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.”