After a BIPOC Theater Coalition’s Bold Call to Action, Have Funders Stepped Up?

Lin-Manuel Miranda is one of thousands of actors and theater professionals who signed on to “We See You, White American Theatre.” Kathy Hutchins/shutterstock

In July, a coalition of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) theater-makers published an open letter titled “We See You, White American Theatre,” calling for change across the field in areas like hiring, work conditions and programming. Over 50,000 actors and theater professionals, including Viola Davis, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Issa Rae and Sandra Oh have since signed on.

“The theater community has been particularly charged” by the coalition’s demands, Vineyard Theatre Managing Director Suzanne Appel told me. “The field has an obligation to change from within and to answer to the calls of our BIPOC colleagues who are letting us know what isn’t working for them as artists.”

The coalition didn’t leave funders off the hook. Its 31-page document enumerated more than a dozen ways the grantmakers can remedy longstanding inequities and “provide transformational support for BIPOC organizations and artists.”

Five months later, are funders rising to the challenge?

I’ve had the opportunity to speak with many performing arts fundraising experts and foundation reps over the past few months, and the short answer is, they’re taking some steps in the right direction. SMU Data Arts Director Frannie Voss cited the We See You roadmap as a means to push “deep institutional change,” while the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Bonfils Stanton Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and others have either endorsed or adopted many of the coalition’s demands, consciously or otherwise.

To be fair, I’ve drawn this conclusion from a small sample of professionals that represent a subset of an ecosystem dominated by individual donors. The longstanding tradition of wealthy white donors giving to wealthy white arts institutions is surely alive and well. But institutional performing arts funders have been grappling with these issues since 2015, when Grantmakers in the Arts made racial equity in arts funding a primary focus. The pandemic and growing calls for social justice accelerated this trend, leading to some encouraging moves in 2020.

Time will tell if theater grantmakers adopt the coalition’s demands en masse, and some of the demands have yet to make it into grantmakers’ toolboxes in a meaningful way. But at the very least, We See You has done a huge service for funders by creating a checklist of familiar, provocative, and disruptive action items.

A 13-point program for equity

Let’s first take a look at the 13 demands for funders and then how grantmakers in this space are—and aren’t—responding to four key demands. Here’s the full list:

1. Make multi-year sustainable gifts.

2. Eliminate budget-size qualifications for major grants.

3. Diversify adjudicators and panelists.

4. Hire more program officers of color.

5. Get to know more BIPOC organizations and artists.

6. “Stop bankrupting our organizations” by funding less effective, predominantly white institutions (PWI)

7. Make grant evaluation metrics transparent.

8. Provide funding to support audits.

9. Make more general operations funding available to BIPOC organizations.

10. Funding for space acquisition and maintenance.

11. Hold umbrella organizations accountable for gathering BIPOC organizations and artists.

12. Support mentorships, apprenticeships and career development, particularly in design and technical production.

“Eliminate budget-size qualifications for major grants”

A grantmaking model that ties funding to an organization’s budget size not only shuts out smaller BIPOC organizations, but creates an environment where “the biggest institutions absorb a disproportionate share of your philanthropic capacity, and as they grow, that ratio needs to be sustained,” said Gary Steuer, president and CEO of Denver’s Bonfils-Stanton Foundation.

That dynamic “rewards people who can fundraise, not people who are doing good work,” said Meggan Gomez, former executive director of Theatre of the Oppressed NYC. Large organizations raise more money and secure large grants commensurate with their ever-growing operating budgets, while funders “dock organizations that haven’t grown enough or shown enough fundraising chops,” Gomez said, reinforcing “barriers in the fundraising process that reinforces white supremacy.”

“By eliminating the requirements,” We See You states, “smaller BIPOC organizations can compete for funding that will elevate and further their work.”

Some influential funders are coming around to this idea. The MacArthur Foundation’s Culture, Equity, and the Arts initiative, which launched in 2019, does not link grant amounts to an organization’s size, nor does the Ford Foundation’s America’s Cultural Treasures, which is focused on helping BIPOC arts groups survive the pandemic.

“Get to know more BIPOC organizations and artists”

“Several funders are unaware of the various organizations doing outstanding work in their communities,” We See You stated. “Opportunities to get to know these organizations… can help establish new relationships, ultimately leading to new funding pathways.”

A number of major funders were on the case before the events of 2020.

The MacArthur Foundation partnered with the Field Foundation to reach untapped organizations in Chicago’s predominantly African American and Latinx neighborhoods. The Hewlett Foundation rolled out a series of community listening circles after concluding that “crucial artistic work was happening in [these] communities where our funding has not historically flowed,” Program Director Emiko Ono told me. Bonfils-Stanton asked community members to create a list of regional BIPOC organizations and then invited them to a series of listening sessions in early 2019.

And Jennifer Coleman, upon taking the helm as director of the George Gund Foundation’s Creative Culture and Arts Program in 2015, drew up a list of BIPOC organizations by searching online, cold-calling groups, and then asking them to recommend peers. “A lot of these organizations have been shut out of the grantmaking process,” she said.

“Stop bankrupting our organizations”

Pre-2020, “the words ‘equity, diversity and inclusion’ were everywhere,” Theatre of the Oppressed NYC’s Gomez told me. The problem, she said, was that funders would give grants to “big, predominantly white institutions for diversity initiatives that ultimately wouldn’t lead to anything.”

This practice speaks to what Grantmakers in the Arts President and CEO Eddie Torres calls the difference between “diversity and inclusion” and “racial equity.” Diversity and inclusion “grant BIPOC and other marginalized individuals access to white-led organizations,” Torres told me. Equity, on the other hand, centers on “self-determination by BIPOC people.”

We See You picks up on this idea, noting that “the minor advancements of [predominantly white institutions] have been rewarded on the backs of the knowledge and contributions of the BIPOC advisors they hire to meet grant requirements.” The coalition recommends grantmakers “shift the funding toward the organizations that have been doing the work for decades so that the experts are funded to do the work for their own communities.”

Two generous post-pandemic programs do bypass predominantly white intermediaries and directly fund BIPOC theaters—Ford’s America’s Cultural Treasures and the Black Seed initiative, which, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, awards grants to 50 Black-led theater companies.

“Funding for space acquisition and maintenance”

This is a potentially transformative demand that is on some funders’ radars, but is not common in practice. “Many BIPOC organizations are itinerant and don’t have their own buildings,” We See You states. “This leads to inconsistencies in producing, as the terms and times of their activities are dictated by landlords.”

The coalition argues that “funding for space acquisition will only fix this IF funding is also provided for the maintenance of the building. Funding to support the initial capital and the added operating costs will allow these organizations to safely acquire and maintain buildings to serve their communities more powerfully.”

Funders have acknowledged that organizations that do not own their buildings are at a disadvantage. “Oftentimes, funders are looking for a balance sheet that has more assets than an organization of color might have,” said Maurine Knighton, director of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s arts program. “That’s because, broadly speaking, an organization of color may not have the kinds of fixed assets that a larger organization will have.”

The coalition behind We See You isn’t the only group floating the elegantly simple idea that funders should help BIPOC theater organizations buy their own buildings.

A few months ago, Angie Kim, the Center for Cultural Innovation’s president and CEO, published a piece as part of the Ford Foundation’s Creative Futures, a series of “provocations” by thinkers across the arts, documentary filmmaking and journalism on how to reimagine their sectors. “The combination of owning real assets and having governance authority shifts power,” she wrote. Kim encourages foundations to “fund cultural communities to own property.”

By asking performing arts grantmakers to purchase property, We See You’s demand requires performing arts funders to reexamine their missions. But these aren’t normal times. If arts philanthropy wants “to get real about solidarity,” Kim wrote, “then putting up one’s assets is an example of what it looks like.”

Real change isn’t free

Most of We See You’s demands aren’t directed at funders. Yet many of these appeals have a subtle philanthropic component to them, and will require funders to up their game.

Consider the demand that theaters eliminate the six-day rehearsal week and “10 out of 12” rehearsals—a practice that “generally saw actors called to start rehearsal at noon, then released from rehearsal at midnight, with a two-hour dinner break in between,” writes American Theatre’s Jerald Raymond Pierce.

“These are long-standing practices that are seeped in capitalist and white supremacist culture,” We See You stated. “When these practices are in place, the growing and nurturing of the BIPOC family structure is imperiled. Many BIPOC artists have been forced to make a choice not to have families.”

Vineyard Theatre’s Appel agrees with this call to do away with “10 out of 12,” but acknowledges that the change will force theaters to schedule extra rehearsals, “and that’s not free.”

We See You also calls for theaters to roll out ongoing mandatory DEI and anti-racism training. These initiatives require funding, Appel said, and “supported staff training and board training, money for recruiting and creating new positions—and funders hate the idea of paying for job positions.” But funders can’t have it both ways. If they truly want to see real and sustainable change within the sector, “there needs to be targeted investments to go above and beyond general operating support,” Appel said.

Beyond conventional grantmaking

We See You’s calls to eliminate the six-day rehearsal week and “10 out of 12” rehearsals also speak to the post-pandemic limitations of the organization-centric grantmaking paradigm.

Leaders at a BIPOC theater organization certainly appreciate a foundation’s emergency general operating support grant. Yet that money doesn’t trickle down to the actors whose “self-determination”—to quote GIA’s Torres—is impeded by 12-hour workdays, little savings, high debt, and the lack of health and labor protections endemic to the gig economy. (In a similar vein, CCI’s Kim would argue that a BIPOC organization’s self-determination is impeded by the fact that it doesn’t own assets.)

“COVID-19 showed that our social infrastructure is not designed to support arts and culture practitioners,” said Javier Torres-Campos, director of Surdna Foundation’s Thriving Cultures program. We See You’s demands suggest the same can be said for our current grantmaking infrastructure. Torres doesn’t dispute this. “Reimagining all support systems for the social sector is a ripe opportunity for the field to collaborate on,” he told me.

What about individual donors?

The alignment of key funders with some of the demands is an encouraging development. But it’s important to remember that foundation dollars are a relatively small—and shrinking—percentage of the typical nonprofit theater’s unearned revenue base.

“In recent years, there has been, in most parts of the country, less money from corporations, and (especially in the arts sector) less from the government and foundations, as well,” wrote American Theatre’s Stuart Miller in 2018. “The result has been an increased emphasis on the individual donor.”

“People think of foundations like Mellon and Wallace making up a bulk of organizations’ revenue base, but that’s not borne out in the data,” Lucas Bernays Held, the Wallace Foundation’s director of communications, told me a few months back.

To his point, SMU DataArts found that 15% of the 44% of expenses covered by “unrestricted contributed revenue” at theater organizations came from individuals and trustees in 2017—more than twice as much as foundations (6%), and significantly more than corporations and government sources (3% each).

There are countless ways to play with the numbers to demonstrate donors’ outsized influence across the sector. Here’s one example. In 2018, James and Elizabeth McDonnell gave the Municipal Theatre Association of St. Louis a $20 million pledge to support the maintenance and upkeep of its campus. The couple’s one-time gift represents 87% of the total theater grantmaking coming from the Davee Foundation, a major institutional funder, between 2014 and 2018, according to Candid data.

American Theatre Wing President and CEO Heather Hitchens summed up the challenge best. Institutional funders “set the compass” when it comes to advancing equity in the theater field. But “if mega-donors don’t get on board, we’re not going to get very far.”