Funding Requests As Panhandling

I have been listening to On The Media’s series on the way poverty is covered in America and suddenly came to the realization that the language associated with the poor has many similarities to the way Non Profit With Balls blogger Vu Le describes funders perceive non-profits.

Proud of this realization, I went to Vu Le’s blog to grab some passages to cite…only to realize he made that exact point back in July.

As I was thinking about the parallels over the weekend, I really started to wonder if arts organizations need to find another tax structure to organize themselves under so that they didn’t have these negative associations to the work they did.

Granted, this is sort of abandoning the issue rather than trying to shift the perception. Arts organizations metaphorically moving out of the tax status neighborhood doesn’t help social service organizations who are painted with the same brush as the impoverished people they seek to serve.

Except that the perception can infect the social service charities as well which shows how unhealthy it is.

In one On the Media episode, Linda Tirado is interviewed and discusses how her family’s belongings were destroyed when their apartment was flooded. Eight months pregnant, she calls a social service organization looking for a chair so she would have a place to sit.

She was told she could have the chair, but she would need to take a resume writing workshop before she could pick it up. The charity wanted to make sure she was trying to better her situation. The only times the workshops were available were when she had to work so she would essentially end up putting herself in danger of being fired for want of a chair.

That is what personal responsibility means to somebody on welfare. It means here are these stupid hoops that we’re gonna make you jump through and then we’re going to give you a solution that absolutely won’t work for you. It’s that kind of just over and over beating your head against these ridiculous regulations and these double-blinds that don’t make any sense. And the whole thing is set up specifically to humiliate you as much as possible because what we need poor people to do in America more than anything else in the world is know their place.

Compare to a similar passage from Vu Le’s post:

The No-Free-Lunch: There have been idiotic proposals by clueless politicians designed to punish the poor for violating whatever ridiculous expectations are set out for them. Like taking away food stamps if their kids don’t get good enough grades or if they’re not volunteering or seeking out employment, despite the fact that there are only so many volunteer and paid positions to go around. In our sector, our funding gets threatened if we don’t comply with various requirements, such as working toward “sustainability.” A colleague mentioned a grant that won’t pay for staff wages and other indirect expenses, and applicants have to demonstrate that they will be completely self-sustaining within a year. That gave us all a good chuckle.

If people see non-profit arts organizations in the same light as welfare recipients, is it any wonder they don’t want their kids going into the arts? If they aren’t going to be constantly asking their parents for support, they will be asking society for support and what self-respecting parent wants that right?

I am not sure people equate the two in exactly that manner, but there is possibly a greater stigma associated with non-profits than we expect. Because people’s perceptions of poverty often has a very strong emotional element, merely surveying people about their attitudes may not be effective since they may not be entirely aware of how much their unconscious associations influence them.

About five years ago, it was relatively common to see people talking about the need for arts to adopt a different corporate structure. Many different options were debated but to my knowledge, no one ever restructured or organized a new arts organization under one of the alternative models. (Though we would really only start to see proof of concept now after five years of operation.)

While the idea that arts organizations need to distance themselves from those that society looks askance at may be immediately satisfying, not only does it not really appear to be viable, it doesn’t really solve the greater issues that arts organizations and non-profits in general face.

I have written before about the effort to build public will for arts and culture which seeks to change general societal perceptions about the arts. I have to imagine that a shift in the negative associations people make with the way arts are supported and funded would integral part to that.

About Joe Patti

I have been writing Butts in the Seats (BitS) on topics of arts and cultural administration since 2004 (yikes!). Given the ever evolving concerns facing the sector, I have yet to exhaust the available subject matter. In addition to BitS, I am a founding contributor to the ArtsHacker (artshacker.com) website where I focus on topics related to boards, law, governance, policy and practice.

I am also an evangelist for the effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture being helmed by Arts Midwest and the Metropolitan Group. (http://www.creatingconnection.org/about/)

My most recent role was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA.

Among the things I am most proud are having produced an opera in the Hawaiian language and a dance drama about Hawaii's snow goddess Poli'ahu while working as a Theater Manager in Hawaii. Though there are many more highlights than there is space here to list.

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6 thoughts on “Funding Requests As Panhandling”

  1. I wonder how many people realize arts orgs are nonprofits. Are we seen as a charity case? I work at a Museum that charges admission and we frequently get feedback that we should be free and we all think “Yeah, we agree, but we got to pay the bills.” So you want us to be “self-sustaining” and free…really?

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  2. I think this is an excellent observation to make. I also see it as symptomatic of the pervasive trend in seeing value merely in terms of means.

    For instance, as we both know, the arts are pedaled as good for this, good for that, but rarely as good in themselves. Support for the arts is support for what the arts are doing, not the arts themselves. The arts are a means, and we can add to the social good by enabling the arts to do so. But the acts of support, no matter how well intentioned under these conditions, do little to advance perception of the value of the arts themselves. Supporting the arts may have the positive side effect of furthering various social goods, but only indirectly. The arts themselves are not seen as social goods. And so the arts are never taken seriously themselves. And if you don’t believe in the arts it can be a strain (financial and psychological) to invest in them.

    Poverty has the same issue. Poor people are not seen as real humans with intrinsic value but as a problem to be solved. Its not that they have been ill served by society but are themselves a drain. And if they are this negative sort of means, a problem that needs fixing, who really gets excited by that? Seeing poor people as less than ends in themselves dehumanizes them. We begrudgingly attempt to ameliorate poverty, but the poor people themselves are representative of the problem. They are the problem, as far as perception goes.

    When your focus is on means rather than ends, it is difficult to be enthused. Means are not reasons why. They are not motivations themselves. Means are what motivation uses. Means are the furtherance of our ends. And the ends are the important things. The ends are what we yearn for. The ends have value in themselves.

    So the difficulty we have in appealing for support of the arts seems to make sense: It is awkwardly positioned from the get go. Asking people to fund the arts as a means is hardly catalyzing. When you build a house you need good hammers, but its a distraction to sell the hammer as the important part. Its especially problematic if a nail gun would work better, more efficiently, or more economically. If the arts are no more than the hammer to achieve social goods, why are we expecting people to get excited to fund hammers?

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  3. Early next year I’ll be launching a for-profit community theater company. It will be set up as a Benefit Corporation, since it will have a social mission. Is this what you mean by the ‘different corporate structure’ that’s been discussed? One of the things that inspired me to go this route was sitting in on meetings of the local arts council, which felt very much like sitting in a nest of baby birds craning their necks for a handout from mama bird. So, I get a lot of the points you make here. And thanks for the links; gives me a lot more to think about.

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    • Drew-

      Yep, Benefit Corporation structure is one of the things I was thinking about when I referred to different corporate structures. There were a number of people who talked about starting an organization under that structure but I don’t know anyone who went through with it and operated regularly.

      I know of a couple examples where the commercial enterprise supported a non-profit operation (if only by keeping the people in charge fed.) Keep me apprised from time to time about how it is going.

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