
DATE: Wednesday, October 15, 1997           TAG: 9710150001

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 
SOURCE: Glenn Allen Scott 

                                            LENGTH:   86 lines

CORRECTION/CLARIFICATION: * The The Kirov Ballet performance at Chrysler Hall, a fund-raiser for the Virginia Waterfront International Arts Festival's endowment, is scheduled for 7 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 16, not Wednesday, as wrongly stated in Glenn Allen Scott's Perspectives page column this week. Correction published in The Virginian-Pilot, October 17, 1997, page B10. * MONEY FROM KIROV BALLET EARMARKED FOR ENDOWMENT VIRGINIA WATERFRONT INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL

The Kirov Ballet performance scheduled for Wednesday, Nov. 16 at Chrysler Hall is a fund-raiser for the Virginia Waterfront International Arts Festival. Tickets for the Kirov are selling fast. The St. Petersburg-based troupe is dancing this season in 18 U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Proceeds from the Kirov's appearance in Norfolk will not underwrite the second festival next spring (April 23-May 10) but will be deposited in the organization's endowment fund at The Norfolk Foundation to aid future festivals.

Says Robert Cross, the festival's artistic director: ``We are committed to long-term fiscal stability. With a successful first year behind it and a $10,000 gift from the Celia Stern estate, the board created the Virginia Waterfront International Arts Festival Fund through The Norfolk Foundation's Hampton Roads Cultural Endowment. We will systematically add to the fund and invite donations and bequests to it.''

By lodging its endowment at The Norfolk Foundation, the arts festival gains low-cost investment management and whatever its fund yields. Like all other money entrusted to The Norfolk Foundation, the festival-fund principal can never be violated; it remains with the foundation in perpetuity.

The festival will do three things to gain a percentage of the yield from the Hampton Roads Cultural Endowment's incentive fund in addition to its own fund's yield. The festival will:

1. Dedicate a dollar for endowment from each ticket sale.

2. Let festivalgoers and the community at large know that donations small, medium, large and extra large will be welcomed and acknowledged.

3. Stage an annual endowment fund-raiser. (The Kirov is the first.)

The Hampton Roads Cultural Endowment incentive fund, begun with a $25,000 grant from the Celia Stern estate, generates a modest $1,500 a year. The yield will grow as generous givers direct money to it for the nurturing of regional arts and culture.

A hefty incentive fund is key to persuading not-for-profit arts-and-cultural groups to consider starting an endowment at The Norfolk Foundation. Most groups scrape by, their hands ever out for patronage, donations, grants. Urged to set aside a dollar for endowment from ticket sales and hold endowment fund-raisers, the groups complain that they:

1. Need every dime they can get to pay operating expenses.

2. Raise money for operations and couldn't possibly hold endowment fund-raisers.

3. Would not be able in an emergency to borrow against or withdraw principal from a Norfolk Foundation fund.

The objections are understandable. George's Washington's Mount Vernon is also strapped for money. But it implemented the dollar-for-endowment discipline in 1991, collecting $2.5 million for its fund. Estimated earnings on the $2.5 million have further fattened the endowment by $1.1 million.

Impressed in part by dollar-for-endowment, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation granted Mount Vernon $2,250,000 for its long-planned ``pioneer farmer'' project and followed up with a $250,000 grant to the endowment.

In Hampton Roads, objections by arts-and-culture groups to creating endowments at The Norfolk Foundation would fade if, say, $10 million were in the incentive fund. Groups would trample each other to sign up to get their share (determined by arithmetical formula) of the roughly $500,000 a year spun off by $10 million. They also would strive to enlarge their own endowments in order to claim big chunks of the incentive-fund yield.

Couldn't happen?

Consider the history of The Norfolk Foundation. A community charitable trust founded with thousands of dollars in 1950, the foundation currently manages permanent assets totaling more than $70 million. It distributes the millions of dollars yielded by these assets to individuals and institutions in Hampton Roads, primarily.

Simply by existing at The Norfolk Foundation, the Hampton Roads Cultural Endowment incentive fund harbors the potential for accreting substantial assets over the years from patrons of arts and culture in the same way that the foundation itself attracts money because it is there. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The

Virginian-Pilot.

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by CNB