Profiles of Arts Grantmakers

Although most grantmakers get involved in program development, it is rare to have the chance to build an entire foundation giving program from the ground up. However, that was exactly the challenge Olga Garay encountered three years ago as the first program director for the arts hired by the newly established Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF). The New York-based foundation was created in 1996 as part of Ms. Duke's estate, whose family wealth came from her father's tobacco company and Duke Power. In a few short years, the national grantmaking organization has seen its assets grow to approximately $1.6 billion. By December 2000, the Foundation had awarded 214 grants totaling about $236 million in a variety of areas including environmental conservation, medical research, child abuse prevention, and the performing arts.

The broad program areas represent Doris Duke's personal interests and stipulations in her bequest. Duke actively and often anonymously contributed nearly $400 million to charitable causes during her lifetime. Duke was an intriguing, somewhat aloof and reclusive figure in U.S. philanthropy. Yet Garay notes that the Foundation staff focuses on "her stronger side that was amazingly diverse and entrepreneurial." She's particularly impressed by Duke's devotion to the community of Newport, Rhode Island where Duke lived and sparked a renovation and rehabilitation of the decaying city in the late 1960s.

Much of Duke's personal giving was rooted in her abiding passion for theater, modern dance, and jazz. That passion is evident in a whimsical photograph of Doris Duke looking up admiringly at another legendary Duke — Ellington that is — who appears poised to play a riff on, of all things, a violin. “She wasn't so interested in ‘institution building,'” says Garay, “it was all about supporting actors, singers, musicians, dancers...about people and individuals.”

While Duke's own interest drew her to individuals, the Foundation's board gave Garay and other senior program staff the directive to give away big grants. “It was an extraordinary gift to look at a blank canvas and start asking ‘what makes sense for the field? What can we do to help people do their work better and to improve working conditions for artists?'” Garay's background as a former arts presenter and producer at Miami-Dade Community College, Wolfson Campus also played an influential role in creating the Foundation's arts profile and funding direction. “It was an opportunity to build a program that I wish had been in place when I was looking for grants.”

Under Garay's leadership, the Foundation has launched several funding initiatives that provide approximately $15 to $20 million annually to leading performing arts organizations throughout the country, making it one of the largest national arts funders in the United States. Currently, the DDCF supports twenty-six organizations through its programs for Leadership Presenting Institutions (LPI) and Mid-sized Presenting Organizations (MPO). Among them are the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Lee, Massachusetts, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. All of the program participants have been invited into the program by virtue of their national and international reputations as “centers of excellence.” They not only serve as arts presenters, the organizations also create the financial and human resources that allow individual artists to create work through commissioning activities, artists-in-residence programs, and community-based projects.

The LPI and MPO programs provide three-to-five year artistic programming grants coupled with matching endowment support. “To provide multi-year artistic support allows the institution to have the immediate resources to give work to artists, and then building in a matching endowment will safeguard the program's existence at a point when it starts to solidify and to gain acceptance and prominence. So many times the funding drops out just when you get to that point, which is, in my opinion, the bane of many arts organizations. We hope that the endowment program has a deep impact on a select number of organizations,” says Garay. The Foundation is not considering additional organizations to participate in the LPI program until the completion of a year-long review in 2001.

The strategy of increasing program endowments has been a hallmark of recent DDCF collaborations with other grantmaking organizations such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the NEA. Such collaborations have resulted in a Theatre Initiative and an ambitious Jazz Initiative, a sector of the field that has had little philanthropic support in the past. Acknowledging that LPI, MPO, and initiatives provide substantial support to a relatively small number of grantees, Garay is eager to learn if the strategy is making a difference.

In the meantime, the DDCF also has developed other programs to reach broader numbers of artists. Seven national service organizations including Arts International, Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Chamber Music America, Creative Capital Foundation, National Performance Network, New England Foundation for the Arts, and Theatre Communications Group, Inc. have received large, multi-year support from DDCF for re-granting programs to performing artists.

In collaboration with the Surdna Foundation, DDCF recently unveiled a new arts education program. Garay sees the program as an ideal merging of the two foundations' interests in developing young artistic talent. The program will focus on five performing arts high schools and approximately nine upper-division training institutions. “If you do a traditional arts and education program, you could spend a lot and only skim the surface. Why not focus on young adults that already have shown a talent and commitment to the performing arts?” Garay envisions the program as a combination of institutional funding, scholarships, apprenticeships, and mentorships.

Garay is excited about what DDCF has accomplished thus far and remains optimistic about the future. Yet there are moments when she misses her old career as a performing arts producer. “I still go to performances, look around, count the seats, and worry about whether the house is full, how many people are on stage, and what the tour costs,” she admits with a laugh. Garay adds that carving a new Foundation's niche in the national arts funding community takes “a different kind of creativity than putting on a performing season, but there are more similarities than you'd imagine.”

Nancy Fushan is program officer, The Bush Foundation.