Last July, the Wallace Foundation launched a five-year, $53 million initiative exploring how arts organizations of color “leverage their community orientation to increase their resilience while sustaining their relevance.”
The commitment represented an impressively large investment in an arts field that’s dominated by affluent individual donors. But even more importantly, it found Wallace tackling many of the important questions that emerged across a sector that’s been transformed by the pandemic and the response to the murder of George Floyd. What does “community orientation” look like for organizations serving people of color? Can it be measured? What are the distinct challenges facing these historically underfunded organizations?
Ten months later, we have some preliminary answers. In late May, the foundation announced 18 grantee organizations founded by, with and for communities of color. Each organization will carry out a specific project to address a key strategic challenge, and researchers will work with leaders to surface transferable insights about the evolving relationship between “community orientation, resilience and relevance.”
The common thread running through Wallace’s inaugural cohort is this idea of community orientation. Bahia Ramos, Wallace’s director of arts programs, told me previous studies suggested that organizations that “have the values and needs of their community embedded into their mission are better off,” in that they are uniquely resilient and relevant to the audiences they serve. Wallace’s goal across this initiative’s opening stage was to “understand how and where it happens,” Ramos said.
Another phase of the initiative, expected to begin in late 2022, will support smaller arts organizations of color with budgets below $500,000. Ramos said it was important for Wallace to fund and learn from the kinds of larger organizations featured in its first cohort, plus those with smaller budgets that “represent the majority of arts organizations of color and do incredibly exciting work.” All told, the foundation has increased its total commitment to the initiative to $100 million over five years.
A common set of challenges
Wallace received over 250 applications from visual and performing arts fields, media arts, and community-based organizations focused on artistic practice, and the 18 grantees will receive anywhere between $900,000 to $3.75 million each over five years to develop and pursue individual projects.
Grantees will embark on a planning year for their projects with Wallace, researchers, consultants and financial management advisers. These organizations plan to address a set of strategic challenges that include succession planning, developing equity-centered practices, developing values-aligned business models, increasing visibility and creating cultural spaces that nurture the creativity and wellbeing of artists and the communities to which they belong.
In addition, the Social Science Research Council will pair a researcher with each of the funded arts organizations to develop ethnographies that document their organizational history, practices and culture.
A deep dive into “community orientation”
Wallace’s press release noted that beginning in the 1970s, researchers posited that a performing arts organization’s “community orientation, coupled with high-quality artistic programming, may be foundational to organizational health.”
I suspect most readers will find this to be self-evident. Why wouldn’t strong community orientation be an organizational asset? But intuiting an idea to be true is much different than observing and analyzing it. Compounding matters is the fact that the term “community orientation” is an intentionally broad one that can include an organization’s ability to preserve the art forms of a particular racial group, supporting artists, or developing a cultural workforce.
At a broad level, Ramos said that community orientation is “represented in the way the organizations respond in real time to a need or crisis.” The obvious example here is how organizations pivoted during the pandemic. Leaders thought, “I’m a theater, but now I need to be a food bank,” Ramos said, and recognized they didn’t “exist solely for the sake of art, but to also serve a community purpose by providing a sense of belonging and connection.”
While the pandemic clearly galvanized this shift, Ramos said the field was heading in that direction long before the spring of 2020.
In 2014, Wallace launched a six-year, $52 million Building Audiences for Sustainability (BAS) initiative to identify and share insights into how performing arts organizations successfully engage, expand and retain their audiences. Wallace staff found that in order to inspire audiences to return, leaders, often equipped with robust market research data, had to understand ways to define and understand their audience’s identity, while ensuring this identity was “absorbed and reflected in the organization,” Ramos said. “These discussions led us down this path toward community orientation.”
“We’ll give you some breathing room”
The nonprofit community — and often IP writers — tend to be proponents of greater general operating support in the sector, especially considering that many grantmakers still aren’t sold on providing unrestricted support. At the same time, however, the Wallace Foundation’s initiative is a textbook example of the advantages of restricted funding, which earmarks grants for pre-defined projects.
For example, at least from a funder’s perspective, it allows program managers to identify and measure discrete outcomes that can be useful in the future. This funding strategy complements Wallace’s core competency of identifying data-driven best practices that can be shared across the broader field. It can also benefit organizations by surfacing issues that may not be on leaders’ radars.
For example, its BAS initiative produced insights that proved to be prescient when the pandemic forced organizations to ramp up remote programming. Similarly, its initiative supporting arts organizations of color will look at succession planning, which Ramos said is “currently a universal theme within the arts.”
Many resource-constrained organizations led by or serving communities of color do not have a formal succession plan in place, either for internal staff or board members, and the failure to implement one can force them to conduct expensive, disruptive and time-consuming searches. Ramos said that a lack of a succession plan can be a liability for grantseekers, since “you have long-term funders who are looking to leave behind a legacy of stability.”
Now, it’s perfectly plausible that an organization could use flexible support to develop a succession plan. But this implies that leaders, at least to some extent, would prioritize succession planning over more urgent needs like paying for programming costs or bolstering their cash reserves. When framed as a financial trade-off in which flexible support is finite, the scenario suddenly seems a little less realistic.
So the Wallace initiative helps leaders tackle vexing or under-resourced activities like succession planning while developing models that can be exported to other organizations. “Our offer was, ‘We’ll give you some breathing room to really think about these questions, and not think about it as a fire you have to put out, but an aspiration you’d like to meet,’” Ramos said.
“Be open to change”
Another benefit of Wallace’s approach is that its leaders can take a high-altitude view of the arts ecosystem and identify trends that aren’t readily visible at the granular level. Reflecting on the initiative’s work over the past 10 months, Ramos said that one of the things that struck her was “how under-documented the legacies and practices of these organizations were in the broader landscape.”
Many leaders spoke about their operations through “the deficit lens of what they need,” rather than laying out “how they’ve been able to survive in spite of undercapitalization.” In other words, leaders were under-resourced and modest, and as a result, they didn’t amass what Ramos called a “robust body of knowledge around their work.” Sensing an opportunity, Ramos and her team added the Social Science Research Council ethnography component to the initiative to ensure researchers documented organizations’ practices.
Nonprofit leaders also encouraged Wallace’s staff to engage organizations of color with budgets below $500,000, so beginning later this year, the foundation will begin rolling out the first phase of this complementary initiative.
In the meantime, Ramos said Wallace’s work will continue to evolve based on her staff’s interactions with organizational leaders. “We’ve been trying to adapt to what we hear in our conversations, and it’s been exciting,” she said. “The impact sometimes isn’t immediate — you’re not going to see it in a spreadsheet. But over time, once you go into the deep context and unpack what’s happening, you can sense it and be open to change.”