Rishard Allen joins the Pop Culture Collaborative team as the Grants & Community Manager. In this role, he will oversee the grantmaking process and provide direct support to current and prospective grantees from proposal development to final reporting. 

 

Rishard is an emerging philanthropic professional and creative consultant with multiple years of experience in grants management and administration, program and project management, and racial equity initiatives. His professional practice has primarily focused on supporting, preserving, and strengthening the arts, culture, and creative economy, especially for marginalized populations.  

Rishard’s career began at Arts for Learning Indiana, an affiliate of Young Audiences, where he worked with schools, community centers, and juvenile detention facilities to create arts-in-education learning opportunities with professional teaching artists. He then transitioned to the Arts Council of Indianapolis, where he directed a grantmaking portfolio of $1.8 million that benefitted both individual artists and arts nonprofits. Following, Rishard joined The Indianapolis Foundation, an affiliate of the Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF) collaborative, to implement a national community foundation framework to dismantle systemic racism.

 
Rishard has also lent his talents to several local, regional, and national working groups and committees, including at IndyHub, WolfBrown, Americans for the Arts, Arts Midwest, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, and the Community Foundation Opportunity Network. He’s also a published scholar in The Giving Institute’s Giving USA 2021 publication. Rishard obtained his B.S. in Arts Management from Indiana University Bloomington and his M.A. in Philanthropic Studies from the IU Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.