Gayle Ligon, right, talks with Serinity Harris during art class Thursday at Calvin Donaldson Elementary School. The Imagine Chattanooga 2020 project is working to examine the future viability of the city's cultural offerings on various levels.The Chattanooga Theatre Centre. Art on Main. Ballet Tennessee. Chattanooga Symphony & Opera. Shaking Ray Levi Society. The Hunter Museum of American Art.
For all the richness of Chattanooga's many artistic offerings, an ongoing two-year study suggests local cultural organizations' coffers may run dry without new sources of funding.
WolfBrown, a Cambridge, Mass.-based nonprofit consulting firm, has been meeting with 200-300 Hamilton County artists and cultural-institution leaders since March to begin drafting a cultural plan for the next decade.
"In Chattanooga, you have a particular problem in that much of the money that has sustained these organizations for some time has come from a few very large foundations and a few wealthy families," said Thomas Wolf, WolfBrown principal consultant. "That money is beginning to dissipate.
"One of the challenges [the city] will face over the next decade or more is to replace that funding with a broader, diversified funding base," he said. "That's one of the challenges we'll address with the cultural plan."
Wolf is working in collaboration with a committee of 43 community leaders assigned to six task forces focusing on areas such as "arts and culture," "individual artists and public art" and "diversity and underserved communities."
The overarching goal of the project, dubbed Imagine Chattanooga 2020, is to unite and strengthen the city's cultural organizations while ensuring their sustainability, Wolf said.
Chattanooga's artistic offerings far exceed other cities of comparable size, but that richness is a double-edged sword, the expert said.
"I think, programmatically, [the arts community is] very healthy," Wolf said. "From that point of view ... [Chattanooga is] the envy of communities that are much larger. But from the point of view of the health of these organizations, financially, it's a tough time."
WolfBrown has been involved with the planning process since January 2010, when the firm conducted a 10-month assessment of Allied Arts of Greater Chattanooga and the 14 organizations it funds.
According to an executive summary of the 2010 study's findings, most Allied Arts organizations were debt-free but lacked sufficient cash reserves and were overreliant on a limited number of funding sources. The study also suggested that some organizations were too dependent on Allied Arts, as opposed to raising funds themselves.
Programs supported by Allied Arts get from 5 percent to 23 percent of their yearly budgets from the group. That is not significant enough to qualify as critical, said Dan Bowers, Allied Arts president.
"That 'overreliance' depends on how you look at it," he said. "[But] if it causes them to be lackadaisical, then certainly it's a problem."
Effective funding of the arts has been a challenge in Chattanooga for decades. The last cultural plan, New Vision for the Nineties, was drafted in 1989. Of the plan's 10 primary goals, the No. 1 ambition was to "secure a level of funding to sustain [cultural institutions'] activities and provide growth for their future."
As a result, the most recent study's suggestion to improve sustainability came as no surprise, Bowers said.
"Every nonprofit has a certain sense of vulnerability," Bowers said, "but [Wolfe] put a sharp point on that in talking about the need for us to be better fundraisers and fund developers."
OTHER CHALLENGES
Sustainability was just one area of concern raised during WolfBrown's meetings this year.
During an April 5 open forum attended by about 70 people, primarily local artists, funding was one of 10 primary topics of concern identified by WolfBrown consultant Marc Goldring.
According to a summary of comments during the meeting, other issues addressed included how to effectively market local artists, using the arts to engage children and families, developing stronger partnerships among arts organizations and developing arts-based tourism.
Many of the themes from the April meeting have begun to crystallize as goals for Imagine Chattanooga 2020, but it is still too early in the process to reach any conclusions, Bowers said.
"The emphasis has been on listening to all these people and all these groups," he said. "When we start categorizing it, in my mind, you're shutting down part of the process if you don't leave it open."
According to WolfBrown's schedule, the cultural plan should be finalized by the end of December.
Although the study has yet to yield any programs or initiatives, some of the observations made by WolfBrown have changed the way the arts community interacts, said Rodney Van Valkenburg, Allied Arts' director of communications and arts education.
"We're getting out of our silos, meaning that we look at solutions that don't just work for our organizations but start a conversation to bring people together to talk about solutions," Van Valkenburg said.
"Before ... your reality [was] based on your organization and what you're capable of, instead of saying, 'Gosh, we have a literacy issue. How can we all work together to combine programming?' "
This has resulted in greater outreach beyond performance-based art forms to the film and literary communities, arts leaders say. Preliminary discussions have also begun to create a centralized event calendar and ticketing location for artistic, outdoor and sporting events, Bowers said.
According to an emailed outline of its members' projected FY 2012 budgets, Shaking Ray Levi Society's $26,000 projection is the second lowest of Allied Arts' 14 partner organizations. Allied Arts will provide 21 percent of the society's budget, according to the outline.
The society is a nonprofit that supports music, film and performance arts.
In its evaluation of the society, WolfBrown praised the organization's conservative approach and its "strong contribution to Chattanooga over the years with a very modest investment of dollars and a large amount of human capital."
Shaking Ray Levi Society president Ernie Paik wrote an email response that he has already begun acting on WolfBrown's suggestion to expand the organization's outreach and education programs.
"We have taken WolfBrown's suggestions very seriously, considering the best ways to adopt several of them," Paik wrote.
opening it up
Up to this point, input on the cultural plan development has been largely restricted to one-on-one interviews, invitation-only small-group meetings and focus groups. In October, however, the plan is to begin involving the whole community, Wolf said.
Bowers said Wolf will visit Chattanooga Monday through Wednesday to begin finalizing plan recommendations, which will be introduced during a series of public meetings to be held Oct. 3-6 at locations around Hamilton County.
WolfBrown consultants have anticipated some areas of public interest based on the results of Stand, a grassroots community survey that collected about 26,000 responses when it was conducted in 2009.
Using arts organizations to address broad public concerns is an important part of any cultural plan, said Wolf, whose firm has helped develop more than 20 such plans across the country.
"Every successful cultural plan must do that ... look at the broader issues that are of concern to the population as a whole," Wolf said. "If you just deal with those people who are supporters of the arts or who attend arts events, you're not going to develop a broad enough constituency for the recommendations you're going to make."
To encourage widespread participation in the discussion, the planning committee launched a website on Sept. 1 for Imagine Chattanooga 2020 (www.imaginechattanooga2020.org).
In the coming weeks, Van Valkenburg said, the goal is to emphasize this online component to encourage discussion in the site's forum and through a Facebook fan page.
"We're trying to be on the cutting edge of getting public feedback," he said. "You always want the public involved, hear what they have to say and get their buy in, because the public is going to have to implement it."
Once the suggestions of the cultural plan are implemented, Van Valkenburg said, the hope is arts organizations will be able to work together efficiently to address larger issues.
'NOT IN A CRISIS'
Ultimately, Bowers said, he hopes the process of drafting a cultural plan opens people's eyes about the significance of artistic programming to Chattanooga's identity.
"People tend to identify [art] narrowly in their minds," he said. "They think about the Tivoli and tuxes and mink stoles, but when you start talking to them and they start thinking more broadly about it ... they see [a new] role of the arts."
During a meeting held at the onset of the planning process, the steering committee requested a list of other communities that have benefited from implementing cultural plans. WolfBrown mentioned three: Charlotte, N.C., Portland, Ore., and Dallas.
Wolf said that at the onset of his evaluation of arts and culture in Chattanooga, he was basing his assessment of Chattanooga on other cities with similar artistic offerings, not similar populations. When he began looking at communities of similar size, such as Allentown, Pa., Wolf said he was struck by the wealth of cultural programming available in Chattanooga.
"I was just astonished because some of the towns the same size don't have anywhere near the richness of cultural institutions and artists that you have in Chattanooga," he said.
Although the study has brought a number of challenges to light, Bowers and Van Valkenburg said Imagine Chattanooga 2020 was not born out of a sense of urgency.
Allied Arts sought funding for the study -- about $220,000, in all -- primarily to take a comprehensive look at arts and culture for the first time in more than 20 years, Van Valkenburg said.
"The arts are not in a crisis in Chattanooga," he said. "When you're not in crisis mode, you have the luxury, perhaps, of taking more thoughtful time.
"It's what healthy communities should do. Healthy communities plan and involve the public. It's a healthy process to go through."