If coronavirus hadn’t sidelined so much activity, right about now I would be working on stories for Applause, our annual performing and visual arts supplement published each August. (The supplement has been postponed for 2020.) Chief among those stories was to be a profile of Terry Loftis, pictured, who within the last year was named head of TACA, a foundation that provides grants and arts funding across North Texas. We likely would have discussed the challenges and goals of running such an organization.
Now we all pretty much know what a hurdle serving the arts has become.
And as of this morning, TACA is doing its best to clear that hurdle.
Loftis announced the TACA Resiliency Initiative, a new program to make TACA more helpful and easier to work with.
“In response to this pandemic and its severe impact on the Dallas community, we are reframing our support for Dallas arts organizations with this new initiative,” Loftis said. “We’ve conceived a multi-faceted funding system for the arts to make grants more frequent, [to] simplify the grant application process, ease the criteria for consideration of a grant and [to] remove grant use restrictions.
The three-pronged approach focuses on grantmaking (unrestricted grants designed to allow groups to fulfill their missions in the new world of remote and virtual enterprises); capacity building (built around workshops aimed at training arts professionals support and expertise in navigating work during the pandemic); and thought leadership (including those such as the study of the impact of COVID that I reported on last week). TACA’s annual Perforum conference will also go entirely virtual in 2020.
For more information on TACA and its new initiative, visit its website.
— Arnold Wayne Jones
