GIA Reader (2000-present)

Setting the Stage

With a population of over 2.3 million and one-in-four residents being foreign-born, Houston is the most ethnically diverse metro area in the nation. The city’s arts programs and cultural offerings are robust in number and breadth, and its vibrancy unfolds along the numerous bayous and highways. Most years see 11 to 16 million visitors traveling to the city for arts and cultural events. Houston’s nonprofit arts and culture sector, a $1.1 billion industry, employs more than 25,000 people.

Just societies cannot grow in toxic soil. To build regenerative communities, we should look to how life flourishes in the natural world, of which we are an inherent part.

Millennials live differently than previous generations of Americans. We stay single longer. More of us have student debt and are self-employed, freelancers, and members of the growing gig economy. According to Randstad’s research on the workplace, more than half of Americans will be self-employed by 2025. More than 40% of gig workers will be millennials, a figure that will likely grow given the size of the generation and its youth. Millennials are the largest demographic in American history. We are the future.

THE FRONT, a gallery and performing arts space that serves the communities of San Ysidro and Tijuana, sits on a busy thoroughfare only a few hundred yards from the busiest border land crossing in the Western Hemisphere. A program of Casa Familiar — a social service organization that operates senior and affordable housing to health services to youth programming in facilities scattered in and around San Ysidro’s well-loved Beyer Park — THE FRONT was opened in 2004 as a passion project for artists living and rooted in San Ysidro, the southernmost neighborhood of San Diego.

To better support Black artists and cultural communities, arts philanthropy should increase its focus on stability and resilience in creative practice. Covid has fully revealed its long-standing fragility, leaving 63% of all artists unemployed and 66% unable to access the infrastructure necessary for their work.¹

In William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying, a young character by the name of Vardaman is allowed to believe that his “mother is a fish,” because no one takes the time to tell him that his mother is dead. Instead he associates what he witnesses with the reality he understands within a highly dysfunctional family. In the novel, he repeats, “fish. fish. fish.” Similarly, I would offer that we are currently operating in a highly dysfunctional philanthropic family. I believe in the potential of our work.

Over the course of decades of working with nonprofits, particularly arts- and community-based organizations, we’ve seen an unfortunate pattern emerge. With the regularity of waves, many nonprofits move in and out of cycles of fiscal instability. The factors are familiar and well-known: drops in earned revenue for various reasons, often out of leaders’ control; shifts in the priorities of donors; turmoil in staffing and leadership; and restrictions placed on funds.

As with many of our foundation peers, the Barr Foundation has been grappling with what 2020 demands of us. This year has brought a global pandemic with devastating health and economic impacts as well as the fraying of civil discourse and public trust in government and democracy. Simultaneously, our country is facing a long overdue national reckoning with systemic racism and anti-Blackness. At Barr, this is all leading us to ask ourselves some fundamental questions: How do we best live out our values? How do we advance our philanthropic mission in this context?

This piece was originally published in the inaugural issue of Nonprofit Wakanda Quarterly, an independent and free space for Black people who work or who are involved in the nonprofit sector to dream, aspire, interrogate, and express, freely.