“Resilience and Resolve.” A COVID Emergency Fund Reports Back to the Arts Community

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In the early days of the pandemic, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation joined forces to create the NYC COVID-19 Response & Impact Fund at the New York Community Trust, providing grants and interest-free loans to small and mid-size arts and social services nonprofits.

Other funders quickly got on board. The fund issued RFPs to nonprofits on March 20 and the grant application portal closed on April 22. By July, the fund’s grant program raised and granted more than $73 million.

As of January, the fund has distributed more than $110 million in grants and loans to nearly 800 nonprofits, according to the trust’s new report, “Resilience & Resolve,” which documents the fund’s giving to date and lessons learned.

“Time and again we see that when a crisis hits, New Yorkers give generously,” said Kerry McCarthy, the trust’s vice president for philanthropic initiatives. “Though the city has had urgent needs for food and healthcare, New Yorkers also recognized that the arts are important to the quality of their own lives and to the economic health of the city,” she said, noting that “direct grants from our donor-advised funds stayed strong in 2020.”

Kate Levin, who oversees Bloomberg Philanthropies’ arts program, called the fund “a significant acknowledgment by a consortium of donors that cultural organizations are essential to the city’s identity, resilience and future dynamism.” Suzanne Appel, managing director of New York’s Vineyard Theater, told me the fund “gave us a lifeline. They asked us what we needed, we told them, and they fully funded our request. That early support was critical.”

Philanthropy has been so concerned with shoveling cash out the door as quickly as possible over the past 11 months that wondering where, exactly, all the money went can feel like an afterthought. This is what makes the “Resilience & Resolve” report such a fascinating read. It details the scope and impact of the NYC COVID-19 Response & Impact Fund, including its focus on organizations serving communities of color. The report also serves as an instructive template for arts leaders looking to implement collaborative funding models in a post-pandemic world.

Here are a few points from the report.

Donors stepped up in a big way

When the pandemic hit, arts leaders worried that donors would prioritize health-related causes over museums, dance troupes, symphonies and theaters. (They’re still worried.) It turns out these fears were misplaced—at least as they applied to New York City’s private, corporate, family and community foundations and individual donors.

The fund received a total of 1,345 donations. It allocated $37 million in loans to 45 nonprofits and $73 million in grants—40% of which ($29 million) flowed to arts and culture organizations. For comparison, this $29 million figure is $2 million more than the total music-related grantmaking from the sector’s fourth-largest grantmaker, the William Penn Foundation, from 2014-2018, according to Candid. “The Trust staff did a full year’s worth of grantmaking in five weeks,” said President Lorie Slutsky.

The fund received a total of 1,621 applications. Of those, 764 grants were approved—a 47% approval rate. The fund received 837 applications from arts and cultural organizations and awarded 381 grants—a 46% approval rate. The median amount awarded to an arts and culture organization was $50,000.

“There is so much need,” said Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. “It’s a remarkable pressure boiler that creates a heartbreaking dilemma. You cannot help everyone. You have to pick and choose.”

With venues shuttered, recipient arts organizations’ first order of business was to continue paying staff. According to the report, arts and culture grantees used 74% of funds to pay personnel costs, followed by program expenses (11%), technology (6%), professional fees and administration (3% each), and personal protective equipment, communications, and other (1% each). In contrast, the top three areas of human services funding were personnel (37%), technology (17%), and food (10%).

The report also includes case studies showing how the May-Yi Theater Company and the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute used the fund’s emergency support.

Collaboration is key

I’ve spoken to dozens of arts leaders over the past year, and they’ve all expressed a desire to broaden their networks to better engage historically under-funded organizations. Strategies have included setting up “meet and greet” events, working with consultants, and even searching for organizations on the internet.

Leaders have also pointed to the promise of collaborative grantmaking. “Since the onset of COVID-19, we have received more and more inquiries from partnerships of performing arts organizations related by demographics and by geography,” said Javier Torres-Campos, the program director of the Surdna Foundation’s Thriving Cultures program. “Grantmakers’ funding coalitions have the ability to more equitably resource an ecosystem and not just siloed institutions/organizations.”

The math doesn’t lie. A funder can access a far larger set of organizations by relying on partner networks than attempting to do it alone.

This is old news for the New York Community Trust. Back in 2016, the trust published a white paper testifying to the power of funder collaborations. “By joining forces, funders leverage the resources of many to tackle larger agendas, tougher issues or long-term challenges,” Slutsky wrote in the paper’s introduction. “Collaboration also provides philanthropists with an opportunity to get involved in areas in which they are not experts or take risks they might not assume on their own.”

The trust has rolled out 26 collaborative funds totaling $200 million over the past 40 years. Other collaborative funds housed at the trust include Early Childhood Partners NYC, the Fund for New Citizens and the Mosaic Network & Fund, which supports African, Latinx, Asian, Arab and Native American arts groups (ALAANA is an acronym commonly used in the arts community).

The trust’s deep experience in collaborative grantmaking resonated with the fund’s architects. “There is no playbook for how to respond to a pandemic,” said Bloomberg Philanthropies CEO Patricia E. Harris who, along with representatives from Carnegie and Ford, approached the trust about establishing the fund last March. “But we knew if we all got together, we could make a difference.”

Strong support for BIPOC organizations

Last September, I graded philanthropy’s response to the pandemic based on a report by the Center for Disaster Philanthropy and Candid. For instance, the report found that among institutional giving to specified recipients, only 5% of total dollars and 12% of awards explicitly identified communities of color or people of color-serving recipients as intended beneficiaries. This earned philanthropy a grade of D-, by our measure.

The NYC COVID-19 Response & Impact Fund performed much better. Fifty-six percent of grantee organizations had majority Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) staff. All told, 27.5% of grantees have both board and staff who are a majority BIPOC.

This support for BIPOC organizations didn’t materialize out of thin air. It took extensive outreach and communication, especially given the fund’s short application window. This is where the trust’s portfolio of collaborative funds came in handy. McCarthy told me that leaders accessed contact information for many of the city’s ALAANA organizations through Mosaic Network and Fund and invited them to apply.

Significant challenges remain

The fund’s planners created a simple, streamlined application for resource-constrained organizations. They also effectively engaged arts organizations that may have been unaware of the relief fund’s existence.

That said, organizations still faced formidable barriers to access due to the unprecedented breadth of the crisis. “Some resource-strapped nonprofits did not have the bandwidth to submit applications in time to qualify,” the trust’s report read. “And in some cases, organizations struggled to apply specifically because COVID-19 had infected key staff members.”

Nor has demand waned as the fund approaches its one-year anniversary. Vanessa Reed, president and CEO of arts services organization New Music USA, recently told me that her “biggest challenge right now is the sheer demand for our support compared with the funds we’re able to give. Fundraising is more challenging now than it was at the start of the pandemic because people are concerned about their personal finances and challenged by how to respond to so many competing needs.”

And so the trust’s report ends with “The Long Road Ahead,” a section laying out the challenges facing the city’s arts and culture ecosystem moving forward. These challenges will sound familiar—expiring emergency programs, the ongoing suspension of in-person events, and a virus that continues to spread.

“There are, however, rays of hope,” the report reads, citing organizations’ progress in investing in technology, reaching new audiences and building relationships with supporters and volunteers. “New York City is an incredibly resilient place,” said Bloomberg’s Harris. “It’s been knocked down before and has come back for more.”