No plans for future action were made by the City at that meeting or since.

What was revealed was that the City made major changes in the metrics they used to evaluate how they fund arts orgs. Most notable was their admission that they didn’t have the human resource or the experience to conduct a merit-based, competitive application process for the Investment Award, in which each organization is independently assessed on its equity, inclusion and access work. So instead, they gave the same 40% bump in base award to any organization that could demonstrate it served K-12 students or “underserved communities” as they defined them.

This change was made without consulting the 80 members of the GOS cohort with or without an adequate understanding of how this would impact the field — namely that it would strip nearly half a million dollars in funding from small and mid-sized arts orgs and funnel that money to the largest.

We also learned that the Mayor unilaterally directed an additional quarter million dollars to Portland Center Stage, and that Commissioner Dan Ryan directed additional subsidies to renters of P5 — both of which bypassed even this rushed application process, directing precious funding to the top.

The smaller organizations don’t begrudge more funding for larger organizations. In fact, this was already built into the system of general operating support. One portion of funds were based on size of budget and one portion was based on equity- and equal amount available to each org based on detailed diversity, equity, inclusion, and access work for the previous year.

We did the math:
For the top organizations (in budget size), the increase in city funding is less than 1% of their annual budgets. They also additionally hold an average of 268% of their annual budgets in assets in a range of 81-677%

For the bottom quarter of orgs (in budget size), the city reductions are an average of -4% of budgets, the largest difference is -8%. These organizations have on average 63% of their annual budget in assets (the smallest assets/reserves is 5% and the largest is 175%). All but 2 have less than a year’s budget in assets which means they don’t have as much of a safety net and some have almost no reserves.

Equity Investments have been given through RACC (with City funding) for years as part of the annual General Operating Support process. Organizations could provide detailed information on diversity, equity, inclusion, and access of their work to be eligible. This information was specific, detailed, and the points for each question were provided in advance of filling out this portion.

Also the Equity Investment portion of the grants was available equally to all of the GOS city supported orgs.

Now the city has dropped the “Equity” part of the name and the Investment awards are a short questionnaire that is much less detailed in collection of data. Also the award was based on budget size, just like the rest of the grant funding. This led, purposefully or not, to the drastic cut of funds for smaller equity-focused orgs and instead increased the funding for the largest orgs without detailed data on their equity measures.

No, there was more funding available this year. We anticipate that changing, but with the current criteria, that would have even greater impact on the smaller organizations moving forward, and greater likelihood of beloved long-standing spaces and programs closing.