One of Two Ways

My post a few days back that talked about the competitive advantage that could come from paying artists and administrators a living wage caused a lot of email to be sent my way.

Most of the email was, of course, in favor of paying artists more . . . but they were confused about where that money was supposed to come from.

I got the predictable responses . . . that the government should do more direct funding of artists, or that corporations should provide general operating support to arts organizations.

Allow me to clear a few things up here.

Government and foundation money is designed to help get an organization on it's feet and/or help it get through a challenging moment.  If your organization is dependent on either of these funds for the majority of their support, then paying anybody a living wage over the long haul is going to be real tough.

It's the same for corporate support.  It's almost always designed for the short term.

If you want to pay your performers and staff a living wage or better, then the money is going to need to come from two places:

1.  Earned revenue (ticket sales, subscriptions, merchandising, whatever)

2.  Individual donations

Those are the only types of funds that typically come without strings attached.  In fact I would challenging you to find me an arts organization that pays fairly that doesn't get the bulk of their annual budget from those two sources.

Yes, asking people for individual donations is much more time and labor intense then writing a grant app and waiting four month.

But if you want to give your work the sort of salary and stability it needs, it's the only way to go.

 

Comments

[laura zabel]

I'll take that challenge! Facts about my organization:

-about 30% of our budget is from earned income
-less than 10% of the budget is from individual contributions (I know, we're working on it!)
-we pay our six staff members competitive salaries, comprehensive health & dental insurance and a matched retirement plan.

How does that happen? I think it's mostly about intentionality. Your original post on this topic really resonated with me -- you have to decide whether you're going do what's always been done, what you can get away with or whether you're going to lead. As part of our strategic planning, the board of the organization decided that, as a service organization, it was our responsibility to be a model to the community on issues like employee compensation, health insurance and flexible work schedules.

While we'd all like more general operating support, it's possible to include ongoing staff (and other overhead) costs in program and project requests. I've actually experienced very little resistance from funders to this idea, many of them actually encourage it. When there is a question or resistance, I cite our strategic plan and our need to model best practices and I say, "our staff ARE our programs - without them how would this happen?"

This commitment is to our staff and also to the artists we work with, I wrote this about a recent fundraiser we had, in which 75% of the event expenses went directly to artists: http://bit.ly/Tnlfd

If we don't pay people who work in the arts a living wage, what are we communicating about the value of art?