I have been thinking about and writing about, and in my consultancy meetings with small arts organizations, wrestling with folks on Simon Sinek’s challenge to start with their WHY—the pivotal/central stories that mobilize people and resources to help organizations achieve their missions. At its core, this gesture is rooted in the organization’s ability to answer the “Need” question on a grant application, or when seated in front of a major donor. To be able to answer WHY an organization exists, and WHY it is in need of funding and support and WHY it does the programs it does the way it does, might offer up a clear pathway to stewarding the resources necessary to continue forth. That was in the last world. That was before COVID-19 completely upended our understanding of safety and security, before it distanced us from each other, and the art that keeps us.
In the last few weeks, as the COVID-19 crisis intensified, I have witnessed folks begin to prepare either 1) how they should respond if they were in a position to offer support to the arts + culture field, or 2) how they should respond if they found themselves in a position requiring that support. And now we’re here. Week after week: new layoffs. Furloughs. Whole departments slashed. Employees given a week, a day, to understand that they would no longer receive a paycheck from their place of employment. Whole groups sacrificed for whatever attempt the organizations sought to “salvage”—for what? For whom? For a tomorrow none of us are sure of?
If the raison d’etre of an organization starts with WHY, as Sinek argues, I want to argue here, in this new world, that maybe the how of it, starts with WHO. The people. Here’s my diagram. I argue we readjust the center. Especially now.
Keep People / Employees at the center.
I’ve been thinking about this increasingly when, during a podcast interview about my Red Olive Creative Consulting / Black Art Futures Fund (BAFF) Multiverse (see what I did there?), I was asked who we serve and the interviewer quickly said you serve Black artists and arts organizations, right?. I thought about it for a second. That was true. But there was something more true: we also serve the volunteers who want to understand how philanthropy works, we serve the donors into the BAFF fund who, through some of our efforts get to stand closer to the multiple organizations we support by welcoming them into the wider community, and we serve the folks who make it all possible through direct client services to arts + culture organizations. People are at the center of it all.
My team at Red Olive Creative Consulting is mighty fly, and creative and collaborative. If there was a different visual that depicted the ways in which my priorities are stacked, how I secure the base of a pyramid or hierarchy of organizational needs, it’d look something like this:
Last month, in a webinar on Philanthropy’s Response to COVID-19 hosted by Grantmakers in the Arts, I spoke about the different ways arts and culture organizations intervene in their communities, and why ensuring their survival is not only about capital “A” art. In the same week, a Foundation funder of a client, a Black arts organization, prefaced their potential canceling of years-long support with the argument that the foundation was in search of supporting “more pressing, critical needs” for the “more vulnerable” populations. Imagine that.
This moment right here, arguing for the necessity of culture, is something I’ve tried to wrestle with before the crisis, and I think my own central mission continues to be getting to the heart culture’s case for support in order to make it undeniable:
Only through the philanthropic sector’s investing in people, that is, allowing for a true realization and thrivability of the engine of the nonprofit arts + culture sector, will art prevail. People first.
In the exchange though, I reminded the representative of the Foundation that not only did my client serve explicitly Black artists, who live precariously above the federal poverty lines, but that also because of years of field-wide Philanthropic underinvestment (or divestment, or NON-investment) and restrictions on 10-20% of grant funds for administrative operations means that they were already a body of Black people working in an unstable environment, made more unstable through institutional funding racism, and if you’ll allow my generalization—they were Black folk who through historical and empirical data continue to suffer from the deep and vast disparities in wealth between white and Black households. If my white colleagues in the field are despairing right now, where are Black folks? What is below despair?
And, finally, I argued
Black arts organizations, and especially community-based organizations, serve a critical need to the people they employ, if they are so lucky.
(see: institutional funding racism and the razor-thin margins of general operating dollars). They can secure the bottom of Maslow’s cultural hierarchy of needs through the maintenance of a payroll. As a result of that one critical investment, organizations could help staff in the procurement of critical needs for each employee, and perhaps even a broader community: food, shelter, security…which then allows for the employees to show up more wholly in the workspace (even in the now virtual world, maybe especially now), be a contributor in the community of the organization, which then allows for room for THE WORK—however it is manifest in this COVID-19 -present and -post world. Even though I am speaking explicitly about small Black arts organizations, who need some spotlight, I am positive this can be applied to any organized body of employees.
But for the cultural sector, here’s the truth. None of this is possible without continued philanthropic partnerships.
None of this is possible without philanthropic partnerships, and when they revoke or change their commitments, as I am watching some do, it puts nonprofit employees at risk, and ultimately their ability to secure the future of the culture-makers who will, through art, help us make sense, thrive, and convene at this exact moment.
By readjusting the centers and securing the bases of these organizations through fearless, brave, and deep philanthropic gifts, community-based Black arts organizations can be fully realized: as centers of resource sharing and safety—even virtually—as the vulnerable populations (artists, nonprofit employees, contract support services, all) look to the organizations to provide beauty, meaning, sanctuary, respite, reprieve.
Certainly no group will emerge whole from this, or return to base operations prior to the global pandemic. But as I read the news and hear from my friends across the country about the ways in which their own security has shifted and how institutions and foundations with billion-dollar or million-dollar endowments continue to practice contrition at this moment instead of emergent, unprecedented generosity, I mourn. I get furious. I mourn some more.
How do we come back to a place that, in moments of crisis, have shown through sweeping actions and statements like, “funding the critical needs” and “more vulnerable populations” that maybe they don’t believe in culture’s true power, its ability to be an acceptable vehicle of service to the people they say they are now pivoting towards? And we can’t have culture without the people lifting it up?
How do we reframe our thinking about the art + culture field in this crisis moment, and yes, support the artists, and beyond the artists, remember the people…who are so often still artists, and the administrators, and the contract educators, and the fundraisers, the part time visitor services, the receptionists, the building maintenance crews, the invisible third shifters…and include them in the “vulnerable populations” worthy of funding? In the space for which we will fight for funding, for their critical inclusion in the path towards whatever tomorrow holds? And then, when we get to tomorrow, continue those commitments?
My refrain for these last few weeks when someone from the philanthropic sector has asked my advice on how to respond, and I say swiftly, and without hesitation: Cut the checks.
Culture can’t move without its people.
