Brigitte McQueen had a lot to do in 2020. She was raising money to build a theater for The Union for Contemporary Art, an organization she had founded a decade earlier to draw artists to her majority-Black community in North Omaha. The COVID-19 pandemic was raging, and she was struggling to keep staffers paid and artists fed. Many people were questioning the need to support the arts in a community grappling with poverty, racism, gentrification, and the lopsided effects of the pandemic.
She sometimes felt unmoored, McQueen confesses, unclear about which way to turn to keep things running. “I didn't have anyone show me how to do these things,” she says. “We've just been figuring this out as we go along.”
The Wallace Foundation designed its Advancing Well-Being in the Arts initiative in large part to support leaders such as McQueen, who helm arts organizations founded by, with, and for communities of color. These leaders are weathering the effects of the pandemic, institutional racism, and decades of underinvestment. Many say they need time to step away from everyday demands, take stock of their organizations’ long-term needs, work out strategies to fulfill those needs, and put in place systems and policies to help ensure their organizations can thrive in years ahead. The initiative has committed more than $100 million over six years to support dozens of organizations around the country. The hope is to support these leaders and help philanthropies learn how to better support arts organizations founded by, with, and for communities of color, a subset of the arts sector funders have often overlooked.
A New Adventure…
The initiative stems from several decades of Wallace investments in the arts. The foundation’s most recent effort, Building Audiences for Sustainability, supported two dozen organizations as they experimented with strategies to increase the size, diversity, or loyalty of their audiences and determine whether their efforts improved their financial health. A study of the organizations’ work showed that audiences grew, but there was little effect on organizations’ finances.
How, then, can arts organizations thrive, if not by developing audiences? A pair of studies pointed to communities. One suggests that some of the country’s best performing arts organizations have strong connections to their communities, an idea that intrigued Wallace leaders. “We thought, ‘well, for those who do have this connection, what are the kinds of strategies that they employ?’” says Bahia Ramos, Wallace’s vice president of the arts.
The other suggests that community is most important to one particular group of arts organizations: those founded by, with, and for the communities they serve. “We were seeing that arts organizations that were actually founded by and for and with their community were, not surprisingly, able to maintain that relationship in a stronger way,” says vice president of research Bronwyn Bevan.
“That led us to design this initiative,” Bevan adds, “and to commission a number of research studies that could document how this important part of the arts ecosystem builds on these relationships to contribute deeply to their communities.”
We centered the work around this issue of well-being. What does it mean to have organizational well-being that is tied to—or has a relationship with—the community's well-being?
… Requires a First Step
Most Wallace initiatives start with a hypothesis. Organizations participating in those initiatives test that hypothesis in projects they design. Independent researchers study the organizations’ work and determine whether and how the hypothesis holds.
Sometimes, however, Wallace lacks the information it needs to devise a hypothesis. The foundation has not historically focused on arts organizations founded by, with, and for communities of color, so it knew little about the sector when it began considering a new initiative. And research did not edify. “We went to the research literature first, and we found very little there,” says Bevan. Conversations with field leaders provided many insights. “But it was anecdotal,” she adds.
Wallace's arts team needed to build relationships with field leaders to guide it to a testable hypothesis. As it did so, the team also sought to document the work to add to the evidence base about the sector.
The team therefore developed a broad initiative—a so-called model development initiative—that could potentially lead to hypotheses future initiatives could test. “We centered the work around this issue of well-being,” says Ramos. “What does it mean to have organizational well-being that is tied to—or has a relationship with—the community's well-being?”
It’s a fuzzier focus than, say, balance sheets or test scores. But it broadens Wallace’s view so the foundation can learn what matters most to the organizations it seeks to engage. “A lot of times, philanthropies focus on organizational finances and the bottom line to say, ‘this organization is thriving, this one is not thriving,’” says Bevan. “But there are other ways in which organizations can thrive. And that led us to the idea of well-being.”
How does one explore such a broad concept? Engage with a lot of organizations, which Wallace is funding in three cohorts.
A Leading Cohort of Larger, Established Organizations
The first cohort of organizations comprises 18 relatively large organizations with annual budgets of at least $500,000. Wallace’s arts team limited this cohort to relatively large organizations to ensure each one could benefit from the initiative, contribute to it, and take on the work of an extended Wallace initiative. “We wanted organizations that were at least ten years in existence,” says Ramos, “so that their commitment to their community and that narrative arc of their history could be demonstrated just by sheer years. And that they had the wherewithal and interest in engaging in research.”
“We felt it was important to enter this exploration with humility and trust and to try to enter communities with a sense of curiosity.”
A key difference between these organizations and those in most Wallace initiatives: there are few limits on the work Wallace will fund. If there is a clear problem an organization seeks to solve, and if the organization has a clear project with a clear rationale to solve that problem, Wallace will support that organization to design and implement its project.
The goal is to learn, not to prescribe. “We felt it was important to enter this exploration with humility and trust,” says Ramos, “and to try to enter communities with a sense of curiosity.”
The team has designed an extensive research effort to help explore that curiosity. Wallace tapped the Social Science Research Council, an independent nonprofit that oversees social science research internationally, to match an early-career research fellow with each of the 18 organizations to document the organization’s history and help understand its work. “For some of the 18, these studies are documenting their history for the first time,” says Bevan, “going into the archives and interviewing community members and others.”
Ayesha Williams, executive director of The Laundromat Project, one of the organizations participating in the cohort, says the exercise is helping to lay a foundation for the organization’s future.
“We’ve had community based, community engaged work since the beginning of the organization,” she says. “But to be able to reflect on and understand the essence of what we do, that helps us more strategically build for the future of the organization.”
Brigitte McQueen in Omaha adds that Jason White, the research fellow paired with The Union for Contemporary Art, helped her hand the organization over to new leaders. White asked McQueen and her deputy director to send him journal entries that could give him a sense of the everyday work of the organization’s leaders. In those entries, he saw a log of the anxieties of leaders working to keep an organization running with scarce funding and little time to think.
“I was really pleased with what it ended up being,” McQueen says, “because I think it opened the door to a conversation that is often not had about that stress and strain on executives in the nonprofit sector.” McQueen ended up using that conversation to prepare staffers for her departure and to help train her successor, Lakesha Green, who took the reins of the organization in June.
Bevan hopes that such efforts will also benefit the sector at large. “We're supporting early career scholars of color to do this work. The initiative is helping to build the research resources for the field to support ongoing research and knowledge building. And it's valuable to developing our own understanding at Wallace because it gives us a different view into the organizations with some real depth and nuance,” she says.
A separate research team is taking a broader look across the cohort and documenting the way the organizations work, the assets they deploy, and the barriers they must navigate to complete their projects.
A Larger Cohort of Small Organizations
Early in the initiative design, the Wallace team learned that a focus on larger organizations would not tell the whole story. “As we spoke to field leaders about working in communities of color and in the arts,” Ramos says, “many said to us, ‘You know, the way Wallace does business is great. You provide huge influxes of cash and you have longevity with folks. But working with a small cadre of institutions that are $500,000 and above is not going to tell the full picture of what we represent and who we are.’”
Field leaders felt strongly that Wallace had to fund smaller organizations as well. But this presented two major hurdles.
First, some small organizations may be unable to commit the resources necessary to make the large changes and collect the data Wallace initiatives often require. Second, Wallace lacks the capacity to support small organizations in a way that would help achieve the initiative's learning objectives. Wallace would have to fund many dozens of organizations to appreciate the breadth of the sector. It would also have to build deep relationships with each organization to understand the depth of its work. It would be a significant undertaking that could quickly overwhelm the handful of staffers of Wallace's small arts team.
Wallace is therefore turning to two networks of intermediaries to distribute grants to such small organizations. One network consists of six regional arts organizations set up by the National Endowment for the Arts and state arts organizations to help manage national initiatives. The second is a group of arts service organizations grounded in communities of color. This group includes organizations such as the First Peoples Fund, which supports indigenous cultural practices in the U.S., and the Asian American Arts Alliance, which works to strengthen Asian American artists and cultural groups.
“The regional arts organizations really understand the regions that they work in,” Bevan says. “The arts service organizations really understand the subsector that they work with. They are in the best position to reach those organizations, to stay in dialogue with them, and support them and design the professional learning and professional gatherings.”
Research into this cohort will primarily focus on the work of the intermediary organizations. "There will be researchers studying what equitable grantmaking processes led by these two networks look like,” says Bevan. “The proposals the networks receive could also help us learn about trends in the larger population of smaller organizations.”
This focus on intermediary organizations is somewhat unusual for Wallace. But Ramos believes the foundation must try new approaches to change old habits that sometimes led to unfair practices. “It was really important to us that we find a way to address the need,” she says, “rather than be stifled by our own bandwidth. This was a real opportunity for us to change practice and for us to think about ways of breaking our own boundaries.”
If our intent is to build a robust knowledge base, it should not just be built by Wallace
Cohort 3: Experience Need Not Be the Only Teacher
The most stifling boundaries can sometimes be the boundaries one doesn’t know one has. To help Wallace break through such constraints, the team created a third cohort to fund research into questions Wallace does not know to ask. This cohort consists of organizations—mostly arts service organizations—that are undertaking research projects they propose to help them better understand the groups and interests they serve.
“If our intent is to build a robust knowledge base, it should not just be built by Wallace,” says Ramos. “That knowledge base should come from both the field and from our work. So, it was important to seek out other folks in the community who had developed, were developing, their own research projects and wanted to contribute to the knowledge base.”
“Most of these organizations have never had the funds to ask their own questions, form their own research partnerships, and generate research-based evidence for themselves and their communities,” adds Bevan.
The team worked with field leaders and experts to review dozens of proposals and has funded nearly two dozen studies so far. It expects to fund several more this year. “We're not only able to support these subsectors to ask research questions that can strengthen their practices,” says Bevan, “but we're also able, as a foundation, to get much greater insight into what seems to matter to the field. And that can guide us in the future.”
I want for all the organizations in this initiative to see themselves in a space of abundance. That can come from support in advocating for and what we need. And for the field to understand more about the value of community-based organizations as true anchors in their neighborhoods.
Building a Foundation of Trust
Insights cannot guide anyone unless they are based on open, frank communication. Frank communication is impossible without trust. Trust, however, can be elusive between communities of color and the national institutions that have rarely supported them.
To begin to build trust, Wallace is taking a looser approach to the initiative and foregoing many of the reporting requirements that often come with large, multi-year grants. “Organizations have to be able to say, ‘My books aren't as good right now. I've been running on fumes for the last 30 years and I actually want to feel whole again. How do you help me feel whole?’” Ramos says. “That's the excitement about our work. It's not seen as a flaw. It's seen as a challenge that we can work on together.”
Such honesty requires a slow process of building relationships, Ramos adds. “We break bread. We go to community events. We jump Double Dutch,” she says. “We serve and don't come in as if we are experts about the place, the people, the discipline. We are really their students.”
“When we do the wrong thing,” adds Bevan, “so far people have been pretty open about telling us. And for us, that’s a moment of learning and, hopefully, insight.”
Such open conversations help build trust. But they could also help organizations crystallize what they need to thrive, not just from Wallace but also from governments, other funders, and the field at large.
“I want for all the organizations in this initiative to see themselves in a space of abundance,” says Ayesha Williams of The Laundromat Project. “That can come from support in advocating for and what we need. And for the field to understand more about the value of community-based organizations as true anchors in their neighborhoods.”
Header photo courtesy of Harrison Martin at The Union for Contemporary Art
