philanthropissed

Today I submitted a grant application to the National Endowment for the Arts for my organization’s hopeful chunk of the $50 million American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding for the arts. The NEA will make grants of $25,000 or $50,000, which means that only 1,000 – 2,000 organizations will receive funding. Not that many if you think about it, especially considering that industry insiders believe that 10,000 American nonprofit arts organizations may close in the next year.

The purpose of this funding is to preserve jobs in the arts sector. Great. So why did the sentence below appear in the application instructions?

REMINDER: Salaries, wages, fringe benefits, and fees that are incurred in connection with fund raising (e.g., development staff) are not allowable project expenses.

This is really short-sighted. For many organizations, the only thing that will help them create jobs in the future is money raised from the community. You need fundraising staff to be able to raise this money in any kind of intentional, sustained way. A short-term infusion of cash for artistic staff will help in the immediate, in the RIGHT NOW, but refusing to fund development staff at all means that organizations who want to use the arts stimulus money to insulate themselves from even greater future economic damage are shit out of luck.

Part of me thinks that it’s related to the general stigma around fundraising. But if the current economic crisis has taught us anything, it’s that our society as a whole can’t continue to function through models that are unsustainable in the long run. We have to have foresight, and we have to use it. This applies to the nonprofit sector as much as the finance, banking, insurance and auto manufacturing sectors.

Shame on the NEA. I know that because it’s a Federal agency, it would take an act of Congress to change this little point that taunts me so,  and there was no time to do that before the application process needed to start. But it’s short-sighted, and provides disincentives for organizations that actually have their act in gear and have a sustainable fundraising program to keep them growing.

You know you’re really engaged with your nonprofit when the angle for your next grant proposal strikes you after midnight, and you are in bed, and you get up and go out and wake your computer up and spend 20 minutes emailing yourself the structure of your argument and fleshing out the details.While your fiance waits patiently.

When I feel this way, it makes me think I may never have been fully and truly engaged at past organizations. I always did the work. But I really, really care about this place.

And it’s up to me to keep it open. That’s a scary, but ultimately empowering thought.