Partnerships Between Large and Small Cultural Organizations

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A small, African-American classical music organization joins forces with a historically black college and gets the space it needs to start a music program for talented, underprivileged teens. A large children's museum with a predominantly white visitorship and staff collaborates with a small, Latino theater and attracts hundreds of Latino community members to events. And, together, a small organization dedicated to promoting African-American culture and a large African-American history museum engage local congregations in a project to collect, preserve, and exhibit church artifacts. In all three of these examples, small and large cultural organizations collaborated with each other to do more than they could have done alone. They are among 10 large-small partnerships supported by The Wallace Foundation's Community Partnerships for Cultural Participation initiative (CPCP), which provide useful insights for other small and large organizations about the benefits—and challenges—of forming partnerships to enhance cultural participation.¹

Taken together, the results of these collaborations show that partnerships between large and small arts organizations can be a useful tool for building cultural participation. Partnerships can help both large and small organizations expand their networks, horizons, capacities, and audiences.

However, an examination of the CPCP partnerships also reveals that it can be very difficult to create mutually beneficial or sustained large-small partnerships. Partnerships in general are challenging, but issues of mutual respect and relative influence and rewards become all the more sensitive and hard to achieve when collaborators differ so greatly in their resources and culture. The large partners in this research had budgets ranging from $8 million to over $40 million—at least 15 times larger than their smaller partners' budgets. Usually, the disparity was far greater: in about half of the cases, the large organization's budget was over 50 times larger than that of the smaller partner. By contrast, the largest of the "small" organizations in this research had a budget of $550,000.

This financial disparity was generally accompanied by other differences, such as staffing and professionalization, audience size, and, in most cases, the ethnic composition of staff, boards, and audiences.

The purpose of this brief is to share the lessons learned from these 10 CPCP large-small partnerships in order to help cultural organizations recognize and evaluate the benefits and challenges of developing partnerships, and to design and conduct more successful collaborations. Toward that end, it addresses the following questions:

• What cultural participation-enhancing goals can partnerships help large and small organizations achieve?
• What resources can large and small organizations offer one another?
• What are the characteristic difficulties that arise in large-small partnerships?
• What strategies can help large and small organizations initiate, design, and better manage partnerships with one another?

Notes from this section

1 This brief highlights and extends a discussion of large-small partnerships presented in a general CPCP monograph on partnerships among cultural organizations. Additional information on research findings, data, and methods may be found in that monograph, Cultural Collaborations: Building Partnerships for Arts Participation. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=310616.

Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

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