Richard Stein
When government support is reduced or non-existent, when philanthropic support wanes due to the sagging stock market, and when corporate support is increasingly tied to direct shareholder interests, the local arts agency funding model is in jeopardy.
Unlike the organizations we serve—the producers and presenters of art—arts services organizations don’t typically incite passion for the cause the way a love for Mozart, Mondrian, or Mamet will. The major gift model of cultivating members up the ladder into large donors is far more difficult when your product is a grantwriting workshop as opposed to an opera production.
A trending topic in recent years is “social enterprise.” The term means something slightly different to different people. It often reflects the creation of a for-profit company to serves philanthropic goals.
Social enterprises may also be adjunct funding mechanisms to traditional nonprofit organizations or agencies. One of the biggest examples of this in the arts world is the California Arts Council.
When its general fund allocation was eliminated by the state legislature (except for the $1 million required match to its National Endowment for the Arts block grant), the council was forced to rely entirely upon the proceeds from selling its “arts license plate,” designed by famous California pop-artist Wayne Thiebaud, and introduced in 1994.
Nearly 10 years later, the council still only receives $1 million in general fund monies, but its social enterprise, the arts license plate, brings in three times that.
The council recently embarked on a celebrity-endorsed “Million Plates” campaign, which is intended to generate $40 million, and raise California’s state arts funding rank from 49th.
Local arts agencies can’t exactly issue their own license plates, but they can take advantage of their natural strengths.
At Arts Orange County, our staff possesses a unique skill set comprised of many years’ experience in artistic curation, management, marketing, and fund development. While we are able to share some of this expertise in the form of free professional development convenings (thanks to a modest corporate grant), there is no philanthropic support available to provide one-on-one consulting to organizations in need.
But there are some organizations that are willing and able to pay for such expertise directly, and ArtsOC has accepted a number of contracts to do just that.
These include curating a series of performances for a public park and conducting an call-for-artists selection process for the park’s new artists-in-residence program; operating local arts education advocacy networks serving 16 Orange County school districts under contract with a statewide advocacy organization; and consulting with an arts services organization in an adjacent county that wishes to expand its programs and strengthen its management.
While these activities are somewhat unusual, not to mention supplementary to our regular portfolio of services, our board did not see them as being outside the broad umbrella of our organization’s mission when we proposed them.
Some organizations go even further in their social enterprises by conducting non-mission-related business to earn revenues that will support their missions.
In challenging times like these, I suspect our board would also endorse such an approach, but, for now at least, an ArtsOC Gourmet Food Truck is not yet among our immediate plans—despite the fine culinary talents on our staff.