GIA Reader (2000-present)

In 2009 the Fund for Folk Culture, a national intermediary serving the field of folk and traditional arts, suspended operations after eighteen years. GIA asked Amy Kitchener, executive director of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, to interview Betsy Peterson, former executive director of the Fund for Folk Culture (FFC), about what led to this decision and to share some of the important experience the Fund gained during its years
of operation.

Amy Kitchener: Betsy, could you talk about how and why the Fund suspended its operations?

What happens when a founding artistic director moves on? Whether the move is a departure or a shift in roles within the organization, leadership change presents a daunting — and inevitable — challenge. As the nonprofit arts field matures and faces unprecedented economic challenges, the question of how to survive and embrace significant transitions in the leadership of an organization becomes pressing.

Introduction

Foundations trying to better leverage their influence and improve their impact increasingly are being urged to embrace advocacy and public policy grantmaking as a way to substantially enhance their results and advance their missions. In fact, public policy grantmaking has been described as “one of the most powerful tools available to foundations for creating real change” (Alliance for Justice, 2004, p. 1).

While researching for a town hall meeting held last fall at New Dramatists to discuss the low numbers of female written plays reaching production, I noticed that, by every estimate, work by women made up only approximately 17% of the total number of new plays produced in this country; yet, in an apparent paradox, 31% of the plays on the Theater Communication Group’s list of the “Top Ten Most Produced Plays in American Theatre” were written by women.

The Durfee Foundation’s ARC program — Artists’ Resource for Completion — is, you might say, a program designed to let a thousand flowers bloom. It was founded in 2000 to serve Los Angeles artists, in any discipline and at any career level. The grants are made quarterly, for small sums of up to $3,500 per artist. About sixty to seventy artists are funded each year (fifteen to eighteen each quarter).

The conversations that flow among our field’s funders, professional conferences, and boardrooms suggest that there are two principle barriers to strong future leadership in the arts: a shortage of high-potential managers in the pipeline, and a sparse offering of professional training to prepare them for the task. And yet a quick survey of the environment shows that we are literally surrounded by both. Our organizations, communities, and universities are rich in young people who are passionate about the arts — great prospects for future leadership roles.

My goal for putting together a session at the 2009 GIA Conference entitled: “Changing the Game: New Models, New Leaders, New Ideas for the Arts,” was to cast new light on old problems by enriching our collective conversation with new voices. I described it in the conference guide this way:

The recession has impacted all professions, and artists are no exception. As of 2001, there were more than 2.5 million working artists in the United States, representing a critical part of the entrepreneurial, independent workforce. In the summer of 2009, Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC), in partnership with Helicon Collaborative and Princeton Survey Research International, developed the Artists and the Economic Recession Survey to provide high-quality and timely information to funders and artist service organizations.