Philanthropy Phalters

Given the shit-storm of the global financial meltdown, what will happen to charitable giving? Over $300 billion was donated last year in the United States, and individual donors account for 88% of that giving. It’s not really a question of ‘if’ things will be bad, it’s only a question of ‘when’. Check out this article from the NYTimes called ‘Bracing for Lean Times Ahead’.

Obama and McCain on the Arts

Not surprising, both U.S. candidates have differing view on the arts and government’s role in funding it. Obama is calling for more federal support, while McCain is calling for less. The McCain campaign has released very little language on the subject, but two weeks ago issued this four-sentence statement basically saying it’s up to local entities.

“John McCain believes that arts education can play a vital role fostering creativity and expression. He is a strong believer in empowering local school districts to establish priorities based on the needs of local schools and school districts. Schools receiving federal funds for education must be held accountable for providing a quality education in basic subjects critical to ensuring students are prepared to compete and succeed in the global economy. Where these local priorities allow, he believes investing in arts education can play a role in nurturing the creativity of expression so vital to the health of our cultural life and providing a means of creative expression for young people.”

Obama, on the other hand, has made arts proposals a part of his official party platform. His key points are: Expand Public/Private Partnerships Between Schools and Arts Organizations; Create an Artist Corps; Publicly Champion the Importance of Arts Education; Support Increased Funding for the NEA; Attract Foreign Talent; Provide Health Care to Artists and Ensure Tax Fairness for Artists. You can find his arts policy statement here.

U.S. Congressional Arts Report Card

Americans for the Arts has published their 'Congressional Arts Report Card 2008' in advance of the November election. Statistics show that the budget for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) is just 48 cents per American. Funding for the NEA, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Arts in Education and the office of Museum Services totals approximately eight hundredths of one percent of the federal discretionary budget. The NEA budget had its highest budget back in 1992 at $176 million. In FY08 it is $144.7 million. Taking inflation into consideration, the FY08 budget has about half the purchasing power of its '92 budget. Without going through each member of Congress' grade , I'd just like to single out Doug Lamborn (Republican for the 5th district in Colorado). Not only does he receive a failing grade, he offered an amendment in June 2007 to eliminate funding for the NEA all together. Luckily the vote failed 97 to 335, but anyone in Lake, Park, El Paso, Fremont, Chaffee, or Teller counties should send this loser a message on election day that his antics won't be tolerated.

Creative Collaboration Southeast Europe Arts Fund

WHAT IS CREATIVE COLLABORATION?
Creative Collaboration is the British Council’s South East Europe* Arts Project. This includes Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece, Israel, Kosovo, Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Turkey.

WHAT IS THE COLLABORATIVE PROJECT FUND?
Creative Collaboration operates in partnership with artists, cultural producers and creative entrepreneurs to create a series of collaborative cross-border art projects in South East Europe and the UK. Projects can include performances, publications, exhibitions, installations, networks, websites, residencies or workshops (this list is not exhaustive). You should apply to the Collaborative Project Fund if you want to create such a project.

WHAT DO WE WANT TO ACHIEVE?
Projects that enrich the cultural life of Europe and its surrounding countries and build networks for dialogue and debate across the arts communities of South East Europe and the UK, as well as fostering understanding, skills development, trust and respect across borders.

HOW DO I APPLY?
The application process is in two stages:

• Stage One – Concept Note–Deadline now extended to Oct 10 08
• Stage Two – Full Application (if invited)–accepted until Nov 30 08
Individual artists or groups/companies working in all art forms are eligible to apply for the fund. As long as you work in the Arts and are committed and enthusiastic about cross-border collaboration you can apply!

Failure to complete the form correctly or respond to queries from the Creative Collaboration team will mean that your application cannot be considered. Applications should be completed in English.

FUNDING
Creative Collaboration will normally support up to 50% of a project’s total budget. Priority will be given to applicants able to demonstrate that they have a balanced range of sources of income, including in-kind contributions, in place. However, in exceptional circumstances we may fund a higher percentage of a project’s budget. At Stage Two, applicants will be required to submit a detailed budget forecast for the creation and delivery of their project.

We are offering grants for research and development projects up to a maximum of £5,000, and grants for fully developed projects of between £5,000 and £25,000. In exceptional cases we may fund larger scale, higher value collaborative projects/multi-country arts partnerships. We are unable to offer support for existing projects but proposals developed from ideas already under discussion, or existing models that can be developed further will be considered. In addition, we are unable to provide retrospective funding for any project-related activities taking place before the application process has been completed and project funding has been confirmed.

Italy's Starving Cultural Institutions

Italian arts institutions are in a pickle and they only have themselves to blame for electing Berlusconi to a third term. (At least us in the US are constitutionally protecting from having Bush serve another term.) Below are some excerpts from a NYTimes article with a link to the full text here.

"Arts institutions across Italy are reeling from a sweeping round of budget cuts adopted this summer by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's four-month-old conservative government. More than $1.3 billion has been slashed from the culture ministry’s budget for the next three years. The cuts have affected hundreds of museums and archaeological sites that depend on state money, as well as opera houses, theaters, filmmakers, libraries, archives and conservators of monuments and artworks; they also threaten the lush countryside, which the Culture Ministry is expected to protect.

Weak economic growth and stricter EU limits on government budget deficits have forced member countries to reduce public arts financing. But critics here grumble of particular shortsightedness in Italy. While the nation touts its cultural heritage as an essential component of national economic growth, critics say the government fails to preserve this precious resource. (“It is our oil,” Sandro Bondi, the culture minister, told the Turin daily La Stampa this week.) Italy’s most recent operating budget allocated just 0.28 percent to the culture ministry."

Conservatives Cut Arts Funding by $45 Million

The Canadian Tories are committed to cutting $44.8-million in spending on arts and culture by April of 2010. The Conservatives have earmarked 10 programs and parts of another to be eliminated and will reduce spending on two others, after a "strategic review" process that audited all Canadian Heritage programs for efficiency and effectiveness. All but one cut falls under the Heritage purview, the lone exception being the previously reported $4.7-million PromArt, a grant program for foreign travel administered by Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

The most expensive of five new cuts approved in February was the $11.7-million Canadian Memory Fund, which gives federal agencies money to digitize collections and mount them online. Also chopped were the $3.8-million Culture.ca Web portal; the $560,000 Canadian Cultural Observatory; the $5.64-million research and development component of Canadian Culture Online; and the $2.1-million Northern Distribution Program, which distributes the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network signal to 96 Northern communities.

The departments says a rarely advertised $500,000 annual fund - part of the Sustainability program designed to rescue arts organizations on the brink of extinction - has also been axed, after helping rescue four groups on the brink of disaster in the past six years: the Winnipeg Symphony, Calgary Philharmonic and Théâtre du Rideau Vert received $250,000; and the Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal received $100,000.

Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay and Toronto Mayor David Miller's joint letter to Prime Minister Harper, which decried a perceived reversal in a generous Conservative approach to the arts, only added to the exasperation of the Prime Minister's communications director, Kory Teneycke. "To listen to some in the arts community and the opposition, you would think that there's blood in the streets…When we find examples of programs that are clearly not meeting their objectives, without apologies we will cancel them. That is the entire purpose of Strategic Review. We owe that to taxpayers," Mr. Teneycke added, calling PromArt "a boondoggle."

Putting Art Back in the Arts

While chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (1998-2001), Bill Ivey dreamed up an unofficial Cultural Bill of Rights, which he fleshes out in his book Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights . Now director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, Ivey argues that arts policy has long targeted two issues, arts education and increasing funding for nonprofit organizations, that aim to “bring more fine art to the American people” without encouraging more people to actually create. Here he answers some questions from the Utne Reader talked about why we’re making less art and what public policy’s got to do with it.

Weak $ = More Tourism + Higher Costs

With NY awards season finally over (and many shows getting a post-Tony bump in sales), Gordon Cox of ‘Variety’ writes about the ‘double-edged sword’ facing American producers. Though the weak dollar has meant a rise in international tourism, it also means a steep increase in production costs for anyone mounting plays from abroad. See full article here.

“For the nonprofit presenters whose main goal is to bring international legit fare to a largely local aud, the dollar's slippage proves a major hindrance.

"Brooklyn Academy of Music is a global performing and cinema arts center," says BAM exec producer Joseph V. Melillo. "A weak dollar eats right into our operating budget."

"We pay international artists their fees, we transport them by air, we bring them to New York City and give them a per diem," Melillo chimes in. "If you're doing that in pounds sterling, you feel the impact. For us, it means more fund-raising. It means higher ticket prices."

Newer, smaller orgs can have an even tougher time. "It's not a happy situation for Under the Radar or for smaller presenters," says Mark Russell, the former A.D. of small-scale international presenter P.S. 122 and current topper of the Public Theater's Under the Radar fest of new legit works. "We're having to do fewer pieces and cut our seasons down. It comes around to the fact that often, international troupes are subsidizing a tour of the U.S. themselves."

At St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, a current production of Macbeth from Polish troupe TR Warszawa has seen costs spiral to around $700,000, rising by about $200,000. "What's hurting the most is the devaluation of the dollar," says St. Ann's A.D., Susan Feldman. "You'll make a deal and then the dollar drops. It adds tens of thousands of dollars to the budget." (Macbeth is co-funded by the Polish Cultural Institute.)

Whether to pay relocating artists in their own currency or in dollars therefore becomes an issue. "It's good for our gang when they go overseas, because they get paid in euros," notes Russell. "But when I end up paying them in dollars, they don't like it. It makes it harder to keep them interested."

Still, Gotham orgs have the prestige of the New York arts scene working in their favor. "Breaking into this market is of interest," Russell says. "Artists aren't going to take a reduced fee to go to Piscataway."

The American Model in the German System

Check out this great article from the NYTimes that specially focuses on the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden and how it has Americanized its not-for-profit festival. Europe as a whole, and Germany in particular has always had a strong subsidized arts culture. Just a few years ago it would have been unthinkable to ask private donors and foundations for money. But now that the cuts to public funding are increasing, organizations are being forced to rethink their fundraising activities. Here’s a taste.

"It’s a trans-Atlantic looking-glass situation. Germany alone this year, including all city, state and federal support, will dole out a total of $12.4 billion on culture — libraries, theaters, museums, musical and dance groups — including $4.6 billion just for music and theater, according to the country’s department for statistics. There are no fewer than 80 state opera houses, staging 7,000 performances a year.

That sounds great, astonishing even. But the system, bloated and not everywhere well managed, inevitably produces much mediocrity. The reality is that about 20 percent of the budget for Berlin’s three struggling opera companies today must come from private contributions. Bayreuth scrambles to raise nearly half its budget from donations and ticket sales. It would have gone bankrupt by now if donors hadn’t made up for deficits due to bad leadership."

Singapore's Renaissance

When Singapore’s Esplanade arts complex opened in 2002, there was strong opposition from the media and business establishments. They wanted to know how the government justified such a costly development ($461M) in a country where so few people cared about the arts, and how the hell were they going to fill the 2000 seat complex. Six years later, the critics have been silenced as the Esplanade has become Singapore’s cultural heart. With its 1600-seat concert hall, two theatre studios which each seat 200-250 people, outdoor performance space and foyer art displays, the centre is an example of how aggressively Singapore has grabbed the cultural baton and run with it. Read more from 'The Australian' article here.

IRA Incentive

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill that would renew a tax break that encourages older Americans to give money from their individual retirement accounts to nonprofit causes. Until December 31 of last year, donors age 70½ or older were able to transfer up to $100,000 to charity from their individual retirement accounts each year without paying income taxes on the money. Members of Congress have been working to revive the tax break, and the House on Wednesday approved legislation that would extend the break for one year, from January 1, 2008, through December 31.

Grandma, Grandpa, time to pony up.

Crime Pays (for the Arts)

The Scottish Government has announced a £600,000 package of funding available for arts projects that create social inclusion for young people. The so called ‘CashBack for Communities’ funding will use money seized from convicted criminals and require matched business funding from the private sector - in cash or kind - to release £1.2 million over the next two years.

The project is the first culture scheme supported by the Proceeds of Crime Act. The funds will be used to promote social inclusion through the arts for young people between ten and 19 years, in particular those who may not otherwise have such opportunities.

Culture Minister Linda Fabiani said, "Recycling the money of criminals into arts and cultural opportunities is poetic justice indeed and I now want to see this fund benefit young people across Scotland, particularly those who may not have the parental support to encourage them out to try new and different activities."

Toronto takes on Montreal

With global arts funding being cut across the board, it’s nice to hear a story where those budgets are actually increasing. It appears that Toronto now has the funding to climb the ladder and challenge Montreal as the cultural capital of Canada. The Ontario government had some extra money lying around after fiscal year 2007, so Dalton McGuinty gave the arts community over $75 million. The biggest winner was Luminato, Toronto's festival of creativity, which made its debut last year. It received $15 million as a legacy gift to plan for the future and commission new work. Read more here in ‘The Star’.

Prague's Arts Funding Crisis

The current trend of funding cuts continues around the globe. This time it’s Prague. Not-for-Profit arts organizations have never had an easy relationship with City Hall, but after months of waiting for delayed grants, arts groups were shocked to discover that they were receiving less money, if any at all. Arts groups (pictured) have started a petition and protest, calling for the resignation of certain city officials and proposing drastic policy changes. Click here to read more from 'The Prague Post'.