A recent local editorial about the debt refinancing of Madison’s Overture Center (discussed earlier this week) uses an interesting phrase, which lives at the end of the excerpt below:
Mayor Dave Cieslewicz is right to express reservations about signing on to a new long-term funding scheme for the $205 million Overture Center for the Arts.
The Overture Center is an absolute gem, which will yield tremendous benefits for the city and its citizens. But there are serious questions about how much the jewel box is going to cost the taxpayers of a city that supposedly received the center as a gift….
…at some point, Overture will have to stand on its own.
These are certainly days of fiscal restraint for any government, and assuming new and vague financial risks is always worthy of a public conversation. But that last phrase, ”Overture will have to stand on its own,” frames that public conversation in an odd and unproductive way.
Nonprofit cultural facilities and activities exist to balance the whims of the commercial marketplace, not feed from them. They offer a broader range of options and resources to a community and its citizens than would be available in a pure market system. And they provide a vitality and voice that neither the public or private sectors can sustain (I’m not saying that nonprofits are more noble, but that they are essential to the ecosystem). To sustain this complex role, cultural nonprofits require earned income, certainly, but also individual donors, volunteer labor, active board governance by community members, corporate support and sponsorship, foundation initiative, and municipal support.
Contrast that complex web of connections with the premise that Overture or any cultural nonprofit ”stand on its own,” and you begin to see the disconnect. Successful and dynamic cultural facilities can only stand with the help, effort, and resources of many, regardless of who paid for their construction. Government is an inextricable part of that collective, and in fact, is often the crucial agent and enabler that makes it work.
So, let’s certainly have a public discussion of the role and responsibility of government in the mix, but let’s base the conversation on assumptions that have some relationship with reality.
Well put. Add to that the commercial energy created by non-profits (just look to Millennium Park in Chicago for a recent example), which directly creates value for real-estate developers, retail business, and thereby the tax rolls, and the non-profit equation becomes more level. Beyond that, many of the artists that hone their skills in non-profits go on to become successful commercially — most of the wildly successful CSI franchise is based on Chicago actors, honed in the city’s non-profit theaters. Where would the commercial interests offer that training?