The More Things Change...

Back in 2011, I wrote a lot about Holly Sidford’s study for Grantmakers in the Arts called “FUSING ARTS, CULTURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE High Impact Strategies for Philanthropy.” Sidford showed that the tichest 2% of cultural organizations in the US received 55% of charitable contributions and grants, a ratio that was worse than the income inequity in the US as a whole.

Well, I just discovered that, in 2017, Sidford did a followup study to see if anything had changed in the ensuing years. And indeed they had! As a result of a “growing numbers of arts foundations [that] have become concerned about the lack of diversity, equity and inclusion in the nonprofit cultural sector….spurred, in part, by national conversations about economic inequality, racism, LGBTQ rights, class bias and various kinds of unexamined privilege in society overall,” things had actually gotten worse! Instead of the richest 2% getting 55% of philanthropic support, in 2017 they were getting 60%! God knows how much they get today.

These organizations are symphonies, opera companies, regional theaters, art museums, ballet companies and other large institutions — the majority of which focus primarily on Western European fine arts traditions. While most of these institutions have made sincere efforts to broaden participation in the past decade, their audiences remain predominantly white and upper income. (NEA Research Report #57)

Very few organizations of color or cultural groups based in low-income communities are included in this large-budget group. Across the nation, fewer than 50 cultural organizations whose missions focus primarily on artistic traditions from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Native America, or that focus primarily on reaching rural populations and low-income communities, receive enough funding to maintain budgets of $5 million/year.

You can read Sidford’s report, “Not Just Money,” as well as Dudley Cocke’s response, a Minnesota Public Radio interview of Sidford, the late Diane Ragsdale’s call for some “moral imagination” (including 3 suggestions for change), and American Theatre Magazine’s investigation.

I could write pages and pages about this, but I won’t. It’s time for artists to start questioning the way their systems are organized and decide whether they want to keep supporting such inequity in the hopes of getting some of the crumbs, or instead try to create a new way of doing things. If you fall in the latter camp and are in theater, I humbly suggest you take a look at my book Building a Sustainable Theater: How to Remove Gatekeepers and Take Control of Your Artistic Career, which you can read free here. It might provide a few ideas to get you thinking.