{"id":514,"date":"2023-08-22T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2023-08-22T00:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/scenechange\/?p=514"},"modified":"2023-08-22T18:10:05","modified_gmt":"2023-08-22T18:10:05","slug":"funders-how-do-you-hold-your-nonprofit-arts-organizations-accountable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/scenechange\/2023\/08\/22\/funders-how-do-you-hold-your-nonprofit-arts-organizations-accountable\/","title":{"rendered":"Funders: How Do You Hold Your Nonprofit Arts Organizations Accountable?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Alternately, are you just robotically giving the most money to previous beneficiaries?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(Image by 66kim from Pixabay)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In a city in which I no longer live, I served on a local government arts panel evaluating capital requests from arts organizations in the community. We looked at a number of proposals from organizations with small, medium, and large budgets, but the money for such capital expenses came from the same government allocation. We didn\u2019t have enough money to fund them all, nor would we have funded them all given the nature of the requests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The large organizations asked to fund, for the most part, top-of-the-line technical apparatuses, room renovations (donor parlors, in particular), and updated equipment to replace their current technologies. Many said they would then donate that older equipment to other nonprofit venues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All the other organizations asked to fund items such as computers for their administrative staff (because they didn\u2019t have any), ticketing systems (to replace handwritten charts and wood racks), chairs (in one case, the organization\u2019s theater chairs were almost 75 years old and, predictably, mostly broken), rudimentary sound and light boards (because they were still just flicking switches on and off), and other comparatively basic needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In essence, they were asking for a 12-pack of Ticonderoga pencils<\/a> while the large organizations asked for a Patron of Art Homage to Victoria Limited Edition 888 Fountain Pen<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Just so you know\u2026 the pencils are on the left.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Making things exponentially worse, large organizations have a number of people residing in their development departments. These experts have keen insights, knowledge, and experience raising funds. Their grant requests used the best terminology, the most prolific statistics and acumen, and a high level of writing prowess. Almost always, that was due to the single fact that dedicated grantwriters had been tasked to attack this grant application. The only other tasks with which that the large companies\u2019 grantwriters might have had to handle included the search and disposition of other grants and general development work\u2014some of which used the same (or at least similar) language, approach, and persuasive techniques. That\u2019s the advantage of having a bevy of highly-educated, experienced development personnel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For small and medium-sized organizations, the development department is often a single person. He or she is an underpaid workhorse, handling not only grant writing activities, but also annual galas, correspondence with donors, board committees, and anything else that falls under the umbrella of \u201cunearned income,\u201d an insulting description of the hard work at hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In applications from those organizations, often the writing was rushed, inexact, and a grammatical abomination. The request were desperate and not terribly well-supported by data. The amount requested had often only been passed on from the person in charge of the building (costs and all), with no supporting documents verifying the amount requested. There were flowery, obviously repeated phrases from other grant requests. In one case, the copying went too far; the requestor mistakenly kept in the name of the foundation from a previous ask for the same equipment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those in the room shook their heads at many of these requests because most in the room either worked for the government or larger arts organizations themselves. And while none of them had a request in to the committee, their friends and colleagues from large organizations seemed to float in the same circles as they. One person went so far as to laugh out loud, saying, \u201cIf they really wanted to get a donation, they should have spent more time on this application, don\u2019t you think?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As someone who has worked for very large and very small organizations (and medium-sized ones, too), I got pissed off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDo you know what the person who wrote this does all day? Do you know the circumstance? Do you understand that s\/he is a one-person department handling everything under the sun? And do you get it that the person is young, without a great deal of experience, and criminally underpaid? How dare you!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, I got a little dramatic. But the empathy in the room was in short supply, to say the least.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clearly, our goal was bifurcated \u2013 to serve the people of the region and to fund the arts organizations (those with buildings). These are not the same goals. They\u2019re not even parallel goals. Often\u2014more often than you might think\u2014these are opposing goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It reminded me of the greatest negative issue within our current system of capitalism. The cost of a loaf of bread is a fixed cost. It represents a tiny portion of the expense budget of a wealthy person. It also represents a much larger portion of the expense budget of a poor person. The meanness of the system turns relatively sane people into believing that poor people need be punished, somehow, for needing that loaf of bread, a wholly insane outlook. As Rutger Bregman said in his TED talk<\/a> (with over 4 million views), \u201cPoverty isn\u2019t a lack of character; it\u2019s a lack of cash.\u201d If you have never watched this talk, you\u2019re missing out on some key revelations in the nonprofit business.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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