January 13, 2000 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Arts Funding 2000: Funder Perspectives on Current and Future Trends
By Loren Renz and Caron Atlas
Many grant makers who support arts programs worry that people see the arts as peripheral, according to this report.
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However, the report notes, those same grant makers were uncertain how best to persuade the public that the arts are vital.
“We don’t know how to work outside of our sphere or seek collaborators from other platforms,” the report quotes one grant maker as saying. “We can’t be one hand clapping.”
The Foundation Center and Grantmakers in the Arts sampled the opinions of program officers and other officials at 13 private foundations, seven family foundations, seven corporate-giving programs, five community foundations, and three public foundations. Most of the grant makers in the survey spend more than one-tenth of their overall budgets on the arts.
The respondents range from large foundations that have traditionally supported the arts, such as the Ford Foundation, to grant makers with a narrow focus, such as the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which supports female artists.
Two-thirds of those surveyed said they expected to award more money to the arts than in the past, and many respondents praised initiatives that combine the arts with other program areas, such as education or community development.
Chapters cover how grant makers set priorities, how support for the arts has changed (dwindling government funds, for example), how some grant makers feel they must justify their support of the arts, and what grant makers expect from the coming years.
Appendixes profile the 35 institutions and include a copy of the initial questionnaire sent to them.
Publisher: Foundation Center, Order Code ART4, 79 Fifth Avenue, New York 10003-3076; (212) 807-3690 or (800) 424-9836; fax (212) 807-3677; http://fdncenter.org; 74 pages; $14.95 plus $4.50 postage and handling; I.S.B.N. 0-87954-776-6.
