Stuck in the Middle With You!
It's been a wild 8 weeks! We've been in touch with many of our artists but have also been thinking about our nonprofit arts and cultural peers and colleagues across the south.
We're writing to share what we've been experiencing during COVID-19 as a small arts and cultural organization located in the south. We hope that this is informative and useful for our peers and that it also serves as a conversation starter moving forward! Please reach out to us if your organization is experiencing similar challenges; we want to talk!
Studio Two Three is in a tough financial spot due to a weird culmination of circumstances:
1) We can't rely on Foundation support: Organizations in the regional south receive less than one tenth of the national average of philanthropic funding per capita. As a result, many of our most vital and vibrant arts and cultural organizations are not in the philanthropic pipeline. As foundations start to release emergency funding, they are almost exclusively looking inward to fund the organizations they've already invested in so the landscape of opportunity is diminishing rapidly.
2) We can't rely on earned income, because our community is also suffering: Since we haven't been able to rely on a proportionate level of philanthropic funding, we've developed a grassroots methodology to building an organization. The studio followed industry best practices and built a very healthy and stable base of 70% earned income, with 30% foundation and donor support. This has enabled us to be agile and responsive when things have come up in the community and it means that we can say yes because our funding is not contingent on specific projects. Unfortunately, the unprecedented nature of COVID-19 means that industries and organizations dependent on earned income are in dire need. We've suddenly been forced to close the doors to almost 3/4 of our revenue and it's paralyzing.
3) Where do we turn? We need federal support. We are falling through the gaps in nearly all of the available safety netting! To receive emergency funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), organizations are required to be registered in the system and have been funded 3 years in a row. We are too young and too small to be in the NEA system for 3 consecutive years. The studio has only recently reached a staff capacity with 5 full-time paid employees and was able to hire a Development Director in 2019. We have the solvency, stability and ingenuity to receive and properly steward NEA investment, yet we are essentially invisible to them in this moment. The federal safety net has let us slip through as a result of their previous funding mandate. And they've let thousands of other similar orgs slip through for the same reason.
4) Our organization is too big for local foundation support. Despite being too small, and somewhat invisible to national foundations–– our budget is too big for us to apply for local grants (of which there are few).
It's like a case of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Too hot, too cold but where is our just right?
Our immediate answer is that we need to immediately advocate for expanded funding from the NEA in the second disbursement of the CARE act. As we understand it, the NEA decided to only fund previously funded organizations so that they could move rapidly to disperse to organizations who have already been "vetted". That means that the organizations who are eligible total approximately 3,100 across the entire nation.
We know that opportunities will arise moving forward and have switched to quarterly budget planning. What are y'all doing to address your middleness?
