The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University THE NEXT NORMAL: Arts Innovation and Resilience in a Post-COVID World Wednesday, February 10, 2021 Arts Funders Panel, 2:30 pm TRANSCRIPT ** Fred Bronstein: Welcome back, everybody, for our third panel today. This is a panel of funders, and I want to bring them on, beginning with Anita Contini, the arts program lead at Bloomberg Philanthropies – welcome, Anita; Ben Cameron, the president of Jerome Foundation – welcome, Ben; and Susan Feder, the arts and culture program officer at the Mellon Foundation. Welcome, Susan, and welcome to all of you. Thanks for being here with us today. I think one of the really interesting things about you as a group is you represent very deep, long, deep experience in the arts. Well, in the funding world and, of course, in the arts funding world as well. As we talk about and grapple with the issues of Covid, a lot of what we're trying to talk about today is long- term impact as opposed to the immediate impact we all know has been devastating. But the long- term impact is, I think, a really important question. We'll do this the way we did the other panels. We'll do 15 minutes or so, or however long it takes, for us to do an opening question. I would love to get your thoughts on a couple of things. And then we'll do some other questions, have some conversation, and then the last 15 minutes of the hour we will take some questions from the participants. Let me frame this first question for you, which is, “How has the experience of the last year impacted the funding priorities of your organizations, and do you think this will be a framework for what you do in the years ahead and why?” It's kind of a two-part question in a way. And again, asking you to think immediately and then how you see it impacting long term. Anita, would you like to start? Anita Contini: Sure. Thank you so much for having us here today and for bringing up such an important question. I just wanted to start by saying the number one priority for Bloomberg Philanthropies and many funders has been how to provide immediate and flexible funding to institutions, especially those small and midsized arts organizations that don't have access to the same funds that many others do. We've also seen that innovation really starts with small arts organizations because they have the flexibility to take risks and to advance their mission. For us, ensuring the immediate and long-term survival of arts organizations has also been a priority. The culture sector has always had to be nimble and kind of punch above their weight when it comes to finances and resources. Due to Covid-19, there's been many, many cancellations of galas and fundraisers and other revenue sources, and that's made the long-term outlook for many more difficult, especially those that don't have sufficient financial safety nets. That's a concern because they do not have savings or endowments or business interruption insurance, and the lack of confidence and prepared managers also is an issue. We looked at what we can do to be helpful. I also like to think about what Mike Bloomberg, our chairman, often says - that philanthropy cannot replace the scale of government, but it can experiment and test ideas to prove actually what works. In our arts initiative, we try to fill unmet needs that may have been overlooked, where we can actually bring our expertise to make real issues that are out there and to create real important impact like our arts innovation and management program. This is a program we also called Aim, and through the management training component of Aim we help organizations build expertise and confidence that they need to sustain themselves. During Covid 1 | P a g e The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University THE NEXT NORMAL: Arts Innovation and Resilience in a Post-COVID World Wednesday, February 10, 2021 Arts Funders Panel, 2:30 pm TRANSCRIPT ** this type of guidance has been really important so much more than ever. We put together not only short-term but long-term a number of initiatives. Because there's been such a negative impact on the organizations’ earned income, particularly admissions and ticket sales and memberships, we decided to immediately release and distribute multi-year funding through to 2021, and we also created greater flexibility on reporting and how to use those funds. We launched programs and funds to support institutions, including providing digital tools to our Bloomberg Connects app to help institutions actually stay connected, not only internally to their organizations, but outside their walls to their audiences. And we then decided that it was really important during this time to work with other institutions, particularly other funders, and we've done that in a number of different ways, both with the American Cultural Treasures and the Covid-19 Response Impact Fund which has supported 800 different cultural institutions in New York. We really believe that partnerships are the way of the future, and we think that's extremely important. Just before I close, I want to say that our Aim program really focuses on ensuring organizations have long-term strategies they need to meet the unforeseen challenges like what's happened with the pandemic, and we've been working with over 744 organizations that are small and midsize to help them. In addition, many of these organizations really need to develop, and we've been working with them to develop their long-term strategy plans so that they can make smart decisions for the future. We really believe in partnerships and investment in these organizations. That's immediately what our thought is, Fred. Fred Bronstein: Thank you, Anita. Ben. Ben Cameron: I stand in awe to follow Anita and with Susan on the panel as well. I want to begin by saying I'm actually calling from Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is the land of the Dakota and the Ojibwe whose ancestors and descendants are in the past, present, and future. I want to acknowledge and honor, even while I hope all the participants on the call will do a similar acknowledgment wherever they're calling from. I want to say two things. One is, Fred, to the framing of your question, maybe wrongly, I heard a larger curiosity about how funders are changing their priorities toward the arts in this time at all. And observationally, I would say that for most of the foundations I'm watching, I'm seeing very few shift towards arts funding, not because they don't care about the arts or because they don't realize how important it is, but because the same degree of distress and pain and anguish that we're seeing in the arts, they're seeing in the fields to which they are equally passionately dedicated. It's not about resistance to the art as much as it is a kind of a larger scale of pain that permeates the nation right now that makes shifting into the arts for somebody that hasn't been there a difficult proposition. The other thing I wanted to just acknowledge at the top is that the question for me about priorities invites a real focus on strategies. And frankly, as a foundation we're the peanut in this 2 | P a g e The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University THE NEXT NORMAL: Arts Innovation and Resilience in a Post-COVID World Wednesday, February 10, 2021 Arts Funders Panel, 2:30 pm TRANSCRIPT ** group. By the time I leave my foundation in several years, I won't have given away in total what Susan has in a year. We're very small, but we've been centered less in strategies than we have in values. And I want to just lay this as a backdrop. In 2016 we challenged ourselves to define what our core values are, the things that had nourished us most in the history of the organization, and that represented the sort of central moral and ethical premises that we would dedicate ourselves to in the future. We said our core values are diversity, innovation, and humility. Now humility for us meant in part that we think the arts community knows more about what they need than we know as professionals. It led us to make some dramatic changes. We reached out to the field. We got 1,200 artists to respond. We got 400 organizations to respond. And based on that kind of shift, we shifted our grants from staff-curated grants to panel adjudication in all cases. We shifted from single-year grants to multi-year grants for artists and for organizations. We shifted from emphasizing project support to supporting sustained programs at organizations who shared alignment on at least one, if not all three, of those values. Our priorities became organizations who could demonstrate achievement, not just aspiration, in either humility or innovation or diversity, if not all three. It shifted already who we funded. Even before Covid and the George Floyd murder, 85 percent of the artists we were funding were BIPOC, 35 percent of the organizations we funded were BIPOC led, and 65 percent of the programs within those institutions were BIPOC led. It led us to shift the structure of our grants. Every grant in addition to general administrative overhead was allowed to take 25 percent of their grant for gen op.