

• Creative Capital is a venture capital organization that supports innovative artists who are building projects that will have an impact beyond the art world. 

• How does your charitable giving provide support to social impact artists?  

• Learn more about funding cultural philanthropy.

When the National Endowment for the Arts made devastating budget cuts in the mid-1990s, many of us in the art world began to think seriously about better alternatives for supporting artists. In 1998, I helped start Creative Capital as a daring experiment, borrowing ideas from the venture capital sector to build an organization grounded in the belief that the same early, continuous, and strategic support that helps fledgling businesses take off also helps innovative artists build lasting careers.

Like many other arts funders, our work starts with providing an artist with funding to pursue an idea. But we don’t just write a check and walk away. We support the work from start to finish, meeting with our artists to chart their progress and providing funding at strategic moments that help direct the project to its most successful completion. Take our work with Jen Bervin, for example.

Bervin is an artist and poet who applied to be a Creative Capital Awardee with an incredible proposal that merged poetry, textile arts, and science.

Like many other arts funders, our work starts with providing an artist with funding to pursue an idea. But we don’t just write a check and walk away. We support the work from start to finish, meeting with our artists to chart their progress and providing funding at strategic moments that help direct the project to its most successful completion.

When we put resources into cultivating our society’s most creative thinkers—early, continuously, and strategically—we nudge promising ideas along the path to becoming powerful projects that spark provocative conversations or evolve into endeavors that have impact far beyond the art world.

Read the full article about philanthropy for arts innovation by Ruby Lerner at Stanford Social Innovation Review.