Back in June, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts appeared out of nowhere to drop its inaugural round of funding — $1.25 million in unrestricted support across 78 arts groups through its Artist Choice Grants program. The foundation was seeded with a bequest from Ruth DeYoung Kohler II, a member of Wisconsin’s Kohler family, known for the privately held manufacturing and hospitality company Kohler Co.
In the MacKenzie Scott era, I suspect that $1.25 million figure didn’t make any arts leaders spit out their coffee onto their computer screens. There is, however, a lot more money on the way. Kohler was a major shareholder in the family company, and at a whopping $440 million, her bequest, coupled with the foundation’s intention to move $17 million and $20 million out the door annually, immediately catapulted it into the upper strata of arts funders.
Last month, the Milwaukee-based funder announced another $11.5 million in unrestricted support across three new programs to 138 organizations, bringing the total disbursed this year to $12.75 million. Recipients will also have access to best practices and expert advice, as the foundation envisions each cohort as its own self-contained learning network. Looking a bit further out, it aims to launch a program that directly supports individual artists.
Setting aside the foundation’s endowment, there’s a lot to like about its grantmaking approach thus far. In six short months, it has checked off many of the boxes laid out by arts leaders in the early days of the pandemic, such as providing unrestricted funding, supporting organizations working with fiscal sponsors, and partnering with artists to guide the grantee nomination and selection process.
“We are not an island,” Executive Director Karen Patterson told me via email. “Instead, we are building networks of like-minded partners interested in knowledge-sharing and innovative models. We all come directly from working in the arts and culture field so we hope that those specific experiences will inform all our programs.”
A lifelong patron of the arts
Born in 1941, Ruth DeYoung Kohler II was a champion of under-recognized artists and art forms. She was director of Sheboygan, Wisconsin’s John Michael Kohler Arts Center for over 50 years, served as chair and member of the Wisconsin Arts Board, and was a panel member and site evaluator for the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Organization. Kohler also served on the Kohler Foundation, Inc., board from 1969 to 2019 and as the foundation’s president from 1999 to 2006.
Kohler passed away in 2020, and two years later, the Ruth Foundation launched to honor her bequest. “Meaningful support for artists and the ethical stewardship of Ruth Kohler’s legacy are at the core of the foundation’s work,” reads the foundation’s FAQ page. “We are inspired by the breadth of her life and giving: artist-driven and non-hierarchical, with an unwavering generosity and a commitment to the unexpected and the impossible.”
For the foundation’s inaugural Artist Choice Grants, Patterson and her team invited 50 artists to nominate up to three organizations each. “We generated a list of 78 organizations from that list to offer our inaugural grants to these unsuspecting organizations,” she said. Grants were in increments of $10,000, $20,000 and $50,000. The foundation will announce its Artist Choice Grants annually in the spring.
“Starting and remaining artist-centric in our structure and programs has fueled so much creativity, fostered natural partnerships, and allowed us to be nimble, intentional, and always in a space of learning,” Patterson said. “We are grateful for the inaugural group of artists who nominated such an incredible mix of organizations and set us on our path.”
Three new programs
It’s been a busy seven months since the foundation announced its Artist Choice Grants. Back in June, it had two full-time employees, and is now up to five. Patterson and her team also built out three new grant programs that constitute the entirety of this recent round of funding.
The first, the Core Grant program, is a follow-up to the Artist Choice Grants. The foundation invited previous recipients and new invitees to apply. The Core Grant program follows a theme of “How an artist lives, how an artist makes, and how an artist is remembered.” The foundation awarded a total of $4.5 million spread across 84 organizations, including Beta-Local (San Juan, Puerto Rico), Lauren Edson Dance (Boise), and On the Boards (Seattle).
The RDK Legacy Fund “directly relates to Ruth DeYoung Kohler’s pattern of giving in her lifetime,” Patterson said. Through this fund, the foundation announced it would provide $2.5 million annually across 40 arts and culture organizations that Ruth personally supported. The foundation didn’t say how that amount is being disbursed, but at the very least, we know that leaders at 40 organizations can go to sleep knowing they’ll be getting an annual infusion of support for the foreseeable future.
Grantees include Langlais Sculpture Preserve (Cushing, Maine), Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park and Museum (Wilson, North Carolina), and Northern Clay Center (Minneapolis). Twenty-six of the Legacy Fund’s 40 recipient organizations are based in Kohler’s home state of Wisconsin.
Through the third program, Thought Leaders Grants, the foundation will give 14 art organizations approximately $300,000 within the next three years, for a total of $4.5 million. Recipients include Afro Charities (Baltimore), People’s Kitchen Collective, and Rivers Institute (New Orleans). Patterson said she and her two colleagues on the foundation’s executive team — Program Director Kim Nguyen and Artistic Initiatives Program Director Rachel Reichert — chose the recipients “based on months of research and conversations about exemplary, community-focused organizations who are undertaking ambitious, transformative initiatives.”
“We aim to build trust”
The most encouraging aspect of the foundation’s strategy is its embrace of unrestricted support. It probably sounds like a broken record at this point, but arts leaders were clamoring for flexible funding long before the pandemic accentuated small arts organizations’ precarious existence. Many institutions didn’t have ample cash reserves or endowments when the crisis hit, and some of those that survived did so thanks to the largesse of Uncle Sam. With those funds drying up, grantmakers have no interest in going back to the pre-2020 status quo, and the best way to do that is to provide these organizations with unrestricted support that leaders can allocate as they see fit.
“By and large, these grants are set for general operating expenses,” Patterson said. “We aim to build trust with organizations and to learn where their priorities lie. There are several organizations, such as those operating with fiscal sponsors or with other IRS-set statuses that require a few parameters.”
I’d like to draw your attention to the fiscal sponsor piece, as it speaks to another pandemic-era action item laid out by funding leaders. Back in September of 2020, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Arts Program Director Maurine Knighton mentioned that some foundations prohibit organizations from working with fiscal sponsors when they don’t have 501(c)(3) status. “That’s not going to be helpful in this moment,” she said. Moving forward, Knighton hoped funders would “be open to fiscal sponsors in cases where that is appropriate.”
The Ruth Foundation provided funding to 17 organizations with fiscal sponsors in this most recent round, reflecting its leadership’s willingness to cast a wide net. “We are grateful to fiscal sponsors who allow us to support those smaller organizations and by extension contribute to more complex and robust arts and culture organizations,” Patterson said. “We often say that we see our role as belonging to an arts and culture continuum; this includes a variety of scales, outreach and regions. Fiscal sponsors allow us to work alongside some of the most interesting and experimental organizations.”
Crunching the numbers
When the Ruth Foundation went live in June, Andy Warhol Foundation President Joel Wachs told the New York Times that it “will be right up there at the top” in terms of arts funding. While Wachs speaks from direct experience — his institution had $300 million in total assets for the fiscal year ending 2020 and disburses approximately $17 million annually — the Ruth Foundation will be a little different than the average heavyweight in this space.
Many of the field’s prominent funders — think Ford, Hewlett, Kresge, Duke — include arts giving as part of a broader portfolio. The latter, for example, had $2.4 billion in total assets for the fiscal year ending 2020. According to its grants database, Duke made 41 mostly project-based grants totaling $26 million to arts organizations in 2021. The average grant length was 2.4 years, suggesting it shoveled roughly $11 million out the door that year.
The Ruth Foundation’s Core Grants and RDK Legacy Fund moved a combined $7 million in one-time grants in 2022 — a substantial amount for an inaugural year — while its Thought Leaders grants spread out funding across three years. Assuming the foundation eventually gives approximately $19 million annually, that payout would represent 73% of Duke’s 2021 arts funding, even though the foundation has just 17% of Duke’s total assets.
I realize there are countless ways we can play with the numbers, and I’m not suggesting one funder’s approach is inherently better than the other. But it is striking that a smaller grantmaker can have such an outsized impact, especially when the support is unrestricted. Nonprofits have made it abundantly clear they prefer flexible funding and that restricted support often distorts an organization’s mission.
Then there’s the foundation’s $440 million endowment itself. As Warhol’s Wachs noted, the foundation is already among the larger arts funders, and that’s before the magic of compounded interest kicks in. If the endowment generates a conservative return of 6%, it’ll grow to $787 million within 10 years. At a 5% payout rate, we’d be looking at $39 million out the door annually — a massive amount in vital, unrestricted funding that could flow to small- to mid-sized organizations, and possibly artists themselves.
“Turning over every stone”
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the Ruth Foundation, just like philanthropy’s biggest proponent of unrestricted funding and most foundations, does not accept unsolicited proposals.
We tend to frown upon funders that don’t provide at least some point of access, but this approach makes sense for the nascent foundation, at least for the time being. “At this stage — in our first year, with a new staff — we feel that it is important to establish our priorities and align our programs with our values and mission,” Patterson said. “In addition, we want to be mindful of our capacity and workloads. In this way, invitations seem like the best path forward right now. That being said, each program we’ve launched has its own separate process, and should we collectively see the right space for proposals, we won’t shy away.”
The foundation’s artist-nominated approach also mirrors funders’ post-pandemic democratizing impulse to share or outsource due diligence to individuals embedded within their respective communities, many of which have been traditionally passed over by funding leaders operating in their respective silos. These efforts include other artist-nominated programs like the 3Arts Awards, the MacArthur Foundation’s forays into participatory grantmaking, and the Mellon Foundation’s regranting partnerships. As Duke’s Knighton told me back in 2020, “Humility is the watchword. We don’t know everything.”
Patterson picked up on this theme, telling me that “we like to say that we are turning over every stone before landing on a specific direction or initiative. This means that we are not taking anything for granted and are intentional about looking at everything from all angles.”
Six months after the foundation announced its Artist Choice Grants, Patterson and her team are toggling between fine-tuning an increasingly sophisticated grantmaking operation and keeping an eye on the big picture. “It has been challenging to embrace that complexity on a daily basis, and there were days when we could have easily opted for something more transactional,” she said. “We make sure we leave lots of room for ‘what if?’ and I think that is a lesson we will continue to learn.”