Arts Commission weighs sizes of grants to aid underserved groups

Members of the Arts Commission want the city to show how effective new grant programs have been at reaching arts organizations from underserved communities, out of concern that large award amounts for the Thrive grant program may result in too few awards available to include newer recipients.

At Monday’s meeting, Commissioner Gina Houston spelled out the potential problems with Thrive, which in the next two-year funding cycle will see 35 awards given at amounts between $85,000 and $150,000 per program year. Those award amounts represent a modest increase from the first iteration of the program.

Houston noted keeping the same number of recipients is likely to cause long-standing “legacy” arts organizations to push out newer nonprofit groups from the award pool.

As context, the city has opted to increase the number of grant awards given via two related programs, which are aimed at individual artists and for-profit creative businesses.

“Historically speaking, the same organizations get funded. So we’re setting up a system where we’re creating a dependency on the awards, especially if we’re awarding an organization money that is 60 percent or more of their operating budget and they can’t survive if their budget isn’t 60 percent city funding,” she said.

“We don’t want to create that. We want to create self-sufficient organizations and individuals who are creating exceptional art.”

Over the past six years, the city has substantially restructured is cultural arts grants, which are funded via Hotel Occupancy Tax revenue, to heavily weight equity and providing funding to new arts groups or those that had been historically frozen out of the process. The initial change to the system caused loud criticism in 2018 when many long-standing arts organizations were zeroed out or greatly reduced after years of receiving city funds almost as a default.

A multiyear analysis and consulting process resulted in the Thrive, Nexus and Elevate grants, which fund different cohorts of artists and organizations at different levels.

Thursday’s meeting included a general update on the application and award processes for the three programs, with the next round of Thrive recipients slated to be announced this month. In addition to the concerns about the mix and number of recipients, commissioners discussed the possibility of increasing the use of small business training and other technical assistance to help smaller organizations better manage six figures worth of funding.

Laura Odegaard, acting manager of the Cultural Arts Division, said the forthcoming data about the next cohort of recipients will give the city and the commission the needed information to help make adjustments for the next two-year funding cycle.

“Once we have the information about who’s getting funding from this (fiscal year) 2024 bucket, we can see the differences between the organizations and the individuals and then take that as well as the feedback that you’ve shared,” she said. “Thrive was created to be that deep investment for the small- and medium-sized organizations that had historically been capped at a percentage of their revenue in previous funding cycles.

“We had organizations that received funding from us for 30-plus years, but because they never had any deep investment at one particular time, they were only getting $20,000 from us for 30-some years.”

Commissioner Faiza Kracheni said the city may want to look for ways to draw further distinctions for major arts organizations with budgets in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars that have more fundraising and development capacity than younger groups.

“The guidelines say that Thrive is created for small- and medium-sized organizations to reach cultural institution status. So while I understand that there are legacy organizations in that group, I wish there was a way for that money to really be prioritized to small- and medium-sized organizations,” she said. “Both of the things matter, right? One is not more important than the other.”

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