Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 1, 1994 TAG: 9404010208
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE KENNEDY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
They did not tell the audience at the Radisson Patrick Henry Hotel in Roanoke about how difficult it was for so many people to reach consensus on so broad a topic.
It was plenty difficult.
The plan was born in an atmosphere of financial crisis, as government and corporate cutbacks in the early 1990s led to reduced programming and shrunken staffs.
It came at a time when some staff and officers of the Arts Council already were investigating, and looking favorably at, united cultural funds that collect money for several agencies, much in the manner of the United Way, including workplace giving.
Many observers thought such a fund would be a major outcome of the plan. It wasn't.
Blueprint 2000 calls for implementation teams to begin work immediately in four areas: information and communication, education, resources and pluralism. It mentions a united cultural fund as something to be discussed by an ad hoc committee and suggests that workplace giving be studied in greater detail.
"There certainly was a diversity of opinion about that," said Wayne Strickland, director of the Fifth Planning District Commission and chairman of the Blueprint's steering committee.
Some corporate leaders are much in favor of such a system. Officials of some cultural organizations, particularly those with annual budgets in the million-dollar range, are cool to it. The report says their concerns involve creating an additional bureaucracy and a loss of autonomy.
"I'm totally against a united arts fund," said Jere Lee Hodgin, executive and artistic director of Mill Mountain Theatre, which has an annual budget of about $1 million. "I don't think it's what this valley needs.
"Personally, I feel strongly that the arts are being extremely well supported within the valley. There's already a tremendous history of giving, not only from the top, but from the bottom. I think that history of giving is one that's extremely tied with a certain sort of relationship with the organizations themselves and the public.
"The primary difficulty I have with united arts funds is that they destroy the personal relationships that exist between arts organizations and the people they are trying to serve."
Marguerite Fourcroy, former executive director of the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra, who moved to Detroit on Wednesday, said many of the same things. She and Hodgin were among several executive directors who took to meeting independently of the task forces, believing that their voices were not being heard.
"The greatest fear when we talk about funding is that people will lose ground," said James Sears, executive director of Center in the Square. "Many cultural organizations, if not all, feel they have a difficult, uphill struggle now just to maintain the quality programs; and even to remove $1 for something we want to try is definitely a threat."
He thinks such a fund could be beneficial, but said such a major change could take three to five years to implement.
Such tension is common between cultural groups' needs and a community's resources, said George Thorn, who consults with arts groups around the country and directs a graduate program in arts administration at Virginia Tech.
In general, he finds united cultural drives "not helpful to the community" - for one thing, they can be restrictive on member organizations - and he testified to that effect at one of the Blueprint meetings.
"I've always said it could be a good idea," said Ken Schutz, executive director of the Science Museum of Western Virginia, "but there are a lot of questions that remain unanswered."
How quickly and how satisfactorily they will get answered are the big questions. Meantime, the Arts Council is moving ahead on a marketing plan for the cultural community to be produced in conjunction with the Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau, on a cultural volunteer program that may operate through the Voluntary Action Center and on an effort to recruit board members for cultural organizations from all segments of the community.
Both in their comments and in the report, the council and the steering committee acknowledged that some of the findings are more relevant to small organizations than to large, and vice versa.
They have suggested that a workplace-giving campaign might be better for "emerging" programs than those that have burgeoned over the past 10 years.
"That would certainly help us," said Cynthia Light, secretary-treasurer of Arts Place at Old First, which is struggling to improve the old First Baptist Church on North Jefferson Street.
"It's a money pit, like any old building," Light said.
Just getting the groups together and coming up with a plan was a formidable accomplishment, said Terri Cornwell, project director.
"I don't think any of us realized how difficult and long-drawn-out this would be," said Sally Rugaber, who was president of the Arts Council in the plan's early stages. "I was somewhat surprised at how hard it was to convince folks in the other cultural groups that the Arts Council was open and aboveboard about this. I thought it was a noble effort."
An early backer of a united cultural drive, including workplace giving, she said she was neither surprised nor disappointed by its lukewarm reception. "I was really for it, and I remain convinced it would raise more money. . . . It's just too difficult an idea right now."
by CNB