It’s a pattern I can’t unsee. The foundation representative was direct: they no longer fund “the arts.” Their priorities are workforce development, economic mobility, and stronger communities.
Across the table, the nonprofit’s development director began going through his organization’s programs, looking for a fit. Then he described one that stopped me.
The program served students who had recently arrived in the United States and were attending an international public high school. Many entered the school year speaking little or no English. At first, they showed up, gathered within familiar cultural and language groups. As the school year progressed, through weekly music participation, they rehearsed together, performed together, and learned together. Participation came with expectations: attend school, make academic progress, demonstrate positive behavior, serve the community.
By the spring concert, they were performing in English. The principal said something else was happening too — students who had once stayed separated were mixing at lunch, integrating more fully into school life. Attendance among participating students was 100 percent.
When the meeting ended, I told the development director what I thought I had just heard.
“You just described a workforce development program that teaches communication, collaboration and integration through singing.”
He pushed back. “That’s not our mission.” He referenced the organization’s mission: building a more connected community, breaking down social barriers, bridging community divides, empowering people through arts, education, and volunteer service.
I remember thinking: it doesn’t matter what your mission statement calls it. These are the outcomes your work is producing.
That meeting changed my perspective. The problem wasn’t that this organization lacked outcomes — English-language development, attendance, communication, collaboration, persistence, accountability, social integration, belonging were all present in the work, and the organization knew it. But when asked what kind of work it did, it put all of that back inside a box labeled ARTS.
Before we can change the funding architecture, we have to recognize how our work already belongs inside it. Workforce development. Youth engagement. Increased attendance. Sense of belonging and social connection. And an arts organization may already be producing those very outcomes.
Sometimes the first funding barrier is recognition. We’ve become very good at describing the artistic intervention and much less practiced at naming the public problem that intervention solves.
That doesn’t mean changing the mission to fit a grant application. It means understanding the full value of the arts programs well enough to see where the human outcomes it produces intersect with the priorities other institutions consider essential. The music program was still a music program. But it was also teaching young people to communicate, collaborate, attend school, navigate a new culture, and build relationships across difference. Calling those outcomes workforce development, education, integration, or community building doesn’t make the artistic work less authentic. It makes the work easier for other institutions to recognize as part of the problems they are already responsible for solving.
Our sector often has to justify allocating money to our disciplines. We often fail to connect with the problems that institutions are responsible for funding.
That meeting shifted how I look at arts programming. I stopped asking only how do we convince people to fund the arts? I started asking: what if they're already trying to fund the problems we solve?