A number of compelling conversations have been taking place over the last several weeks as a result of some very thoughtful blog posts about our Arts grantmaking strategy. (Nina Simon kicked it off with this post and then linked to related posts here.) What I find most exciting about all of this is the fact that a range of thoughtful leaders are engaging with ideas that are obviously important to Irvine, and their engagement will help make our grantmaking better. I’d like to take the opportunity to add to the dialogue as well as clarify a few points about our Arts strategy that were raised in the conversation so far.

Irvine has funded the arts since our inception because we care deeply about the importance of a healthy arts ecosystem that connects people and builds communities. We have an interest and an obligation in strengthening the arts system as a whole and we believe that the system will thrive if it focuses on engaging Californians who so far have largely been absent as audiences, visitors and donors. In becoming an adaptive, relevant and responsive field, we become more able to address the fact that the majority of Californians don’t engage with our system---not responding to this situation is clearly not the answer. Our response then, the core focus of our grantmaking that launches later this year, will be to support sustainable, core operational shifts as arts organizations expand engagement.

It’s hard to believe, but a year has passed since we announced the first deadline for a grantmaking fund under our new Arts program strategy: the Exploring Engagement Fund. And today we are announcing our third round of this fund, along with the second round of our more targeted Exploring Engagement Fund for Priority Regions. The deadline to submit applications for both funds is December 3, 2012. And please note: we will now have only one round of funding per year — in December — for both funds as we streamline this grantmaking process. This means that if you miss this deadline, the next time you’ll be able to apply is December 2013.

We are excited to see the results of the many projects that we have supported or will support under the Exploring Engagement Funds as arts nonprofits investigate new and enriching ways to engage Californians in the arts. Many grantees from the first round are already getting underway with their projects and I encourage you to watch brief interviews with the leaders of two of our grantees — the AjA Project and MusicianCorps — and hear how they’re thinking about exploring engagement and why it’s important for arts organizations to adapt to the shifting arts landscape.

Irvine’s Board of Directors approved $16.9 million in grants at its quarterly meeting this week. Of the 31 grants approved, 10 are in the Arts, five in California Democracy, 14 in Youth, one in Special Initiatives, and one in Special Opportunities. I’d like to highlight some grants that we’re excited about:

Exploring Engagement Fund for Large Organizations – Our Arts program is supporting eight large-budget organizations to explore new ideas for engaging audiences as part of our Exploring Engagement Fund for Large Organizations. This is the second set of grants made under our new Arts program strategy (the first round of Exploring Engagement Fund grants was announced in June). The goal of the new strategy is to promote engagement in the arts for all Californians — the kind that embraces and advances the diverse ways that we experience the arts and that strengthens our ability to thrive together in a dynamic and complex social environment.

Irvine recently hosted a set of informal question and answer sessions about our new Exploring Engagement Fund for Large Organizations in three cities: San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco. We met with administrators from arts organizations throughout the state representing an impressive breadth of art forms: theater, opera, ballet, orchestral music and visual arts. There’s no shortage of innovative ideas coming out of our state’s largest arts groups, so we’re eager to see how these arts leaders begin to explore engagement with us.

Last month we invited organizations to submit concept papers for this invitation-only fund, which is open to a select group of California-based nonprofit arts organizations with operating budgets greater than $5 million per year. The fund is one of three Exploring Engagement Funds we created as part of the Arts grantmaking strategy announced last year. (The other funds are the statewide, open-competitive Exploring Engagement Fund for organizations under the $5 million operating budget threshold, and the Exploring Engagement Fund for Priority Regions, geared toward nonprofits located in the San Joaquin Valley and Inland Empire.)

The Exploring Engagement Fund for Large Organizations is all about risk capital, somewhat of a rare thing in the nonprofit funding world. Think of it as venture capital for arts engagement, but instead of capital returns, our expected payoffs are organizational transformation and expanding arts engagement to new audiences across California. And while we hope all of these ideas will create lasting organizational change for our nonprofit partners, we also accept that some of these experiments may come up short of their intended outcomes. It is risk capital, after all!