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

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

The super-coalition between the Twin Cities Theatres of Color Coalition (TCTOCC) and the Racial Equity Funders Collaborative (REFC) constitutes a unique relationship and philanthropic experiment on a national scale. This article covers learnings and best practices developed through the TCTOCC-REFC coalition.

The biggest initial decision TCTOCC-REFC made when they began meeting in 2017 was to do what the TCTOCC members requested: “take money off the table” and commit to ongoing meetings to move beyond transactional engagement with funders. Counterintuitive on its surface, this agreement opened the door for several lines of inquiry. It took pressure off of both coalitions to solve the issues they already knew about. It also allowed them to delve deeper into what was underneath pervasive sustainability hurdles endemic to all art fields and philanthropy.

After one year of meeting, the theatres and funders together developed a funding goal of $10 million in support of the theatres. An initial $2,150,000 was collectively raised from Twin Cities funders, Surdna, and Doris Duke Foundation. Due to leadership and staffing changes in 2019, TCTOCC-REFC began examining the capacity to raise the goal of $10 million. 2020 brought COVID, racial uprisings in the Twin Cities and nationally, and shifting priorities and mechanisms for collective fundraising. The TCTOCC-REFC coalition laid groundwork for many of the theatres of color to receive national funding through philanthropic responses to address funding inequities. How the collaborative reached that result was a long and complex journey.

Perhaps the simplest sounding but most difficult to execute best practice of the TCTOCC-REFC coalition has been a slow and deliberate forging of deep interpersonal connection. In a series of recorded interviews, arts leaders and funders involved in this process reflected heart-felt respect between arts leaders and funders. In the conversation between Dipankar Mukherjee (artistic director of Pangea World Theater), Arleta Little (formerly arts program officer at McKnight Foundation but now executive director of Loft Literary Center), and Justin Laing (principle consultant at Hillombo Group), Little shares an English translation of a poem by Rabindranath Tagore. In another conversation, Rhiana Yazzie (artistic director of New Native Theatre) and Vickie Benson (former arts program director, McKnight Foundation, now a certified professional coach) joke about how, rather than exchanging applications and check stubs, TCTOCC-REFC exchange tracks at Karaoke. And when Eleanor Savage (formerly program officer at Jerome Foundation and now president and chief executive officer) and Sarah Bellamy (president of Penumbra Center for Racial Healing) sit inside the theatre at Penumbra, they dab their eyes recalling shared hardship and joy.

Undoing White Supremacy Culture in Funding

White supremacy culture in the context of late capitalism creates a normalized sense of transactional and so-called “efficient” systems. Philanthropy and arts organizations have long worked under models where all problems can be fixed by throwing money at them. Many initiatives carry an imposed haste that does not allow for reflection because time is money. This has meant that the actual structure that reinforces social problems like racism and colonialism remains in place while the people who need resources most burn out competing for funding. The TCTOCC-REFC partnership upended this model.

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

After the theatres of color and the funders tabled funding as a goal, they discovered that they needed to address the trauma in the room. Many ills of white supremacy and colonialism have developed and hardened over time, so finding remedies for those ills also takes time and commitment. For arts organizations of color, this commitment is a foundation for work, but the resources to do this work are always in question. For philanthropic organizations, the resources are available, but what is the commitment?

Removing funding as the primary goal of TCTOCC-REFC shifted the goal of this coalition from transactional to relational, cementing the collective. Without specific sources of funding to compete for or allocate, they could concentrate on developing connections, get to know each other as human beings, and embrace the TCTOCC-REFC coalition as a type of laboratory. This created space for what many have noted as working through the tension between an urgency to survive for the Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) organizations while also moving together at the “speed of trust.” This led to not only individuals learning about one another, but also funding officers and organizations’ leaders reframing how they see one another. Mukherjee recalls how this relationality led to conversations about what really matters. “Arleta [who was program officer at the McKnight Foundation at the time] came into the room and said, ‘Dipankar, tell me about Pangea’s aesthetic’…The core of our work, which is our art, which is our aesthetic as to why we form theatre…nobody had ever asked.”

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

This coalition also revealed disappointing yet predictable metrics. Bellamy reflects, “You can look at organizations over a ten-year period. I remember looking at a predominantly white institution (PWI) in the Twin Cities that grew 70 percent, and Penumbra grew one over that same period. One percent. Yeah. Just one little baby percent.” According to Lily Tung Crystal, former artistic director of Theater Mu (now artistic director of East West Players), “Most arts funding, about 95 percent, goes to PWIs.” Even the funding going to TCTOCC as a result of this collaboration constitutes only a small percentage of the $120 million total the REFC funders give per year. For context, the Twin Cities demographics as of 2023 reflect between 26 percent to 33 percent BIPOC communities, with the white population continuing a downward trend.

To address and examine these metrics, among other issues, TCTOCC-REFC committed to meeting as a group quarterly and convened a retreat in 2018. While simple on their surface, the quarterly meetings built upon the organic formation of solidarity between individual organizations of TCTOCC. The theatre leaders came to know one another as individuals and provided mutual support for projects, initiatives, and sometimes protests. For REFC members, who were arriving at this coalition as individuals and not necessarily representatives of their foundations, this engagement effectively took place “off the clock,” drawing a personal investment into the collective goal.

This kind of support sediments over time; even in the non-profit world, wealth begets wealth.

Flipping the Script

One major innovation at this retreat involved funding officers presenting the history of their foundations’ funding rewards and rejections, as well as the resources and possibilities each officer could access and leverage. This presentation “flipped the script” of funding. Generally, arts organizations create elaborate written and presented materials to win support from funders. Creating these materials takes dozens if not hundreds of staff hours, sometimes requiring outside consultants. To prepare, organizations budget at least one fiscal year in advance and justify line items. They must contextualize their mission amongst many other organizations’ missions and provide proof of their fiscal capacities and responsibilities. Each funder requires different kinds of materials with differing nuance and focus. A given organization will need to create dozens of presentations a year to meet funding needs. It is an arduous process.

The “flipped script” presentation exercise not only exposed funding officers to the embodied experience of undergoing such demands, but it also explicitly outlined and supported the intuitive sense that BIPOC organizations are underfunded despite efforts to gain support. Eleanor Savage of the Jerome Foundation gathered funding history for the major white-led and TCTOCC theatres in Minneapolis from the six REFC funders, “The exercise illuminated to both arts leaders and funders the reality that TCTOCC theatres represented only 7.7 percent of the total funding over time. There were TCTOCC theatres who had applied repeatedly and never received funding from the REFC funders.” Presenting the metrics of the actual funding reality for BIPOC organizations revealed the implicit bias and chronic lack of commitment in the funding system.

Foundation funding is sometimes deliberately opaque. “There’s not a lot of legal accountability for foundations,” says F. Javier Torres-Campos, formerly of Surdna Foundation and now an independent consultant. Legal code requires 501(c)(3) arts organizations make financial disclosures available to the public. Arts organizations then must provide lengthy audits of these disclosures in order to apply for funding from governments or foundations. Legal codes do dictate how foundations disburse wealth, but they do not require nearly as much disclosure to the public. While private foundations must spend down 5 percent of their overall investment, with an average recent stock market return of 10 percent per year, some foundations simply build wealth. Additionally, each foundation interprets its mission uniquely depending on changes in leadership, political influence, and trends of the field. These rapidly shifting priorities can feel like a roller coaster ride to arts and other non-profits seeking funding. Considering the immense financial power foundations wield in the entire philanthropic sector, very little public intervention holds foundations accountable.

The Internal Work

This larger context—a known reality to REFC members, but only vaguely known to TCTOCC—required a rethinking of funding strategy. As funding applicants, it is easy to succumb to tunnel vision of what funders need and then simply comply. Understanding how the funding structure works, however, created potential pathways for shifting systemic inequities. “It was clear to us that local funders were committed to doing the internal work. This wasn't just a one-off opportunity…they were trying to transform their entire institutions,” reflects Torres, speaking about the TCTOCC-REFC coalition.

Many foundations were founded by a family with generational wealth. Well-known foundation families associated with supporting the arts include the Duke, Ford, Mellon, Shubert, and Walton families. For foundations invested in the arts, there is a long history of members of the foundation family serving on boards of arts organizations. These informal connections form valuable social capital. A family member might not participate in the business of a foundation, but they might exert influence on the foundation board of directors or president. Similarly, members of the family might encounter board directors socially at many different arts and political functions. This kind of support sediments over time; even in the non-profit world, wealth begets wealth. The decades-long support that a large organization might receive from a given foundation then garners additional significant funding from other sources that see it as a reliably valuable investment. All major cities have such institutions that serve as marquee cultural centers; they have multimillion-dollar budgets and occupy substantive plots of land while maintaining celebrated buildings that have served the same organization for decades. The funding landscape continues to change, yet these organizations still enjoy a combination of government, private foundation, corporate sponsorship, and major donor support. Most of them are PWIs (more on this phenomenon can be found in “Not Just Money: Equity Issues in Cultural Philantrhopy from Helicon Collaborative and in “Working Against Uncertainty: Working Capital and the Resilliency of BIPOC-Serving Organizations” from SMU DataArts).

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

Such connections for organizations of color, however, are difficult to cultivate. Because of the socioeconomics of the communities which TCTOCC organically serves, leaders of color rarely encounter major donors or members of foundation families. Even when this happens, wealthy potential patrons may not necessarily be sympathetic. Bellamy recalls, “A very wealthy donor came up to me, a white woman. And she asked me where I worked and I told her Penumbra, and she basically said, ‘I don't know why we still need Penumbra because these other companies are doing that kind of work. I'm seeing more diverse work on stages. So do we still need it?’” Penumbra’s work is not only to present theatre of the Black diaspora, but also to train new talent, to create a context of learning in which those stories can be understood, to grow Black empowerment, to provide resources that might be seen as social services, and now to create racial healing. The disconnect between this patron and Penumbra’s full mission represents an attitude that is systemic across the arts and philanthropy as well as symptomatic of deep-seated racial inequity. (For more on this phenomenon, please see my article “Can Theatres of Color Get Support Without Strings or Hurdles?” in American Theatre.)

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

The TCTOCC-REFC collaboration revealed that the work needed to go beyond organizational leadership interacting with foundation program officers. Leaders of color needed to develop meaningful relationships with foundation boards and presidents.

This was not necessarily a simple revelation to put into action. Depending on the foundation and its priorities, program officers themselves may not have direct access to their own leadership. Even when they do, the culture of a given organization might mean that a program officer risks much social capital in trying to intervene in business-as-usual. Do they keep leveraging the funds they administer toward issues of racial justice as much as the organization will allow? Or do they risk taking initiative to try to change priorities of the entire organization? The REFC members eventually facilitated the latter and organized a meeting with presidents of large local foundations. This meeting ended up being useful, but not without its hiccups and learnings. Here, too, TCTOCC brought information about their organizations to the presidents but were confronted with questions like, “What is your ask?” And when they responded with, again, “We want to build a relationship,” they were met with puzzlement and dis-ease.

Sarah Berger (senior program officer, McKnight Foundation) and Al Justiniano (artistic/executive director, Teatro Del Pueblo) in conversation. Video by Chris McDuffie.
 

Funding, Humanity, and Love

Developing meaningful relationships across socioeconomic status is perhaps a long-term goal that requires more work. That said, the TCTOCC-REFC coalition created a few additional best practices that have created ripple effects across the country.

They began reaching out to other philanthropy leaders in the field who were looking at racial justice and equity in their initiatives and conversations. They presented on their collaboration at Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA). These presentations coincided with a shift in GIA priorities over the last decade: session offerings at the 2013 GIA conference showed less than a handful of sessions on racial justice or equity, whereas the 2023 GIA conference named equity and justice as a main focus in its description, and all six of their keynote speakers were people of color. TCTOCC-REFC has now been called to speak to many different communities and partnerships to report on their findings. A significant decision TCTOCC-REFC made in addressing these queries was to make sure there was parity in representation at each event. One collaborative could not speak for the other. For each REFC member attending, a TCTOCC member also needed to attend. This led to continued accountability as well as expanded open communication.

The TCTOCC-REFC collaboration serves as an important model for how the arts ecosystem can shift with conscientious, steadfast, and open desires toward equity.

The TCTOCC-REFC collaboration also yielded two tools: the Equity Initiative Framework and the Equity Screen. Distilled into two internal documents, the framework names the many goals and hurdles in working toward equity in philanthropy and the arts, and the screen names best practices and questions that must be asked of the collaboration. The framework loosely outlines two goals: to increase assets and decrease liabilities. It names concrete steps funders, organizations of color, and communities can address to pursue both goals. The screen centers ideas of relationships, resources, and collectivity, parsing the modes of engagement through a series of questions. Both read as very concise textbooks on how to work on changing the funding landscape.

The TCTOCC-REFC collaboration serves as an important model for how the arts ecosystem can shift with conscientious, steadfast, and open desires toward equity. In the Twin Cities, the years leading up to and immediately after the murder of George Floyd created a tender and raging call for racial justice, one still viscerally present on any drive across the Twin Cities. The fact is, TCTOCC and REFC had been laying the groundwork for years before those uprisings, and the individual theatres that constitute TCTOCC had been doing so even before that. While many can take lessons from this coalition, it is also important to note that the winds of philanthropy and arts can change.

Other initiatives tackling similar issues around race and equity include Mosaic Network and Fund in New York and Enrich Chicago. Both comprise larger populations and organizations and, according to their websites, are currently on hold. Similar coalitions are developing in other major metropolitan localities, like the Artistic Directors of Color in Los Angeles.

White supremacy has been a pervasive force for centuries if not millennia. It will take a great deal more time than funding trends and initiatives might have the capacity to address. Therefore, perhaps the most important learning from the TCTOCC-REFC collaborative thus far may not be each individual best practice, but the attitude and commitment to work side-by-side for as long as it takes to achieve justice. Perhaps the important work TCTOCC-REFC has been doing can be encapsulated in a moving exchange between Savage and Bellamy. “I think that true accountability is through relationship,” says Savage. “It’s love,” says Bellamy, “I mean, that’s really what this is.”