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Table of Contents
Overview
The Community Partnerships for Cultural Participation Initiative
Early Findings from the CPCP Initiative
Chapter 1
Overview of the Initiative — Principles, Design, and Evaluation
Chapter 2
Cultural Participation: An Analytic Framework for Understanding Community
Foundations' Goals and Strategies
Chapter 3
Arts and Culture Providers and Their Strategies
Chapter 4
Community Foundation Support for Arts and Culture Providers
Chapter 5
Community Foundations as Intermediaries
References
Bibliography
Appendix 1: Summaries of CPCP Sites and Initiatives
Appendix 2: Evaluation Plan
Appendix 3: Methodology
Appendix 4: Key Informants
Overview
The Community Partnerships for Cultural Participation Initiative
Since its inception, the Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Fund (the Fund) has embarked on a broad-scale effort to extend arts and culture to more people in the United States. Currently, the Fund is pursuing a three-pronged strategy to enhance participation—working through leading cultural institutions, stimulating community-based initiatives, and using media and technology. The Community Partnerships for Cultural Participation (CPCP) Initiative is a component of the Fund's community-based strategy. It is supporting nine community foundations, which are, in turn, helping art, culture, and other organizations in their communities to broaden, deepen, and diversify participation.
Giving the average person more opportunities to experience the benefits of arts and culture requires art and culture provider institutions to change the standard ways they now do business. Arts and culture supporters and funders also need to change their approaches. The Fund is targeting community foundations to be catalysts for these changes because of the unique role such foundations play in their communities. Through the CPCP Initiative, the Fund also hopes to spotlight the importance of arts and culture to community life, and strategies to enhance residents' participation in these activities.
Participating Community Foundations
The Boston Foundation
Community Foundation Silicon Valley
Community Foundation for Southeastern Michigan
Dade Community Foundation
East Tennessee Foundation
Greater Kansas City Community Foundation
Humboldt Area Foundation
Maine Community Foundation
New Hampshire Charitable Foundation |
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The nine community foundations in the CPCP Initiative are receiving four- or five-year grants, ranging in size from $500,000 to $1,500,000. Foundations must match these amounts, in part to create a permanent endowment to support arts and cultural activities. The community foundations each received a $55,000 one-year planning grant to prepare proposals to implement expanded community participation. The initiative runs from December 1997 through December 2002.
In January 1998, the Fund commissioned the Urban Institute to evaluate its initiative. This document, the first report in that evaluation, reviews the progress of the participating community foundations during the first 10 months of the CPCP Initiative. The findings are based on very preliminary data and should be understood as a snapshot of the start of the initiative. In all of the sites, the initiative is evolving rapidly and has already progressed since the initial evaluation site visits in May–July 1998. This report also presents a framework for understanding the outcomes of this initiative over the course of five years.
Diversity Stressed in the Selection of CPCP Sites
The Fund invited a select group of community foundations to participate in this initiative.1 The selection was based on the "quality of the community foundation's work overall, its track record in supporting cultural activities, its success in raising funds, and its capacity to lead community-wide planning and produce concrete results based on that planning."2 Importantly, the foundations represent diverse parts of the country. Each serves a different type of community, ranging from large urban areas, such as Boston and Detroit, to far-flung rural counties, including Humboldt County in northern California, and 19 counties in East Tennessee. The highest median household income among CPCP target areas (the town of Milpitas in Silicon Valley) is almost three times the lowest (the city of Detroit). Racial and ethnic compositions vary from Hancock County, Maine's 97 percent white, to Boston's 22 percent black, to Milpitas's 35 percent Asian, to Miami–Dade's 49 percent Hispanic. The economic base also varies by site, including Newport, New Hampshire's industrial economy, Silicon Valley's domination by the computer industry, and Miami Dade's focus on tourism. The specific geographic, demographic, and social dimensions of these communities have a significant impact on how the foundations implement expanded participation initiatives. The Fund is "encouraging the community foundations to develop plans that reflect the unique characteristics and assets of their geographic service areas and that address the interests and self-identified needs of local residents."3 More details on the sites can be found in appendix 1 and in tables 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3.
The Fund's Goals for the Community Foundations
To guide community foundations, the Fund established four goals. The foundations are being asked to exert strategic leadership, collect and analyze information, create sustainable financial resources, and work to raise the importance of arts and cultural activities in their communities. The CPCP Initiative contains special components to help community foundations achieve enhanced arts and cultural participation, including technical assistance.
Early Findings
1. Community foundations can act as intermediaries in the nonprofit art and culture system.
2. Foundations have emphasized "community" in their cultural participation grantmaking.
3. The planning year was invaluable to foundations, but it raised expectations within communities.
4. Early grantmaking reflects a diversity of community foundation approaches.
5. Permanent endowments are being raised, using a variety of approaches.
6. Community foundations seem to value local evaluation, but are not sure what is expected of them.
7. Technical assistance is needed by the community foundations and their grantees.
8. Foundations have emphasized partnerships, but face difficulties creating and sustaining them.
9. Community foundations are facing challenges in pursuing cultural participation goals. Some have responded by hiring staff and mobilizing board support.
10. Community foundations are starting to change their internal grantmaking and advisory practices to become more strategic in their grantmaking. |
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Importantly, the CPCP Initiative stresses that being part of an audience at an arts or cultural event is only one aspect of participation. The Fund's more ecumenical view of cultural participation incorporates artists, volunteers, donors, curators, production staff, and other cultural activities and professions. It includes individuals as well as organizations, and arts-and-culture focused groups as well as non-arts-and-culture groups that pursue arts or culture related activities to accomplish other goals.
Early Findings from the CPCP Initiative
One year into the Community Partnerships for Cultural Participation Initiative, it is too soon to draw definitive conclusions, but we can highlight some early observations and areas to follow in the next four years.
- Community foundations can act as intermediaries in the nonprofit art and culture system.
Ultimately, the goal of the CPCP Initiative is to foster lasting change in local arts and culture systems that allow for broadening, deepening and diversifying cultural participation at all levels. Achieving these goals requires intermediation—mobilization of money, talent, and leadership.
Community foundations have shown that they can work with their communities to plan this initiative, even where this is their first major foray into funding art and culture. Many of the foundations never before played a leadership role in local arts and culture. Community foundations, however, have other organizational assets such as money, in-kind resources, expertise, and influence, that will allow them to lead.
Aspects of the CPCP structure have helped community foundations to strengthen their ability to act as leaders, brokers, facilitators, and funders. The long and participatory planning process built trust, forged relationships among arts and cultural supporters and providers, and elicited commitments for the implementation phase. Research activities helped foundations lead through their command of information. One indicator of community foundations' success in taking on intermediary tasks is their strong initial performance in raising at least $4.5 million in matching funds thus far.
- Community foundations have emphasized "community" in their cultural participation grantmaking.
In a departure from views traditionally held by many funders, researchers, and cultural organizations, community foundations have embraced notions of participation that go beyond simple increases in audience counts to include community involvement in all aspects of making, presenting, and supporting art and culture. Given their charge to act on behalf of the community to enhance quality of life, community foundations have tended to view arts and cultural activities as one of several ways of building stronger urban, suburban, and rural communities. For this reason, their early planning and grantmaking has accorded special attention to the needs of community-based arts and cultural organizations, though not to the exclusion of "major" institutions, such as art museums, symphonies, and ballet companies.
- The planning year was invaluable to the community foundations, but it also has raised high expectations within local communities.
The Fund gave each participating community foundation a one-year grant to study cultural participation issues and develop plans for the implementation phase of the CPCP Initiative. Community foundations convened diverse participants, ranging from large institutions to neighborhood associations, to develop plans to study and address cultural participation issues, and help community foundations develop programs to address them. It is clear that the participatory planning process was a good way for foundations to explore the arts and culture community, and for the arts and culture community to learn more about the foundations' intentions and goals. All of the community foundations reported that having a year to research and plan this initiative was a luxury they do not often have, but sorely need. However, some of the diagnostic research has taken longer than anticipated, overlapping the implementation period.
In addition to researching their communities, the community foundations used the planning year to search for partners, develop plans, and begin raising matching funds. These steps helped the community foundations assess their own readiness to participate in the initiative. Already, participants around the country credit the planning year with creating change in their communities by raising awareness of art and culture.
The planning year served to raise enthusiasm among arts and culture providers and supporters, but it also raised community expectations, which a few of the foundations found difficult to meet. In particular, the planning year called attention to the availability of arts and cultural funding, setting off debates among arts and cultural organizations over funding priorities.
- Early grantmaking reflects a diversity of community foundation approaches.
In early grantmaking, community foundations gave financial support to leading examples of partnerships among arts and culture providers, as a way of illustrating the major concepts of the initiative to others. They also made grants to encourage more arts and cultural organizations to embrace expanded notions of participation, and encourage more non-arts and culture providers to sponsor arts and cultural activities, sometimes in partnership with one another. A salient initial finding from the CPCP Initiative is the appetite for cultural participation funding, particularly among community-based arts and cultural providers. Interest stimulated by the year-long planning process and strong, creative initial program outreach helped tap the unsatisfied demand for support.
Given a high level of interest from many grassroots organizations, and recognizing the limited organizational capacity of some of these arts and culture providers, several community foundations have started to create technical assistance networks by encouraging strong agencies to mentor fledgling organizations, providing access to technical assistance providers, and making capacity-building grants directly to arts and culture organizations. The community foundations' assumption is that as grassroots arts and culture agencies become stronger organizationally, they also become better able to partner with large arts and culture institutions. Moreover, larger mainstream arts and culture institutions can also learn from the smaller grassroots organizations, particularly with regard to serving minority and non-traditional participants.
- Permanent endowments are being raised, using a variety of approaches.
All community foundations are raising money to be dedicated to permanent endowments for art and culture grantmaking in the future. Some foundations are targeting well-known local individual donors. Others are attempting to involve the business community. Some are targeting other foundations for funding, and at least one community foundation is working on increasing the use of planned giving for an arts endowment. The endowments will represent new resources for local art and culture initiatives. We suspect that even if the CPCP Initiative has no other effect on a community, the dedication of funds to art and culture will be a significant development.
- Community foundations appear to value the initiative's emphasis on local evaluation, but are not clear on what role they should play or how evaluation activities will help.
Evaluation is one of the Fund's priorities, and the CPCP Initiative requires grantees to conduct their own local evaluations in tandem with the national evaluation. The Fund is also encouraging the community foundations to use more data and research in developing their programs.
At this early stage, the community foundations are anxious to know how they are doing so they can implement cultural participation strategies effectively. But although community foundations appear to be genuinely interested in the potential help evaluation results can provide, designing and implementing evaluation research is time consuming and occasionally confusing. In some sites, local evaluation plans are not well developed and community foundations are not clear on what the Fund expects; in other sites evaluation planning is underway, but foundation staff and evaluators are not sure how their work complements, or duplicates, the national evaluation. Each site is participating fully, and most have asked for technical assistance on evaluation to strengthen their own work.
- Technical assistance is needed by the community foundations and their grantees.
The Fund is committed to supporting the community foundations in this initiative and recognizes that many aspects may be new. The initial site visits made by the Urban Institute evaluation team were opportunities to assess the community foundations' anticipated technical assistance needs. Most of the participating community foundations indicated a strong desire for help in evaluation, data collection, performance measurement and benchmarking, and other information collection and analysis activities.
Community foundation staff generally expressed an interest in receiving information on all kinds of programs that worked well in other places, not limited to the CPCP Initiative. Some asked for help with public relations and communications. They also requested a way to communicate among CPCP sites. The Fund is dealing with these issues in part by setting up a "Web Board" for Internet communications among sites.
Many of the community foundations were surprised by the amount of technical assistance needed by applicants and potential applicants. Especially in areas casting this initiative as "community-building," foundation staff are committed to working with smaller and non-arts based organizations, which requires additional work by staff. The foundations are providing assistance in a variety of forms. Several foundations have held application workshops. Other seminars, workshops, and materials are planned to address many of the same issues to be covered in assistance to the community foundations.
- Community foundations have emphasized partnerships in their planning and grantmaking, but creating and sustaining them appear to be one of the more difficult aspects of the initiative.
Community foundations and local organizations are finding that creating and sustaining partnerships for this initiative is hard work. Almost every single respondent interviewed by the evaluation team agreed that partnership is essential to the success of the CPCP Initiative, while acknowledging the difficulty in developing collaborations with organizations different from their own.
Community foundations are partnering with other organizations as they implement their initiatives, trying out different kinds of working relationships. Although some foundations have retained sole control (Dade, Boston, New Hampshire, Tennessee), others are jointly implementing their initiatives (Kansas City, Silicon Valley, Maine), or convening multiple partners, then transferring day-to-day control to them (Michigan, Humboldt). The Urban Institute evaluation will examine different models over the course of the CPCP Initiative, with the understanding that the effectiveness of a partnership model is influenced by the culture of the local community.
One early emphasis across most sites is to encourage partnerships between different kinds of provider organizations; for example, between "major" arts and culture organizations and community-based arts and culture agencies. Foundation staff suspect these partnerships will offer considerable advantages, allowing partners to gain access to each other's traditional participants, combine complementary artistic and other strengths, and tap alternative sources of financial support. But partners will have to bridge the divides that separate traditional arts and culture organizations and community-based arts and culture organizations. These divides pertain to issues of artistic and curatorial quality, the value of amateurs as artists and in other roles, the appropriateness of alternative venues for some types of arts and cultural presentations, differences in governing philosophies and styles, and tensions surrounding issues of finance and accountability. One of the most important early challenges to community foundations is to find ways to foster partnerships through grantmaking and technical support activities.
- Community foundations are facing unexpected challenges in communicating and pursuing cultural participation goals, and some have hired staff and mobilized additional board support
Many community foundations have found it difficult to communicate the goals of the initiative effectively to potential supporters, who may be skeptical of arts and cultural activities in the first place, and even less sure of the value of engaging communities in new ways. (Some have found it easier to speak about the initiative in terms of "community building," instead of culture.) For some community foundations discretionary grantmaking in the arts and culture field is relatively new. Several have found it difficult to carry out the initiative with small staffs and uncertain board support. In at least two sites, local activists are hoping to link CPCP initiatives to local tax referenda, but community foundation staff are being careful to avoid taking sides.
To overcome these difficulties, some of the foundations have begun to hire staff with arts and culture backgrounds. Many continued a process of board education begun in the initiative's planning phase, and they engaged consultants to work on selected aspects of institution building (such as technical assistance to providers, arts agencies, and other supporters) as well as on the evaluation research needed to support foundation decisionmaking. They have done this during a difficult period of program start-up and, by and large, appear to be meeting new challenges successfully.
- Community foundations are starting to change their internal grantmaking and advisory practices.
One of the Fund's goals for this initiative is to help the community foundations take a new look at how they make grants in the arts and culture field. Some community foundation staff and directors are enthusiastic about the opportunities this initiative presents for transforming processes within the foundation. This initiative can be a useful tool for trying new grantmaking procedures, or even restructuring their boards of directors.
It is clear that for several foundations, the introduction of the CPCP Initiative is a change for their current arts and culture grantmaking. Boston, for example, has redesigned the grant review team with cross-department input into grantmaking. Others have been able to integrate the CPCP Initiative without much change, because they can use this initiative to further other goals. However, most community foundations have, at a minimum, expanded the number and types of advisors they rely on to plan and implement programs.
How This Report Is Organized
Chapter 1 - outlines the thinking behind the CPCP Initiative, key elements, program design, early implementation, and evaluation. It also highlights some of the changes arts and cultural systems will need to embrace to enhance cultural participation.
Chapter 2 - introduces the concepts underlying the framework we are using to understand and evaluate community foundations' performance in the CPCP Initiative.
Chapter 3 - examines the varied strategies that arts and culture providers are using to broaden, deepen, and diversify participation in arts and culture.
Chapter 4 - looks at the grantmaking and support system for arts and culture, highlighting how funders and other organizations within the system can undergird arts and culture providers as they implement cultural participation strategies.
Chapter 5 - reviews the role of community foundations in bringing about changes in the arts and culture systems, focusing especially on the foundations' role as intermediaries.
A Note on Language
The communities served by the CPCP Initiative are home to people from many different races, ethnic groups, and language groups. In this report, we use a variety of terms to describe people, because our site visits demonstrated that they use a variety of terms to describe themselves. For example, people who refer to themselves as "African American" are generally referred to as "black" in U.S. Census reports. In Humboldt County, most of the Hupa and Yurok people we met said that they prefer the term "American Indian" to "Native American." However, native people in another part of the country may not share that preference. Similarly, Spanish-speaking people in Silicon Valley refer to themselves as "Latino" or "Chicano," while Spanish-speaking people in Miami–Dade call themselves "Hispanic" as a group. This report will use many of these terms interchangeably, in recognition of different preferences. We hope no reader is offended by any of the terms.
1. The Fund initially invited eleven community foundations to participate in this initiative. One foundation 1 withdrew; one deferred participation. (See chapter 5.)
2. Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Fund. 1996. "Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Fund: Grantmaking in the Arts 2 and Culture: Recommendations for Refined Focus, 1996–2000." New York: Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Fund, p. 8.
3. LWRDF. 1997b. "Overview of the Request for Proposals for an Evaluation of the Community Partnerships 3 for Cultural Participation Initiative." New York: Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Fund, p. 5.
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