Ford Foundation Awards $40-Million to Help 28 Arts Organizations

By CONSTANCE CASEY

When he first answered questions on a survey from the Ford Foundation last fall, Vincent Anthony, founder and director of the Center for Puppetry Arts, in Atlanta,

had no idea that he was in line to become one of 28 beneficiaries of a $40-million grants program announced this month.

Mr. Anthony told Ford officials he wanted to give his center greater financial stability by raising money from newly wealthy people — something that in his opinion hadn’t been tapped in Atlanta, or around the country.

Now that his puppetry center is one of 28 arts groups to receive Ford Foundation grants that range in size from $1.25-million to $2.5 million, Mr. Anthony realizes that he said just the right thing.

Susan Berresford, the foundation’s president, said Ford hopes to jump-start giving to arts groups by stimulating campaigns like Mr. Anthony’s to tap into the new riches created by the booming economy. The idea for the grants, which supplement Ford’s regular arts giving of about $15-million a year, developed in response to both “the current explosion of cultural activity and the rapid growth of wealth in the United States,” she said.

Alison Bernstein, Ford’s vice president for education, media, arts and culture programs, said that the program was also a response to the foundation’s stock-market gains. Ford now has $13.7-billion in assets, which enabled it to give significantly more this year than it originally had expected. For its next major arts venture, Ms. Bernstein said, the foundation was considering joining with several other major foundations to pool resources in a new foundation or some kind of trust to support individual artists.

Under the program announced this month, called New Directions/New Donors, each of the arts groups pledged to match their grants over the next five years with new or increased gifts from individuals or from the businesses and foundations they control.

Choosing groups that already had a solid financial base was important to the foundation. Mr. Anthony’s Puppetry Center, for example, has not had a deficit in its 22 years of operation.

Ford worked with the organizations individually to determine how much they could expect to raise in matching gifts. Most of the grantees have pledged to raise two dollars for every one of Ford’s. A half dozen are more ambitious, going for three-to-one or even more.

Ms. Bernstein said that if each of the 28 groups achieves its pledge, Ford’s $40-million will have generated an additional $73-million for this group of organizations.

Beyond that, Ms. Berresford said she expected the program to have a ripple effect. To further inspire a wave of arts giving, Ford has provided $2.5-million to the Nonprofit Finance Fund, a New York organization that will document the grantees’ experiences in building support from individuals and communicate the lessons to other cultural groups.

Joe Discenza, director of development for Hubbard Street Dance, in Chicago, said he would start gearing up to match the $1.2-million grant with something really basic — using the money to buy computers for all five members of his development staff. Next, he plans to use the company’s new studio space in a remodeled car dealership to involve more donors. Mr. Discenza envisions bringing potential donors to see the troupe of 20 dancers in rehearsal and to meet other dance fans.

“My hope is that later when they come and see the performance on stage they’ll feel they’ve been part of the work-in-progress,” he said.

The Ford grantees represent eight disciplines, with new media and literature-as-performance added to the more traditional performing-arts mix of theater, dance, and music organizations that Ford usually supports. Though some of the recipients are venerable arts groups on the two coasts — the San Francisco Ballet and Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, for example — about half of the 28 are relatively small groups outside of New York and California. A $1-million grant will go to the Western Folklife Center based in Elko, Nev., which currently has an annual budget of $1.75-million. The center, in a town of 25,000 that is 300 miles east of Reno, is best known for its annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering — held, said its director, Charlie Seeman, “in the dead of winter in the middle of nowhere.”

Mr. Anthony, the head of the Atlanta puppetry center, and the other recipients of the Ford grants predict that the vote of confidence from the foundation will make it much easier for them to raise money in the next few years. “When the board found out about this, two or three months ago, it really charged them,” he said. “A key to fund raising is having your board excited. And they are.”