A Good Idea, Gone
Wouldn't it be valuable if Seattle had an organization that connected arts groups to businesspeople who want to support them? Wouldn't it be helpful if these businesspeople taught those arts groups about administration, marketing, cultivating boards, and so forth? It so happens that Business Volunteers for the Arts (BVA) did that very thing for 20 years--and it's just shut down operations.
"It's been a silent partner for arts organizations and nonprofits over the years," said Kibby Munson of the Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival. "We'll all feel the loss. It's been somewhere to go to ask for help on anything, from getting a staff handbook written, to training a board member on fundraising, to finding someone who can do our tax returns for us." BVA even helped the festival recruit several board members. The long list of organizations that received assistance from BVA this past year includes everyone from Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestras to 911 Media Arts Center to dance troupe 33 Fainting Spells.
"The economic climate forced BVA to take a long look at what it could and could not do," said Dan Mayer, a former member of BVA's board of directors. "It had been getting smaller and smaller, and that was what the board faced: How small could you make this organization and still make it viable and responsive to the needs of the community? People were willing to volunteer their time, and the chamber of commerce has provided a lot of support over the years, but it was not feasible to generate general operating support for salaries and overhead."
Seattle's Convention and Visitors Bureau will be picking up some of BVA's programs, including the Market the Arts Taskforce, the steam behind the popular ArtsBucks program, which subsidized tickets in order to develop audiences. Other projects included the Puget Sound Arts Directory; an unsubsidized art credit card (something like a Starbucks Card) that's being developed with 40 participating arts groups; and the Concierge Project, which provides a Cultural Events Notebook to hotels throughout the Puget Sound region and maintains an online calendar of events at SeeSeattle.org. Michael Killoren, the bureau's director of cultural tourism, said, "There are some things I don't want to see fall through the cracks." Regrettably, other programs will disappear.
The loss of BVA will be felt most strongly by small to mid-size arts groups. As Cheryl Swab (executive director of BVA from 1997 to 2000) noted, "The problem is that there's not corporate support for BVA to assist mid-sized groups. Twenty years ago, when the Rep and the Opera needed help, there was lots of corporate support there; [for example], almost all the banks used to support BVA. Most corporations now make their contact with the arts through Corporate Council for the Arts--that draws away from the people who might give to BVA." CCA takes financial contributions and distributes them to large arts organizations, but it doesn't offer skills and tutorials because these larger entities have their own staff and boards to do the kind of work that made BVA useful (e.g., marketing advice and long-term planning). "Support from the arts commissions--city, county, and state--should have been better established," Swab said.
Unfortunately, government funding isn't any easier to pursue. According to Jim Kelly of the King County Office of Cultural Resources, "Those of us in the funding community think service organizations like BVA are great; the problem is they don't fit easily into our funding priorities." If a funder has to choose between giving money directly to art (either through artists or institutions) or to organizations that provide services for artists, the artists themselves tend to win out--even though the arts scene as a whole may suffer in the long run.
