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Just FYI, on “Kicking the Gift Horse,” I will not approve comments that call me or anyone else, say, “poopy-head,” “cuckoo,” or worse. This is not the Staten Island Advance.

Kicking the Gift Horse in the Mouth

Here on Staten Island, we’ve been having a strange few weeks, at least for those of us who are artists, musicians, poets, museums, or community groups.

I know of only one organization on the island that distributes arts grants. This organization, COAHSI (Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island), applies for money from larger foundations like the JP Morgan Chase Foundation and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, then redistributes (“regrants”) the money to individuals and art groups that would not otherwise be able to apply for the grant money. (These large foundations and government organizations don’t have the capacity for or interest in keeping track of individuals, so they hand off money to local organizations like COAHSI to manage.)

Suddenly, a few weeks after the last round of grant awards came out, a few people who didn’t receive awards attacked Ginger Shulick, the grants coordinator and occasional curator, in the pages of the local paper, the Staten Island Advance. (The third word is pronounced AD-vance, a pronunciation about which my husband and I have had many arguments; I think the strange accent is predictable from a linguistic point of view while he insists it’s just wrong. Whatever.)