Guild Receives $75,000 from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

October 6, 2022

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has awarded the Guild a grant of $75,000 over 1 year and 3 months for an Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity (EID) capacity building project. This grant will support our ongoing work of making concrete organizational shifts to become more deeply aligned with our values and racial equity principles.

The Foundation previously invested in the Guild’s racial equity work through the EID program in 2019. As part of that grant, Equity Literacy Institute (ELI) conducted a racial equity assessment of the Guild. ELI’s report included recommendations about how to shift racist policies and practices, as well as address gaps in perception of how much work was truly ahead in order to achieve racial equity. As a next step, we developed our Racial Equity Guiding Principles and Policies and our board approved them as an addendum to the Guild’s governing by-laws. 

Since welcoming our current Executive Director, Quanice G. Floyd, in January 2022, the Guild has prioritized taking action to address the recommendations included in the racial equity assessment and the feedback we’ve received from community arts educators in the field over the years. In this period of transformation, which we call “the Portal”, we are creating a new story and building a restorative culture of trust, transparency, liberation, and love. The goal of the Portal is to deeply examine Guild practices and programs through an anti-racist, anti-oppressive lens, and identify (1) what needs to shift in the Guild’s organizational culture to authentically foster racial equity and become more consistent with our racial equity principles; and (2) systems change work required to make an impact in the community arts education field. 

The current William and Flora Hewlett Foundation grant will support: building an equitable governance structure that allows for collective decision-making, transparency and accountability; developing healing practices for the workplace and integrating them into operations; professional development for staff to foster operational equity in the work; developing tools to support a work culture grounded in clear and respected boundaries, direct confrontation (which is one of our racial equity principles), and a clear understanding of how each approaches their work; and an in-depth analysis of current field needs and how the Guild is internally reflecting those needs.  

We are grateful to members of the philanthropic community who are actively supporting the crucial work of organizational transformation and racial equity. The Guild is fully committed to this work as we reimagine and redesign the Guild as an equity-embedded organization, and we recognize that continuing this work is critical not only for the Guild as an organization, but also for our members and the field at large.

Published: October 06, 2022