The Arts Program has identified three priorities for its future grantmaking that will enable the foundation to help the performing arts community strengthen and reposition itself for long-term fiscal health and artistic vitality.
These priorities build on the strengths of the Arts Program’s past grantmaking and address the emerging trends affecting the future health of the performing arts.
In developing future grantmaking initiatives to address each of the three priorities outlined below, the Arts Program will continue to:
- Maintain its focus on the dance, jazz, presenting and theatre disciplines, as the foundation believes it can achieve greater impact by maintaining this focus rather than spreading its funding across additional disciplines;
- Continue its multi-year grantmaking approach by supporting initiatives that infuse significant funding into organizations over finite periods of two to five years;
- Emphasize depth over breadth by continuing to award a small number of large grants, rather than awarding a large number of small grants;
- Continue working through intermediaries to expand the capacity of the Arts Program’s small staff and to enhance the support services available to organizations and artists receiving grants through DDCF-funded initiatives;
- Pursue national opportunities that local or regional funders cannot undertake.
Priority 1: Investing in Leadership
DDCF has long been invested in arts leadership and will continue to invest in leading artists through intermediary-run programs. Leading artists inspire and provide models for others to emulate through their achievements, and they produce vibrant, exciting work.
Additionally, the Arts Program believes that leading organizations offer artistic, intellectual and often financial and physical resources important to smaller organizations and the larger field. They often serve as the first point of entry for audiences coming to see live performing arts for the first time.
The Arts Program’s past strategy for supporting leading organizations focused heavily on endowment funding – as seen in the foundation’s Leading National Theatres Program, Leadership Presenting Institutions and Mid-Sized Presenting Organizations Programs, and the Leading College and University Presenters Program. These initiatives served large organizations well, enhancing fundraising capacity and creating long-term artistic assets. However, the requirements of this strategy inadvertently tied the foundation’s definition of “leadership” to size, as well as staff and board capacity.
In today’s rapidly changing environment, the foundation recognizes that leadership must be defined by more than size alone. Moving forward, DDCF will use a more complex definition of leadership that includes the following criteria:
- artistic quality/vibrancy;
- creation of an influential body of work and/or sustained relationships with artists important to the larger field;
- vision;
- demonstrated ability to translate new ideas into action and achieve significant organizational change;
- a history of positive response and adaptability in light of changing conditions;
- rigorous self-scrutiny;
- cultural citizenship;
- a minimum of 5-10 years of history, including at least three years of history under the current artistic and management leaders;
- positive financial position;
- priority placed on artist compensation; and
- evidence of effective strategic planning and behavior.
While the best large organizations will still be competitive under this new definition of leadership, it will also embrace smaller leadership organizations that were not competitive under the Arts Program’s prior endowment strategy.
Anticipated Changes: In the coming months, the Arts Program staff will be working to create a new strategy for investing significant resources in leading organizations. The Arts Program expects to announce its revised strategy later in 2007. The Arts Program does not expect to renew its endowment programs in the foreseeable future.
Priority 2: Investing in Innovation
Much of the critical work addressing the impact of technology and the loss of audiences is being undertaken by artists and organizations that have yet to establish themselves as leaders. Many are newer, not well-known, lack the resources of larger organizations, and/or have yet to develop a substantial body of work. In addition, some by their very nature may not aspire to exist in perpetuity.
These artists and organizations often live on the aesthetic fringes, exploring new forms. They are often the first to investigate the implications of shifts in technology, the most multi-cultural, and the most open to challenging traditional assumptions about the audience-artist relationship. They have been the first to redefine audience as participant and remove barriers separating the amateur from the professional, seeing the value of art not as a product to be consumed but as a springboard for the audience’s own creativity.
For this diverse group of artists and organizations, innovation is not a risk: it is a raison d’etre — and some of these artists and the new forms they are creating will rise to prominence in the future, just as modern dance and jazz, both championed by Doris Duke when they were still seen as avant-garde, have now moved comfortably into the mainstream. The foundation believes that these types of artists and organizations are worthy of its investment as they create new work and address the challenges of technology and audience erosion.
Anticipated Changes: Many of the foundation’s current initiatives serve these goals and will likely be renewed. New initiatives also will be developed and announced in 2007-08.
Priority 3: Strengthening the National Sector
Arts grantmaking at most foundations emphasizes developing specific organizations or supporting the work of specific artists, but only rarely does it emphasize developing the overall strength of an entire performing arts field. The health of individual organizations and the performing arts as a whole is increasingly dependent on activities that are national in scope, such as data collection and comparative analysis, research, networking, and information dissemination that leads to field-wide learning.
For individual organizations, better data collection leads to improved benchmarking and more precise budgeting; for disciplines as a whole, such data is important in policy and advocacy circles. Disseminating best practice is often too burdensome a task for a local or regional arts organization to undertake, resulting in loss of field knowledge and unnecessary replication of failed, ineffective strategies.
National organizations play a critical role in the transfer of such knowledge and help promote greater organizational efficiency. National organizations can examine and explore field-wide issues, and are working to promote long-term field strength by developing leadership academies, supporting mentorships and cultivating networks that seed artistic collaborations vital to each field.
The Arts Program’s third priority will be to invest in building overall sector health by supporting select national organizations and national initiatives. The Arts Program will develop and announce new initiatives in this area in 2007.