Calls for funding the arts and humanities in R.I. should be more focused and inclusive

Advocates for more arts funding watch a floor vote in the House of Representatives at the Rhode Island State House on May 28, 2024. (Alexander Castro/Rhode Island Current)

Here’s a strategy unlikely to succeed: “We need this money and don’t much care where it comes from.”

And yet it was employed by supporters of two bills to fund arts and cultural organizations in Rhode Island  in our state Legislature this spring.

Each bill authorized $18 million to be distributed to 14 identified organizations, including the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, which would redistribute some of the money through a grants program. The bills suggested the money could come from an allocation of ARPA (COVID relief) funds, or a bond, or a budgeted appropriation.

In spite of a lobbying effort , the proposed legislation did not even make it out of committee in either the House or the Senate.

Instead, the House approved budget includes an authorization for a bond to be put before the voters to borrow $10 million for a shorter list of organizations (four, to be exact) for capital expenditures only. We tend to pass bonds in this state pretty readily, so the arts and culture organizations on the list for funding might have chosen to take the win. But still, concerns and complaints continue.

I have worked for arts, cultural, social service and educational organizations exclusively over a 45-year career. I am a nonprofit advocate, and I am often confused by the disdain the field gets from hard-core capitalists, and from fiscal conservatives. You all should love us. We do essential things that help keep government smaller than it might be, and we do not compete with industry.

What we must do, however, is raise money, and generally speaking, we do compete with each other for a relatively limited number of philanthropic dollars. We are required, therefore, to be very clear about who in our communities needs us and who cares about what we do. And, when tastes or audience needs change, we must adjust how we are of service.

During the pandemic, almost everyone I know moved a great deal of programming and services into the virtual world. And as the pandemic wound down, we found that we could not return entirely to in-real-life activities. And while I can, and did, argue that nothing beats a face-to-face interaction, some portions of our audiences were not going to join us that way no matter what we did.

Figuring out how to continue to support ourselves in this new reality has not been easy. And the cultural organizations who claim that they have not come back to pre-pandemic levels of engagement, and of income, are not exaggerating.

The RI Coalition for the Arts, which was formed to advocate for a higher level of government funding for the arts and culture sector, argues additionally that in Rhode Island, the arts are a significant economic engine, and yet are often left out of support initiatives. Furthermore, bonds fund capital needs, often with required matching funds, and do nothing to assist the organizations with essential operational funding.

The problems are real. It is their solution that is flawed. In part because if the organizations need to renew their business models to adjust to changing audience habits, throwing public money at them won’t fix that.

But there are other reasons. It is not long-term thinking, or predictably sustainable, to beg the Legislature to approve, and the electorate to fund, a multi-million-dollar bond every couple of years. Nor is it a sector-wide solution to have the money go to the organizations who have the political capital to make the backroom deal and “get on the list.”  And, not for nothing, while advocates cite “arts and culture,” non-arts related organizations — those devoted to history and other educational activities — are often not part of the coalition and the lobbying effort.

We often hold Massachusetts up as a model for Rhode Island. While I usually disapprove, the Massachusetts Cultural Council has a regular annual budget of over $25 million, and makes grants of all kinds across the sector, including to the arts, humanities, and interpretive sciences (like aquaria and zoos). If we really want to improve the health of the arts and culture sector in Rhode Island, a long term, strategic, push for a more permanent funding source for all of us could be the path. An endowment, a regular appropriation, and the thing we like least to do — a broader, more centralized effort — might get us there.

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