Twin Cities Funders and Theatres of Color Are Transforming Relationships, Part One

"This is not charity. This is the stuff of our own rescue."

Sarah Bellamy, president of Penumbra Center for Racial Healing, passionately lays out how nonprofit theatre, philanthropy, and survival intertwine. In Minnesota, the Twin Cities Theatres of Color Coalition (TCTOCC)—comprising New Native Theatre, Pangea World Theater, Penumbra, Teatro del Pueblo and Theater Mu—and a group of foundation officers who make up the Racial Equity Funders Collaborative (REFC) have been grappling with how to work together toward survival. TCTOCC-REFC started meeting in 2017 to develop new approaches to resources. Built on developing trust and embracing abundance, the TCTOCC-REFC partnership has garnered not only substantial financial support from multiple sources, but also a national reputation as a groundbreaking model in sustainable, socially engaged relationships between theatres and funders.

This is a two-part essay on how Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color-led (BIPOC) theatres can work in solidarity with equity-minded funders to create a new and unique model for resource development by outlining the genesis and history of TCTOCC-REFC. Using pre-existing video interviews with key stakeholders, I write this both as a Twin Cities-based theatremaker and scholar, as well as the 2023-24 Social Science Research Council Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow for Theater Mu. Excerpts from these interviews appear embedded throughout both articles to provide a sense of emotional investment amongst the many players. Video adds a layer of tenderness and humanity. The hours of interview footage show overlapped stories and quotes, shared moments of misty-eyed silence, and hearty belly laughs. Clearly, the members of the TCTOCC-REFC megacoalition know one another very well and care deeply about one another.

The ritual of protesting harmful representation followed by galvanizing conversations across and between different communities of color laid the groundwork for more formalized collaboration.

Rising Out of Protest

TCTOCC rose amidst several years of protests against racial stereotyping on widely-known, big-budget Twin Cities stages from the early 2010s. “I remember that there had been so much pain that predominantly white institutions had caused our community, the ways that we have had…to come together to stop harmful pieces from being done in predominantly white institutions, how hard it is to get predominantly white institutions to listen,” recalls Rhiana Yazzie, artistic director of New Native Theatre. The Guthrie Theater presented Scottsboro Boys in 2010, a show with a white creative and production team that portrayed a Black man tap dancing while being electrocuted, much to the criticism of Black activists. The Ordway Center for Performing Arts presented Miss Saigon in 2013 for the third time since 1999, despite repeated protests from Asian American activists claiming the show furthered gendered and exoticized stereotypes of Asian women. In 2014, New Century Theatre presented Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, and Native activists called for an end to harmful depictions of Native people as “extinct” while valorizing agents of genocide. Amidst these protests, leaders of what became TCTOCC’s member theatres not only protested on behalf of their own racial-ethnic groups, but they also showed up for each other in solidarity.

TCTOCC was founded in 2014 when leaders of these five companies agreed to coalesce “to build knowledge and capacity and take action around the challenges and opportunities of equity in the American theatre.” As every member’s website lists, TCTOCC “lead[s] conversations, making available the wealth and depth of knowledge housed in our theatres through the dissemination of tools, practices, and consultation to bolster responsible and accountable engagement around the representation of our communities.”

Sarah Bellamy (president, Penumbra Center for Racial Healing) and Eleanor Savage (president and chief executive officer, Jerome Foundation) in conversation. Video by Chris McDuffie. 

These protests led to both immediate and delayed responses from producers and presenters. Amidst debate and consternation from some, it ultimately put many theatremakers and presenters in the Twin Cities “on watch” for potential harm as well as embarrassment. More importantly, the ritual of protesting harmful representation followed by galvanizing conversations across and between different communities of color laid the groundwork for more formalized collaboration. Thus, TCTOCC was formed.

Rhiana Yazzie (artistic director, New Native Theatre) and Vickie Benson (former arts program director, McKnight Foundation) in conversation. Video by Chris McDuffie. 
 

Each organization had unique histories and structures. At the time, Penumbra brought nearly forty years of programming Black theatre, having been founded in 1976 at the Hallie Q. Brown/Martin Luther King Center by a group of artists including Lou Bellamy, Sarah’s father. Theater Mu and Teatro del Pueblo were founded in 1992, both by groups of artists seeking to create representation rooted in Twin Cities-based Asian American and Latine communities, respectively. Pangea was founded in 1995 as a pan-ethnic arts organization centering immigrant and Indigenous experiences. New Native Theatre was founded in 2009 to to bridge the gap between the more than one hundred theatres in town and the large urban Native American community.

While these five organizations were representative organizations of color for the Twin Cities, they differed greatly in scope and approach. Some had full-time staffs while others had only one founding employee who was supplementing their entire company’s work with other jobs and income sources. Some were working consistently with the Actors’ Equity Association and other artist unions, while others were training artists from scratch. Some were and still are doing a mix of both. The annual budgets of these organizations at the time ranged from less than $20,000 to over $2 million. Carmen Morgan, founder and executive director of artEquity, facilitated TCTOCC’s first retreat in 2014, where they recognized they needed financial support to keep the coalition alive.

Glyn Northington (senior program director (retired), Propel Nonprofits) and Amy Thomas (chief operating officer, Penumbra Center for Racial Healing) in conversation. Video by Chris McDuffie. 
 

Meanwhile, REFC formed in response to a confluence of shifts in awareness around funding inequities in the philanthropic sector. “[We were] being called to task in philanthropy about why are we still funding organizations that are producing work that generates harm and trauma in community?” recalls Arleta Little, formerly program officer at McKnight Foundation but now executive director of Loft Literary Center. In 2011, Holly Sidford published a report called “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change.” Conversations about equity at the 2012 Grantmakers in the Arts conference, followed by Sidford’s visit to the Twin Cities, led a handful of individual program officers to seek ways to change philanthropic practices to better serve equity. The group came together formally in 2013. As a coalition of individual program officers, REFC has represented organizations including the Bush Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Propel Nonprofits, the McKnight Foundation, the Saint Paul and Minnesota Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, and Target Community Relations (the group changes, with individuals moving in and out over time).

Meeting as Humans

“We had the data and now what we needed to do…[it was to] take our thinking into our hearts and move from our hearts. That’s exactly what happened when TCTOCC invited us to begin to work together. We moved from our heads to our hearts,” says Vickie Benson, former arts program director at McKnight, now a certified professional coach. Through official granter-grantee capacities, as well as encountering each other in organizing events such as protests and town halls, members of REFC and TCTOCC interacted with one another through various means. In 2017, TCTOCC wanted to create a strategic plan. When the coalition tried to find a recommendation for a strategic plan consultant from REFC, the two organizations recognized a shared mission. To align those missions, REFC and TCTOCC began formally meeting once a quarter, eventually leading to a retreat in 2018.

Out of habit, the funders initially arrived asking how much money the arts organizations sought to raise. They wanted to change how funding worked for BIPOC organizations and therefore saw goals in terms of dollars and cents. The artists, however, had something else in mind. They knew from experience that funding was neither reliable nor the only kind of resource. The theatre organizations were accustomed to transforming non-financial and often non-material community and human resources into spiritual and emotional salve. They knew too well how to weave something from what seemed to be nothing. Both artists and funders knew that inequitable funding was merely a symptom of deeper ills. The ecosystem itself was flawed. Despite everyone knowing that lack of funding was a major source of difficulty, TCTOCC-REFC made a radical initial decision to take fundraising off the table for at least a year. They needed to understand one another better and give time and space to that learning.

Sharon DeMark (program officer, Saint Paul and Minnesota Foundation) and Lily Tung Crystal (former artistic director, Theater Mu) in conversation. Video by Chris McDuffie. 

Taking funding off the table immediately led to an examination of the traditionally transactional relationships between grants officers and arts organizations. Funders make resources available; organizations apply; awards get decided; officers disburse funding and monitor compliance. Nothing about this structure is particularly creative, yet arts organizations accept it as a matter of course. There is a cost to business as usual, however. Transactional relationships mean that even if all parties wish to be transparent, there are inevitable agendas, competition, and hustle. Organizations that are less legible to grant makers end up losing out. In a context of white supremacy, illegibility turns into far less funding for BIPOC organizations, whose funding percentages do not come anywhere near matching national or local demographics.

Such a radical decision also led to other modes of inquiry, such as how people enter spaces and conversations and what the context was for each person arriving to the conversation. One significant vulnerability the TCTOCC leaders shared was their cumulative and collective trauma, not only as BIPOC leaders, but in the process of repeated applications for funding. “It upended the whole way that we in philanthropy usually approach conversations, situations, and expectations and opened the way to be vulnerable and to hear deeply the trauma—the impact of inequity,” says Eleanor Savage, president and chief executive officer of the Jerome Foundation. Al Justiniano, founder and artistic director of Teatro Del Pueblo, acknowledged the impact of this shift: “The TCTOCC-REFC collaboration was far from just a transactional exchange. It allowed our members to delve deeper into our shared humanity and vulnerabilities, leading to a significant shift in the power dynamic between program officers and theatre leaders. I now feel empowered to approach funders with confidence, recognizing the mutual value in the relationship.”

Grant applications often take weeks of preparation, with multiple questions completed across multiple departments in a given organization. Some larger grants require hiring outside consultants to finesse language, or bookkeepers to run audits or to ensure eligibility. Not only does it take significant resources to apply for many grants, but BIPOC arts organizations often find themselves in situations where they are addressing multiple interlocking needs of their communities that go beyond art-making, which can include anti-racism work, community events, and even providing resources often left to social services organizations. So these applications sometimes become exercises in justifying the very existence of certain communities in space. Along with the emotional, financial, and psychic toll these processes take, every leader relayed the trauma of rejection, of project viability hinging on rejection after rejection.

Nesting Dolls, or: Interlocking Responsibilities

Grant funding has a direct implication on the viability of not only the organization but also the livelihood of its leaders. Some TCTOCC artistic directors’ personal finances are so intertwined with their organizations’ that in the past they have responded to defunded projects with dire actions. “I [grew up] watching my dad struggle for my entire life: mortgaging our house multiple times to keep this place open, laying people off, always making sure that we paid the artists, he and other managing directors like Chris Widdess [Penumbra’s former managing director] not taking salary. That kind of thing. I know that affected me as a leader and as a person,” says Bellamy. While these leaders can feel beholden, powerless, or even subservient in the traditional funding landscape, their relationship to the BIPOC communities they work in means they inhabit their organizations as one of, if not the primary, decision-makers of the organization. This means they are able to adjust and change to the needs and resources of the community. It also means that the battles they wage around white supremacy and colonialism are shared by their staff, artist collaborators, and audiences. They are part of a larger culture that amplifies them as they amplify their community’s needs.

While an artistic director can change radically the direction of their organization based on their vision—and are often encouraged to do so—a funding officer can risk not only their personal financial stability, but the viability of a given funding initiative by asserting different agendas or inclinations.

Meanwhile, funding officers hold a comparably stable financial life. Their salaries are less directly intertwined to their performance or outside metrics. They can take out mortgages or loans and reasonably expect to continue paying them for years. With this stability comes a different set of problems. Funding officers exist as individuals within much larger organizations that often have multiple if not conflicting goals. While they may technically hold the purse strings of a given funding source or initiative, many funding officers only have nominal say over what kind of projects are funded, on what scale, and in what way. Justin Laing, principal consultant of the Hillombo Group and facilitator of TCTOCC-REFC conversations and retreats, reflects on this relationship to institutional power:

“There was a moment where program officers had to say, ‘This is what I can do. And this is causing a little bit of some weight on my end.’ The program officer is not this philanthropoid that can show up in full capacity. It can look sometimes as though the program officer is the foundation, that they are the ones holding power. [But] I find program officers will report feeling the most disempowered. They feel like they are small parts of a much bigger piece”

Therefore, a funding officer who perceives white supremacist or colonialist tendencies of a funding initiative or their own organization might work in a context where those issues may be minimized or ignored. Equity-minded individuals might find themselves fighting against the parameters of “merit” set by an out-of-touch board, supervisor, or an entire philanthropy sector. While an artistic director can change radically the direction of their organization based on their vision—and are often encouraged to do so—a funding officer can risk not only their personal financial stability, but the viability of a given funding initiative by asserting different agendas or inclinations.

“One of the models that really helped us to understand the complex dynamics within the group was the structure of nesting dolls, right?” says Little. In this metaphor, each person who arrived at the TCTOCC-REFC meetings represented multiple interlocking selves. They were individuals with their own tastes and personalities. Then, they represented the organizations they worked for, where some could make large sweeping decisions for those organizations and others would need to recruit buy-in. They represented either REFC or TCTOCC, and each group had specific agendas. And then there was the overall TCTOCC-REFC coalition that was trying to change how philanthropy and theatre interacted and aligned. This idea of nested priorities helped the group move from getting to know each other as individuals to addressing large-scale structural change.

Arleta Little (former arts program officer, McKnight Foundation) and Dipankar Mukherjee (artistic director, Pangea World Theater) in conversation. Video by Chris McDuffie. 

Sharing, arguing, and growing at what Maurine Knighton of the Doris Duke Foundation, among others, refers to as “the speed of trust” meant working through what many would view as several fallow funding cycles. TCTOCC slowly created a fertile medium in which to imagine ambitious funding goals and execute sustainable fundraising. What started as an initiative to undo white supremacy and colonialism in theatre and its funding led to a campaign disbursing $10 million over ten years, to be split evenly between each TCTOCC theatre. This $10 million not only created a sense of stability for each arts organization, but it also provided leverage for even more ambitious projects such as Penumbra transforming into a Center for Racial Healing or Pangea beginning a capital campaign for space. The attitude and commitment to abundance seemed to create something from nothing. 

The next essay about this collaboration will cover the learnings and best practices of this process.

The second installment of this two-part essay can be found here.