Some updates today on past topics, in no particular order:
Say I bet you've heard the conventional wisdom about corporate charitable giving being on the decline. (Can't work in or read about this sector for more than two minutes without hearing it, really.) Or perhaps its more-specialized cousin, the one about how corporate funding for the arts is shifting to marketing budgets. Um, nope. Say how about we open nominations for a couple of new cliches to fret about, those two ceased being original or interesting back around the Carter administration.
Poetry seems to have just burst out all over within the last generation or so in the U.S., and Chicago has for some reason played a huge role in that. When I graduated from college in 1985 poetry appeared to have a smaller place in the national consciousness than competitive ballroom dancing or ultimate frisbee. Since then the poetry-slam phenomenon, created in Chicago by Marc Smith, has burst out all over the place; and I've written about the sudden creation of a large well-funded non-profit to promote classical poetry (big enough to fight over you might say) which is headquartered in Chicago. Now I read, in the Chicago Tribune, that the University of Pennsylvania two years ago started making readings of poetry available for free download to iPods, and last year the site had 8 million downloads!
And over at our misbegotten national museum, sigh...turns out that the Smithsonian has been charging for prints of photographs of iconic historical items like the Wright Brothers' plane, and citing copyright rights to justify the prices. A notable flaw being that the photographs are not in fact copyrighted, as Public.Resource.org points out, meaning that the museum has been collecting money in exchange for rights which it has never actually owned. The advocacy group applied a nice example of the radical democratization which the information age can enable: they simply downloaded all 6,288 photos from the Smithsonian and posted them for free elsewhere! Cheers to them both for the originality and the point. (And kudos to my favorite blogger Harold Henderson for the tip.)
Showing posts with label funding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label funding. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Land conservation takes the lead
A startling report from the Land Trust Alliance is getting some national-media attention this week but I wish they hadn't buried their lede, which is that in the U.S. the permanent protection of land for conservation is now going faster than sprawl -- and pulling away.
Last month the national conservation groups were celebrating the current boom in state/local public funding for land conservation; now the LTA has pulled together national data on non-governmental activity for the same purpose. They report that just in the past five years private non-profits protected 13 million acres, equal to a new Yellowstone National Park every year.
The national conservation-advocacy groups say that new development consumes 2 million acres per year, so the nongovernmental land trusts alone are now protecting more land than is being sprawled on each year. Obviously adding the new open space protected via all those new state and local bond referenda, and the occasional addition to federal national monuments and so forth, makes the picture even better.
The LTA report does have a couple of oddities, such as that most of their charts and graphs include only state and local land trusts when national groups like The Nature Conservancy and Trust For Public Land are a huge part of all this activity. And while criticizing the drops in direct federal appropriations for conservation they ignore the fact that all that private non-profit land protection is being subsidized by the federal tax code to the tune of billions per year now. (And the increase in federal tax benefits from donating land or easements which President Bush signed into law in August will boost all this even more.)
The non-profit land trust business is, not surprisingly, booming like dot-coms in the 90s. The LTA reports that even while the number of state and local land trusts was increasing by a third, the average operating budget increased by two thirds and salaried staff increased by almost half. In just five years, during an economic downturn! And that again doesn't count the big national/international groups.
Last month the national conservation groups were celebrating the current boom in state/local public funding for land conservation; now the LTA has pulled together national data on non-governmental activity for the same purpose. They report that just in the past five years private non-profits protected 13 million acres, equal to a new Yellowstone National Park every year.
The national conservation-advocacy groups say that new development consumes 2 million acres per year, so the nongovernmental land trusts alone are now protecting more land than is being sprawled on each year. Obviously adding the new open space protected via all those new state and local bond referenda, and the occasional addition to federal national monuments and so forth, makes the picture even better.
The LTA report does have a couple of oddities, such as that most of their charts and graphs include only state and local land trusts when national groups like The Nature Conservancy and Trust For Public Land are a huge part of all this activity. And while criticizing the drops in direct federal appropriations for conservation they ignore the fact that all that private non-profit land protection is being subsidized by the federal tax code to the tune of billions per year now. (And the increase in federal tax benefits from donating land or easements which President Bush signed into law in August will boost all this even more.)
The non-profit land trust business is, not surprisingly, booming like dot-coms in the 90s. The LTA reports that even while the number of state and local land trusts was increasing by a third, the average operating budget increased by two thirds and salaried staff increased by almost half. In just five years, during an economic downturn! And that again doesn't count the big national/international groups.
Monday, November 27, 2006
The arts did well in the election, too
Last week I mentioned that a lot of land-conservation bond issues around the U.S. passed easily on November 7th. It turns out that local referenda to fund the arts also did great.
Americans for the Arts reports that in eleven cities or counties plus one state, Americans voted to tax themselves for the arts or art education. The list includes the state of Louisiana; Akron (OH); Alameda County/San Leandro (CA); Alameda County/Berkeley (CA); Austin (TX); Cuyahoga County/Cleveland (OH); Dallas (TX); Marin County (CA); Portland (OR); Salt Lake County (UT); San Francisco(CA); and Santa Clara County (CA). Some of them were one-time bond issues and others were new standing taxes; if we use the ten-year total on the latter the total funding passed was something like $1.3 billion. That's without counting Louisiana's measure which was actually a tax exemption for works of art, the exact value of which is hard to project.
That may not sound like a lot in national context given this country's huge public funding for the arts (of which the NEA is a drop in the bucket), not to mention that tax-deductible philanthropy for the arts had by 2004 reached nearly $14 billion per year (quintuple, after inflation, what it was in 1964; figures are from the Giving USA 2005 report). But the really exciting part may be the precedent: unlike the land conservation referenda this election, not one ballot initiative for the arts failed to pass. Twelve for twelve is as good as it gets in any game.
Americans for the Arts reports that in eleven cities or counties plus one state, Americans voted to tax themselves for the arts or art education. The list includes the state of Louisiana; Akron (OH); Alameda County/San Leandro (CA); Alameda County/Berkeley (CA); Austin (TX); Cuyahoga County/Cleveland (OH); Dallas (TX); Marin County (CA); Portland (OR); Salt Lake County (UT); San Francisco(CA); and Santa Clara County (CA). Some of them were one-time bond issues and others were new standing taxes; if we use the ten-year total on the latter the total funding passed was something like $1.3 billion. That's without counting Louisiana's measure which was actually a tax exemption for works of art, the exact value of which is hard to project.
That may not sound like a lot in national context given this country's huge public funding for the arts (of which the NEA is a drop in the bucket), not to mention that tax-deductible philanthropy for the arts had by 2004 reached nearly $14 billion per year (quintuple, after inflation, what it was in 1964; figures are from the Giving USA 2005 report). But the really exciting part may be the precedent: unlike the land conservation referenda this election, not one ballot initiative for the arts failed to pass. Twelve for twelve is as good as it gets in any game.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Non-profit mergers -- too many or too few?
Mergers are not common in our sector but a few large ones have been in the news this year, such as in Boston, Cleveland, and Memphis. A good number of veterans in the field, particularly at foundations, react to that news by saying, "Good! There are way too many non-profits today!" It's one of the most-common threads of conversation nowadays.
It also seems odd. When a new Target or Wal-Mart opens up in town do we say, "Good! There are way too many small businesses around here"?
It is a fact that there are far more incorporated not-for-profit organizations in the U.S. today than there used to be (and radically more than in any other nation in the world). Even assuming that a fair number of the organizations on the books with the IRS are actually defunct, the active total basically doubled from 1990 to now. There's no sign of any slowdown either.
To me, that's on balance a good thing. Healthy industries, and for that matter societies, are attractive to people -- the clearest sign of the decline and fall of the U.S. will be when the day comes that millions of people are no longer so eager to come raise their children here. The non-profit sector is booming because more and more people are willing to fund it, which is because it's gotten more and more smart and effective, which in turn attracts more smart young people into the field, rinse and repeat.
Healthy growing economic sectors are dynamic with lots of churn, that's part of the deal. We could ask the U.S. auto industry what the opposite feels like....Now if it one day turns out that the not-for-profit sector has been growing faster than the demand for it (expressed in earned and contributed revenues) then there will be some shakeout. I'm not cavalier about this because I once had to shut down a failed non-profit, and if you haven't been there you've no idea how much that sucked. But again: it's part of the big picture, and the big picture is overall terrific.
For example it's easier today to discuss and test new paths to greater effectiveness, and evaluation, and efficiency, and interdisciplinary bridgebuilding and several other hot topics, because at the crowded industry conferences the rooms are full of smart focused 30-somethings who aren't wedded to the rules of thumb and so forth which some of us learned on back in the paleolithic era. A big thumbs up to that (cue George Burns: "I wish I was 28 again...").
It's not that older non-profit staff are simply threatened by the flood of new folks, I detect little of that. It could be that funders are simply uncomfortable with the idea of having to act like customers and choose from among more and more possible grantees. It may be that we don't want the implied pressure of our sector being healthy and thriving with strong growth in resources: it doesn't fit our collective self-image as the underdog fighting upstream to improve the world despite endless funding cuts and the slings and arrows of a regressing society and so forth (cue violins).
Well I vote for dynamic and growing. Like the cliches go about democracy: it's messy, noisy, frequently unpleasant, and beats the heck out of all the alternatives.
It also seems odd. When a new Target or Wal-Mart opens up in town do we say, "Good! There are way too many small businesses around here"?
It is a fact that there are far more incorporated not-for-profit organizations in the U.S. today than there used to be (and radically more than in any other nation in the world). Even assuming that a fair number of the organizations on the books with the IRS are actually defunct, the active total basically doubled from 1990 to now. There's no sign of any slowdown either.
To me, that's on balance a good thing. Healthy industries, and for that matter societies, are attractive to people -- the clearest sign of the decline and fall of the U.S. will be when the day comes that millions of people are no longer so eager to come raise their children here. The non-profit sector is booming because more and more people are willing to fund it, which is because it's gotten more and more smart and effective, which in turn attracts more smart young people into the field, rinse and repeat.
Healthy growing economic sectors are dynamic with lots of churn, that's part of the deal. We could ask the U.S. auto industry what the opposite feels like....Now if it one day turns out that the not-for-profit sector has been growing faster than the demand for it (expressed in earned and contributed revenues) then there will be some shakeout. I'm not cavalier about this because I once had to shut down a failed non-profit, and if you haven't been there you've no idea how much that sucked. But again: it's part of the big picture, and the big picture is overall terrific.
For example it's easier today to discuss and test new paths to greater effectiveness, and evaluation, and efficiency, and interdisciplinary bridgebuilding and several other hot topics, because at the crowded industry conferences the rooms are full of smart focused 30-somethings who aren't wedded to the rules of thumb and so forth which some of us learned on back in the paleolithic era. A big thumbs up to that (cue George Burns: "I wish I was 28 again...").
It's not that older non-profit staff are simply threatened by the flood of new folks, I detect little of that. It could be that funders are simply uncomfortable with the idea of having to act like customers and choose from among more and more possible grantees. It may be that we don't want the implied pressure of our sector being healthy and thriving with strong growth in resources: it doesn't fit our collective self-image as the underdog fighting upstream to improve the world despite endless funding cuts and the slings and arrows of a regressing society and so forth (cue violins).
Well I vote for dynamic and growing. Like the cliches go about democracy: it's messy, noisy, frequently unpleasant, and beats the heck out of all the alternatives.
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