Createquity.Createquity.

Around the horn: Trayvon edition

Ian David Moss — Sun, 28 Jul 2013 21:34:43 +0000

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

The National Endowment for the Arts has shared a draft of its strategic plan for FY14-18, and in what I believe may be a first, is inviting public comment on it via SurveyMonkey. Ah, these modern times we live in. Now let’s just hope House Republicans don’t succeed in slashing its budget by 49%.
A new report from the Wagner School of Public Service at NYU and the Center for an Urban Future details 15 policy innovations for cities that are “novel, proven and scalable.” While no arts-specific innovations made the list, one of the ideas is a type of “digital badging” program found in Philadelphia, Providence and Chicago that “allow[s] students both inside the K-12 system and outside to earn credentials for skills they learn in a wide variety of educational settings, from digital tools workshops at public libraries to art classes at museums.”
The City of Buffalo is at risk of losing over $1 million worth of donated musical instruments if it follows through with cuts to music programs in its schools.
The City of New York has taken over management of the financially troubled South Street Seaport Museum.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

The McKnight Foundation has hired Arleta Little as arts program officer, replacing Laura Zimmermann. If she’s looking for advice on how to settle into her new role, she can check out this completely awesome video Laura made as a goodbye kiss to her old employer.
After 25 years in various positions at the Ford Foundation, philanthropy data nut and friend of the blog Kyle Reis is now Senior Director of Global Data Services at TechSoup. Here he is writing about the Foundation Center’s Reporting Commitment.

IN THE FIELD

Doug Borwick offers a range of thoughts from the Americans for the Arts Convention.
So long Codaex, a European classical music distributor.
A new national network of Latino theater companies has formed in Southern California. Service organizations will note with interest that a Theatre Communications Group conference was the forum that provided the initial push.
In very sad news, Rick Lester, founding CEO of arts marketing consultancy TRG Arts, passed away suddenly last weekend while participating in a bike ride for charity. TRG, which is notable for its management of nearly two dozen community arts patron databases across the country, has a memorial page up with a myriad of touching tributes from colleagues past and present.

BIG IDEAS

The NEA’s Jason Schupbach reflects on the Our Town program now that its third round of grants has been announced.
The Internet is democratizing all sorts of things, not just the arts. Here, the Atlantic reports on the rise of citizen cartography.
Rather than trying (or refusing) to do more with less, why not use the challenge as an opportunity to explore constructive partnerships?
Two more than worthwhile perspectives on the past and future of online marketing, from Seth Godin and Adam Thurman.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

Attention study-at-home MBA candidates: the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Phil Buchanan points us to a motherlode of Stanford philanthropy case studies made available for free recently via Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen’s ProjectU. CEP also has some tips for communicating with grantees.
Rick Noguchi of the Irvine Foundation offers an inside look into grant deliberations and explains how the foundation made some of its decisions in the most recent round of the Exploring Engagement Fund.
Streaming music services in general, and Spotify in particular, have come under increasing criticism from musicians for their ultra-low royalty payout rates. Most recently, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and several associates decided to pull their music from the site in protest. But is Spotify actually undercutting music piracy rather than album sales? As usual, the folks at Future of Music Coalition have turned in the most thoughtful analysis we’ve yet seen on this issue.
Thinking about starting a crowdfunding project and not sure how to figure out the budgeting? You might want to try Taylor Davidson’s financial modeling template in Excel.

RESEARCH CORNER

A new report from Americans for the Arts details the mostly modest salaries of local arts agency employees. But who says you can’t get rich being an arts administrator? Indeed, the NEA’s Sunil Iyengar has a long post on income inequality in the arts, and the idea that it may be portending changes in the economy as a whole. And Diane Ragsdale considers the interesting question of whether being paid too much “crowds out” one’s existing intrinsic motivation to work.
Can we make a dent in poverty just by teaching parents how to parent better? A long-term study from Jamaica suggests maybe so. Meanwhile, the achievement gap between rich kids and poor kids is now twice as large as that between black children and white children. The cause of poor performance by poor students? No one’s quite figured it out yet, but it’s not bad teachers, nor is it moms on crack. (Seriously – a 23-year longitudinal study in Philadelphia has revealed that being born to poverty affects kids’ cognitive development far more than whether or not their mothers were on crack while pregnant. Think about that one for a bit.) Here’s a map of poverty and race in America.
Boston’s Charles River is finally swimmable again – a concrete example of a data-driven policy success. (And it took nearly two decades to make it happen.)

ETC.

Congratulations to Andrew Taylor on a full decade of his blog, the Artful Manager. That is quite a milestone in this space! Andrew had it going on pretty much light years before any of us.
Ben Huh, the head of I Can Has Cheezburger (better known as the home of LOLcats), on “bad art”:

[W]e are entering an age where there is very little in the way between an idea and an expression online, and that means more and more people are participating in ways of expressing themselves. What we do is encourage that artistic expression even if we don’t recognize their creations as “fine art.”

Human beings have this incredible desire to connect and express themselves and that is what is filling up our time on the Internet, and I don’t think that is bad. It is actually a wonderful thing.

Introducing a new $800 million arts foundation

Ian David Moss — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:39:00 +0000

Oh, if only if it were a real $800 million arts foundation! Instead, I refer to the Ortiz Foundation for the Arts, a project for my excellent Philanthropic Foundations class that just wrapped up last week. As anyone who’s read my Thoughts on Effective Philanthropy series knows, I’ve been interested in foundation strategy as it pertains to the arts for a while now. This assignment offered me a chance to think about those ideas and recommendations in an integrated context instead of as separate ideas. My team’s task was to develop a comprehensive programmatic and operational framework for the following foundation as described in the handout we each received the third week of class:

A family in New York that has long been involved with the arts wishes to establish a foundation that will provide funding for visual arts, music, theater, and dance. Although they have a particular interest in the support of New York institutions, they are also consider a foundation program that funds the arts nationally. The donor’s family will hold many, but not all of the seats on the board, and together they will donate approximately $400 million to the foundation in the first year and then add another $400 million over the next five years.

This week, in a series of posts, I’ll go through some of the decisions that my partners, Shiri Friedman, Daniel Reid, Michael Shay, and Michelle Zhao, and I made in approaching this project. It was a fun experience that, among other things, resulted in my learning what “terpsichorean” means. I welcome comments and reactions.

Generally speaking, we wanted our foundation to be as creative as the work that it was supporting, and it was very important to us to find the gaps in the current infrastructure so as to make our work more effective. We thus conducted extensive review of peer institutions, the results of which I’ll discuss in more detail tomorrow. We were also anxious to experiment with integrating some aspects of “new philanthropy” models like those of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation or New Profit into the arts world, which has seen less of this type of innovation.

Today, we’ll begin with the “Values and Philosophies” section of our report. It goes like this:

Our grantees are critical to our success. The Ortiz Foundation deeply respects the vibrant work of the New York City arts organizations it supports. The Foundation will ensure that its processes are transparent, timely, and streamlined so as to promote a healthy and productive relationship between grantor and grantee. The Foundation recognizes that it has much to learn from its grantees as well as much to teach them.

Knowledge is power. The Ortiz Foundation for the Arts will attempt at every turn to justify its policy decisions, program priorities, and individual grant decisions with objective evidence. In doing so, the Foundation recognizes that an honest accounting of what is known and what is unknown is more valuable than a blind trust in statistics.

The best opportunities are not always the obvious ones. The Ortiz Foundation believes that competition for grants is healthy and desirable, and that the most interesting and diverse pool of proposals is generally yielded by an open-call process rather than application by invitation only. Recognizing that a purely reactive stance is less likely to reach artists and communities outside of traditional institutional networks, the Ortiz Foundation will take the initiative to ensure the visibility of its programs in a variety of contexts.

Grantmaking is both a privilege and a responsibility. The decisions made by any funding organization have a real and significant impact on the lives of individuals and organizations alike. Yet the consequences of missteps are all too often borne by a funder’s constituents, rather than the funder itself. Accordingly, the Ortiz Foundation for the Arts will hold its staff and Board to the highest standards of performance. Foundation personnel will maintain a deep dedication to and respect for the Foundation’s mission and the hard work that is necessary to serve it.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at the role of OFA within the New York City arts funding world and describe ways in which the Foundation seeks to differentiate itself.

Wrap-up: SOM Philanthropy Conference (Part I)

Ian David Moss — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:02:00 +0000

On November 16, 2007, I had the pleasure of attending the 3rd Annual Yale School of Management Philanthropy Conference, an ambitious event that included a total of seven panels, three guest speakers, and multiple receptions. The all-volunteer student organizing team did a great job, and I was glad to be involved as the coordinator of one of the panels. The event kicked off with a presentation from Courtney Bourns, director of programs at Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. Courtney’s talk was excellent, and I was surprised and pleased that much of it resonated with opinions I’ve expressed on this blog and elsewhere. Her main theme was that foundations are most effective when they listen to the organizations they are funding–that is, when they allow the organizations on the ground to be the experts. I see foundations–especially those funding the arts–as being fundamentally in an enabling role, not a controlling one. Overwhelmingly, nonprofits have been clamoring for more general operating support (GOS), more multiyear support, and less restriction on how the money can be used. The first and third of these go hand in hand–general operating, for the non-insiders reading this, basically means the same thing as unrestricted. In practice, most “general operating” grants go to pay for boring things like utility bills and salaries for the development staff, since a nonprofit’s programs are usually paid for by grants that have been awarded for those projects specifically. However, it doesn’t have to be this way–if more foundations were willing to provide GOS, then some of that money could be used to support programs. This would be a wonderful thing for nonprofits because it would allow them to allocate program budgets more flexibly, accommodating actual present-day realities instead of being constrained by projections that may have been made years earlier or under different leadership. The multiyear support is important for the following reason: if you fund an organization year in and year out, but you make them reapply each time, what do you think that does to their development costs? That’s right, they go up. The more time that organization has to spend cultivating, applying for, and reporting on your grant, the more your investment is getting sucked up by overhead. As much as I love them, I’m pretty sure that the mission of most nonprofits is not to provide job opportunities for fundraising professionals. So, the more unnecessary steps the funders can remove from the process, the more efficient their grantmaking will be.

Next up was the panel that I organized, entitled “Funder/Grantee Relationships.” We were joined by five panelists: Kim Healey from the NewAlliance Bank Foundation, Barbara Strauss from Clifford Beers Clinic, Sarah Fabish and Lillian Cruz from the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven, and Deb Stewart from the Consultation Center. Beth Daponte, who teaches the Program Evaluation class at SOM, served admirably as moderator. The conversation built upon the themes of Courtney Bourns’s talk, exploring the balance between grantmakers’ and grantseekers’ needs in program evaluation. One issue Healey mentioned was that, as a corporate funder, multiyear grants did not make sense for NewAlliance because the foundation could not necessarily predict its budget from year to year. Nevertheless, the representatives from both funding organizations acknowledged the difficulties an overly complicated evaluation system could produce, for funder as well as grantee (it does no one any good to have stacks of unread reports taking up space in the office). For her part, Barbara Strauss of Clifford Beers said that the evaluation process had improved discipline enormously at her organization. CFGNH adopted a new evaluation system last fall incorporating several levels and methods. Some of the innovations, as I understood them, include asking grantees to evaluate the impact of a grant two to three years afterwards, instead of directly following the period of support; commissioning formal studies evaluating groups of organizations for the purpose of knowledge sharing; and hiring an outside firm to document a grant’s impact while it’s happening. Sarah Fabish added that CFGNH’s evaluation process includes a site visit, an important component that helps identify great projects that may not have looked so good on paper.

While there are many positives to evaluation, Prof. Daponte encouraged the panelists to comment on the pitfalls as well. The main issue mentioned, as before, was capacity. Ms. Cruz allowed that funders are often not so good at determining the cost of a new requirement in their process, and often that cost is paid for by the grantee. Ms. Strauss revealed that her organization simply does not apply to grant opportunities if it knows that the organizational strain will not be worth the potential benefits. (This was also something that I encountered at my last job.) The bottom line, as Deb Stewart put it, is that funders need to decide how they want the staff at the grantee organizations to spend their time. It may not always be possible to have systems that are both appropriate to the scale of the organization and truly state-of-the-art.

Ultimately, the panelists agreed, these tensions and opportunities are best explored in the context of a close and candid funder/grantee relationship. Funders need to be clear about their goals and expectations, while grantees need to feel empowered to speak up when a requirement may be causing more harm than good. When both conditions are achieved, the potential for an optimal solution is enormously increased.

I’ll post part II of the wrap-up, covering the remainder of the conference, in a few days.