“The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.” – Audre Lorde, “Sister Outsider,” 1984.
“A revolution that is based on the people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is one of the great historical contributions of humankind.” – Grace Lee Boggs, 2014
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I opened my email late on Tuesday, February 26th to an email from The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation with news that they are phasing out their Legacy Grant, a small but impactful fund for organizations that support individual artists in the Bay Area. Both organizations I currently co-direct (Bridge Live Arts and Jess Curtis/Gravity), would each receive one exit grant before the program’s closure. Wattis sustains our staff infrastructure and programming, after this year, what’s next? 2026 feels far away as I scan my list of upcoming grant deadlines. At least the news is partnered with a positive update. In their email, Wattis indicates that they will open their New Work grant up to former Legacy Grantees which was previously not an option. I sigh, somewhat unsurprised.
Rewind almost a year ago to almost the same scene, but with a different funder. Over Zoom, the program officer with the Walter & Elise Haas Fund let us know that they will pause their funding to the arts as the Board and staff re-evaluate priorities with a goal to integrate several of their programs. Bridge Live Arts’ received an exit grant. At the time, the general operating support B.L.A. received from Haas covered almost 30% of the annual budget.
In between these two moments, I loosely tracked how many national grants that supported dance terminated their programs. With some helpful, internal insights into philanthropy trends from a group chat with two arts administrator friends, the updates were almost weekly.
The funding landscape that supports the nonprofit and nonprofit-adjacent dance field in the United States irrevocably changed in 2024. As an arts administrator I often found myself on the leading edge of the updates, tasked with ferrying bad news to arts workers who support the dance ecosystem Now, faced with devastating cuts to both private and public funding opportunities, we must dedicate precious time to think about the future. But how do we move forward when the groundwork of grantmaking in the arts as we know it is so destabilized?
Bhumi’s provocation about future dreaming was the impetus to put words on a page, but in practice, I’ve been researching what is happening, why and what to do next for the past few years. I am an arts administrator and researcher whose eight-year career is inextricably woven into the pockets of philanthropists who support arts and culture in what is now called the United States. I can’t escape the torrent of news about philanthropic changes in my work. I might not be able to provide any answers by the end of this reflection. But, at the very least I hope to share what has been swimming around in my brain, offer forward other’s reflections in which I find solace, and share some calls to action as we work toward a more creative, worker-led solution to a sustainable arts ecosystem.
When I began to write, I found myself turning towards the immediate and more distant pasts, with a focus on fiscal sponsors and re-granting organizations, intermediaries, to ground my speculative visioning. This essay hopes to linger briefly there and trace trends perhaps only realized through hindsight. I lean upon recent, more robust reflections that analyze current funding structures including “Creating New Futures” (2020-2023), Funding Bodies (2021), and Artists on Creative Administration (2024), and find solace in facts, personal experiences and community solidarity. I aim to write towards a radical future that eliminates foundations and redistributes wealth in BIPOC, queer, disabled, and immigrant communities. After all, as many of my mentors describe, we are the experts of our experiences.
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WHAT JUST HAPPENED
From 2020-2023, the arts field experienced a major shift in philanthropy. Funds flowed relatively easily into the pockets of Black, brown, queer, trans, and disabled folks and the organizations that support their creative endeavors. While not everyone experienced bounty, those who did, generally redistributed the funds judicially. The beginning moves required of trust-based philanthropy (TBP) gained momentum. Grant applications shortened, program officers offered transparent assessments of their resources, and relief funds (even if highly inaccessible) floated venues, organizations and a few individuals into the present. It seemed, on a surface level, that the glacier of philanthropy was in fact rotating to show a new, more efficient side.
We were still far from true trust-based philanthropy, which calls for a radical redistribution of money, power and decision-making to historically under-resourced artists and local communities. In the recently published workbook, Artists on Creative Administration, administrator Maura Cuffie-Peterson was prompted by artist Yanira Castro to reflect on her experiences with philanthropy. Cuffie-Peterson is the Director of Strategic Initiatives, Guaranteed Income at Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) and was Program Officer for ArtPlace America. Castro is a working artist and met Cuffie-Peterson through CRNY’s work toward a Guaranteed Income program in 2021. Cuffie-Peterson experienced trust-based philanthropic practices at ArtPlace America where artists and their communities led the grant making process based on their needs and desires. In contrast, when working in support of CRNY to cajole other funders to reconsider their methods, she met challenges to the idea of redistributing funds quickly and effectively. In Cuffie-Peterson’s opinion “Money is tied up in endowments, in infrastructure, in investments. There’s money everywhere. It needs to move. Money doesn’t belong to philanthropies in the first place” (Lockyer 57).
In 2020, the quickest and more effective way to make this change was to challenge the 5% rule, or the annual percentage foundations are required to spend in line with their mission (be it on staff time, grantmaking, or infrastructural support). Some foundations followed this heed, though it was largely not sustained in subsequent years. As philanthropy professional Edgar Villanueva, asks in his 2018 book, Decolonizing Wealth, “What about the 95%?!” [emphasis original], as the investments of these funds often compound on inequities. Out of the ten biggest foundations in the world, only the MacArthur Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation disclosed their investment returns on their remaining 95% of total assets (Villanueva 151). This leaves communities they supposedly support through their grantmaking in the dark, with slim resources, and often impacted by the very investments foundations profit from such as fossil fuels, real estate, poor labor conditions, and more.
Building upon this culture of secrecy, arts workers are now experiencing yet another retraction and re-entrenc20hment disguised with language like evaluation, priorities, assessment, and alignment. Unfortunately, this shouldn’t be that surprising. When efforts to redistribute wealth from historic sources of power (foundations, police) to communities of culture (artists, Black communities) happen, there tends to be a racist and classist backlash, often with additional claims of corruption, misuse of funds, and a general sense of distrust. This is made visible through advocacy like national Defund the Police movements or more locally San Francisco’s Dreamkeeper Initiative (DKI). DKI aimed to “reinvest $60 million annually into San Francisco’s diverse Black communities.” Now in 2025, the program is publicly misunderstood and funding is indefinitely paused. Artists and community advocates call for reimplementation and trust in the process. City officials and mainstream media point out potential misuse of funds and signs of corruption. Castro described the dynamic simply after reading an initial draft of this essay. While philanthropic bodies attempted to redistribute funds equitability in the wake of multiplying crises in 2020, they are now retreating to a “cultural mindset of protectionism, hierarchy, and control as a way to maintain a perceived sense of security.”
Multiplying the impact is Trump 2.0 with devastating changes at numerous grant-making federal agencies, a destabilized market, rising inflation, and fears of an economic recession. The community demand that foundations would release more than 5% of their assets is now even more a pipe dream. Economic instability means foundations are hesitant to take big risks which includes investing in artists at the level of an emergency as they did from 2020-2023, thus reducing their power and control over their money. So how did we get here and where do we go from here?
INTERMEDIARIES & CONTROL
If I am going to boil down my curiosities of the moment to one word, it would be intermediaries. In the nonprofit dance ecosystem, I define intermediaries as the nonprofits that ferry funds from foundations to individuals, such as fiscal sponsorship and re-granting organizations. I focus on these entities because I think they reveal a lot about funders’ larger goals and the impact on artists embedded within their communities.
Philanthropy in general is obsessed with the idea of risk. None of their actions can be too risky; no funded entity can seem like a risky investment. In practice, this means foundations are slow to distribute grants to individuals (which alternatively could be done through forgivable, zero interest program-related investments vs grants). Instead foundations use the various intermediaries described below to shield their assets from the “risky” artist. As the use of intermediaries became more popular in the late nineties (post NEA Four), the intermediaries rewarded by mitigating risks were often white-led nonprofits that are now at the center of the field. At its core, this process replicates trickle-down economics. This economic theory favors the rich and their security and assumes that the benefits of a stable wealthy class will ultimately ‘trickle down,’ benefiting all parties along the way. We are seeing this conservative approach now more than ever. Recently, the team at Justice Funders, a partner and guide for philanthropy in reimagining practices that advance a thriving and just world, put out an Open Letter on the response to Trump’s current administration and his reinforcement of trickle down economics (among many other oppressive policies).
Unfortunately, the larger, field-wide response is inadequate and discouraging, even from the seemingly most progressive segments of philanthropy. Many foundations are either taking a “wait and see” approach or retracting all together, cowering to authoritarianism by “obeying in advance” and removing language about race-explicit grantmaking from their website or shutting down those programs entirely, and shifting to the center with their grantmaking strategies rather than holding the line to continue resourcing the social justice movement ecosystem. – Open Letter, February 26, 2025
So, who are the intermediaries foundations consider when evaluating their risk assessments and how has this changed over the years?
From the late 1990s, post-NEA Four (which I’ll briefly discuss later), to the present, fiscal sponsorship has become an increasingly necessary intermediary in the field. Incorporating as a 501(c)(3) was and continues to be an infrastructural challenge for artists due to financial and personnel requirements. Fiscal sponsorship became a relatively easy way to access the nonprofit umbrella without managing your own board, local/state/federal compliance, and more. Critical to this specific historical account, private foundations are legally barred from giving grants to individuals. Fiscal sponsorship became the go-to method for pass-through granting and has grown in popularity exponentially since then, though with little research and oversight.
A few years ago, I dedicated two years to gathering and analyzing the existing data and anecdotal evidence on fiscal sponsorship’s implementation in the arts. I’ll spoil the 100-page thesis for you now. From my vantage point, there is little evidence that fiscal sponsorship builds long term financial equity for individual artists and overwhelming proof that the fiscal sponsorship to nonprofit pipeline is no longer realistic. Instead, historically artists embedded within nonprofit cultures now turn to for-profit business structures such as LLCs and S-Corps to diversify their income streams and somewhat detach from funding. However, in all the examples I’ve witnessed of this “for-profit” move, very few entities are turning a profit and still work on a net-zero profit leading me to believe that philanthropic funds are still floating their bottom lines. Despite this zero income, even the usage of for-profit models reveals a dramatic change from the early 2000s when creating nonprofits was more the norm.
However, when faced with the realities of today’s arts ecosystem, I understand why fiscal sponsorship is necessary. In light of this, I generally advocate for artists to deeply consider why fiscal sponsorship is right for them at the moment and encourage them to form meaningful fiscal sponsorship relationships with community partners over more transactional entities like Fractured Atlas. I will note that the under-the-radar nature of fiscal sponsorship can be helpful in moments of political conflict when artists’ often progressive values conflict with more conservative foundations as nonprofits are not required to report fiscal sponsorship activities on their tax form 990s (though many do).
Beyond fiscal sponsors, I include the aforementioned re-granting organizations like Creative Capital, National Performance Network, United States Artists, MAP Fund, and New England Foundation for the Arts (which is also one of six Regional Arts Organizations). All these organizations do much more than re-grant private foundation and public funding, but this work is a major part of their missions. Some still require fiscal sponsorship despite not being foundations, though many have eliminated that requirement after feedback on the practice’s exclusionary nature. However, it seems like regranting intermediaries have lost the favor of foundations as they began to listen to and implement artists’ demands in alignment with trust-based philanthropy and more radical resource distribution.
CONSULT ARTISTS FIRST (again, please!)
So why the focus on intermediaries and their role in this major funding shift? In short, I believe that foundations realized that these intermediaries, especially the re-granting organizations, were increasingly effective at distributing their long sequestered funds. Art workers’ advocacy toward trust-based philanthropy (minimal reports, short applications, conversations over writing), was eliminating the dependence on philanthropy to steer the field at large. In some cases, artists didn’t even need cultural validation from the intermediaries in order to receive funds as some intermediaries began selecting artists via lottery systems or reducing fiscal sponsorship fees for BIPOC artists. Recently reflected in a conversation I had with Dr. Michelle Ramos, is the reality that artists’ work always is dynamic and prolific, even without funding. This realization for foundations can be disempowering because in that dynamic; art will always be more powerful than money.
To me, this fear is made most clear by the Mellon Foundation’s recent move to defund a number of these intermediaries and instead to direct their monies straight to artists they chose. While this is not a blanket move–many organizations still receive Mellon support–the shift has been dramatic such as these two notable changes which mean that touring support for dance in the United States has lost substantial funding support.
- New England Foundation for the Arts ends the National Theater Project and National Dance Project grants in their current iterations due a conclusion of Mellon Funding. (September 6, 2024)
- MAP Fund ends national grantmaking due to funding changes at Mellon and Duke Foundations. (December 12, 2024)
By highlighting these (public) changes, I don’t mean to diminish the work of all the staff at each respective institution or the work of many brilliant artists who are on the other side of the Mellon funding. Instead, I hope to highlight trends and ask questions. AND, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that the cessation of these kinds of funds, especially those that supported national touring initiatives like NEFA’s NTP and NDP and MAP Fund, will irrecoverably change the field. For me, it brings up two critical questions:
- How will post-emerging artists receive funding for the next stage of their development if they are too small to be noticed by the major foundations like Mellon, Duke and Ford, three critical funders of dance in the last twenty years?
- If intermediaries turn to solely focus on artists’ services (like MAP Fund plans to through the continuation of its Scaffolding for Practicing Artists (SPA) program) or “pay-to-play” programs like many fiscal sponsorship, residencies or professionalization efforts, will this reduce the number of artists who have the resources to invest in their practice (and therefore create a sustainable career), thus perpetuating an existing lack of equity in the field?
I am especially concerned by the way the news of this funding shift seeped out into the broader community. Peer funders likely knew first, then intermediaries, and finally it began to flow into my administrator/artist networks. Administrators toe the line between artist and institutions, our peer administrators shuttle news down from the proverbial mountaintop of white-led philanthropy bodies, but we too are largely reliant on the public press release which lands in our overflowing inboxes, months (or years) after the funding source has already been eliminated. Last to know, in my experience, were the artists who are the direct recipients of these funds. The ripple effect is immediate yet delayed as grantees finish out their previous year’s funds only to realize as they craft next year’s budgets, that the pool of resources is dry.
With chagrin, I ask, after all we “learned” from 2020, should not the artists with the least amount of relative power have been consulted first? Creating New Futures (CNF) emphasized the same query in its 2021 Phase 2 document, “Notes for Equitable Funding from Arts Workers,” which was shared with funders at large. My experience as a reader of CNF at the time, was that the cumulative writing, organizing work and relationship building done by CNF contributors was publicized widely and shared among peers and organizations alike. Some changes occurred, in general applications became more accessible and certain requirements and acknowledgements became more inclusive. But overall, the document and related advocacy still could not break through philanthropy’s gates to radically transform systems, drive increased partnership and center collaboration in the way that artists deserve.
This choice is now reverberating throughout our community as we face yet another economic emergency fueled again by Trump. Averse to risk and artist-led efforts, foundations instead chose to maintain hierarchy and hoard power. And here we are, forecasting into 2026 and committed to still embodying and dancing through alternatives. As amara tabor-smith invoked in a recent work-in-progress show, “this is endurance work.”
Here, I’ll touch briefly on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Public funding outlets have largely escaped my line of questioning in this essay. But recent (unconstitutional) changes at the NEA regarding DEI, “gender ideology,” and an “encouragement” to celebrate “American 250” only add to the tenuous funding landscape. While news of those changes was distributed fairly quickly and was followed by subsequent injunctions that paused the impact, there are infinite questions about what is next and how to proceed. Organizations and administrators are dealing with the impact now; artists may not experience a shift until later this year when NEA-funded projects were meant to occur.
In November 2024 (pre-election), I called Christy Bolingbroke at the National Center of Choreography – Akron (the commissioner of Artists on Creative Administration), to ask her perspective on what felt like a major tide change to me. Bolingbroke reminded me of the post NEA Four era when foundations responded to the conservative turn of the agency. Artists and their support systems created nonprofits and applied for funding with NEA-eligible infrastructures. Administrators (largely white and cis-male) helped form the intermediaries previously mentioned, but then became gatekeepers to the subsequently emerging resources, entities and the relative power as part of their actions. However, as Bolingbroke and I talked, we both acknowledged the major changing of the guard in terms of the artists, administrators, and advocates whose perspectives will shape the future of the arts in the US.
Many individuals and the entities they work within are now passing on leadership (whether it’s voluntary or not) largely to femme, queer, disabled, immigrants or folks of color. I joyfully and humbly include myself in this mix. But, this transference of power however is not without its pitfalls. Many leaders of color were thrust into positions of power in the nonprofit response to historic racism–from interpersonal to police violence–without the resources or sources really needed to sustain programming, staff careers, and community support.
IMPROVISING THE FUTURE
So what next? The history and trends I laid out only scratch the surface of how we got here. Each footnote and link deserves its own reflection.This work is undoubtedly under-researched. And, tracing the administrative footprints of the nonprofit dance ecosystem is not exactly fundable work, especially when the thesis of the work is a critique of the funding bodies themselves. But I’m willing to believe in Christy Bolingbroke’s optimism, Dr. Michelle Ramos’ unwavering trust in community, and Creating New Future’s call to build slower and commune and dance together more.” We have to keep thinking outside of systems that exist in white structures because as the brilliant Audre Lorde invoked, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
Now is the time to look instability in the face and turn toward another path. I know not everyone can afford this route, but for those arts administrators who can, we must (again) advocate for what we need, desire, and deserve. We can dream toward a funding future that is unrestricted, does not require reporting and extends beyond the 501(c)(3) model and its lackey, fiscal sponsorship. Let’s believe in a service economy, one that is hinged on exchange and camaraderie. As Dr. Valerie Luzadis describes in “The Serviceberry” (2022), an article by Indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer, “economics is how we organize ourselves to sustain life and enhance its quality.”
The conclusion of this essay hopes to spark dance makers’ collective imagination regarding the future. I propose alternative, people-centered, non-capitalist economies. I ask:
- What small moves, or micro choreographies, can advance financial equity and promote the participation of all dance makers in funding decisions?
- How might acknowledging and redistributing power from foundations and nonprofits through macro choreographies support the development of financial equity for dance artists?
- And, if the field moves past the immediate future and instead leans upon queer, Black, speculative theories, what or alternative economic models (such as land trusts, worker-owned cooperatives, mutual aid, etc.), may better serve the long-term financial stability of artists historically under-funded by current systems?
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The day before the final draft of this essay was due, I went to see amara tabor-smith’s offering, “to break with care: A Parable of NOW,” or “an oracle working in process. a performance (practice) of communal care amidst uncertainty.” I walked into the space, the ritual already begun, deep bass thrums through my body. I received a cotton bag for my phone, a notebook and a pen. The message is clear. The work has already begun; I better take notes. amara begins to run in a circle, her collaborators follow behind, she yells,
“THIS IS ENDURANCE WORK. THIS IS A PRACTICE OF ENDURANCE.”
She beckons with her arms, her feet keeping pace against the sprung floor. I witness all the pairs of feet that follow in her wake. I think about this writing, how incomplete it feels and yet still so full. How much is unwritten, how imperfectly I’ve portrayed a complicated network of people, art, and money. But this is endurance work. We are in the marathon and it requires a community of individuals who join together to tell their story, one piece at a time.
Works Cited
Andersson, Fredrik O., and Daniel G. Neely. “Bringing Fiscal Sponsor Activity to Light.” Nonprofit Policy Forum, vol. 10, no. 1, Apr. 2019, https://doi.org/10.1515/npf-2019-0021.
Creating New Futures. Notes for Equitable Funding from Arts Workers. 2021. https://creatingnewfutures.tumblr.com/.
Creating New Futures. Working Guidelines for Ethics & Equity in Presenting Dance & Performance. 2020. https://creatingnewfutures.tumblr.com/.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance.” Emergence Magazine, 10 Dec. 2020, https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-serviceberry/.
Lockyer, Tonya, editor. Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from the National Center for Choreography. The University of Akron Press, 2024.
Villanueva, Edgar. Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2018.
This article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of In Dance.
