Posted: March 4, 2011

By Danielle Walker

danielle.walker@insidebiz.com

Arts supporters across the state are celebrating the decision to continue funding the Virginia Commission for the Arts.

The Virginia General Assembly voted Feb. 27 against a proposed 2 percent cut in arts grants to the organization, which currently receives nearly $3.8 million in annual state funding.

The victory is part of an uphill battle for arts proponents, who have watched funding shrink through the years.

"Since 2009, reductions of more than $3.1 million have been felt all over the state," said Patricia Rublein, the executive director of the Cultural Alliance of Greater Hampton Roads in Norfolk. "We really were hoping for no more cuts."

With the latest vote, community organizations that promote the arts, like the Cultural Alliance, are enjoying a temporary triumph.

"In Hampton Roads, we have over 300 arts organizations and we don't want to lose them because they help contribute over $1 billion to the state economy," Rublein said. The Cultural Alliance also gives back to the community, she said.

"It's really an investment from the state, rather than a handout. It is an investment in an industry that pays back."

Rublein said that smaller arts organizations don't have the advantage of larger endowments and the corporate support some of the larger organizations have.

Among the alliance's larger member organizations are the Chrysler Museum of Art and the Harrison Opera House, both in Norfolk.

The alliance provides a network to help promote a "healthy arts industry" in Hampton Roads, Rublein said. It distributes information, including grant applications with the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and also holds workshops and networking events.

If the proposed budget cut had been implemented, cuts would have been equally applied to each organization under VCA's funding stream.

Peggy J. Baggett, the executive director of VCA in Richmond, said that the state organization supplies funding to various arts venues and organizations in Hampton Roads. Among the larger ones are the Virginia Stage Company in Norfolk, and the Virginia Arts Festival, also headquartered in Norfolk.

Medium-to-smaller organizations include the Suffolk Center for Cultural Arts, Hampton Roads Writers and The Hurrah Players in Norfolk.

"We are giving grants to all of the Hampton Roads cities," said Baggett, explaining that VCA matches grants with local/city governments.

"The people who think the funding is important have to do more and more to show how critical it is for communities," Baggett said.

Last summer, Virginians for the Arts, an arts advocacy group in Richmond, set up a program through which General Assembly members would be contacted by arts supporters. VFTA members talked to them about the history and significance of arts organizations in their community.

The Academy of Music in Norfolk, a nonprofit, received $1 million from the Batten Endowment Challenge in January. The program awards funding to nonprofit organizations focused on educating children and youth in South Hampton Roads. Philanthropists Frank and Jane Batten donated $20.5 million to The Norfolk Foundation, which started the program.

Founded in 1991, the Academy of Music offers private and group instrument and voice lessons, conducted at various churches in the region. It also provides funding for low-income children in Hampton Roads who wish to enroll in music lessons.

"One of the problems with nonprofit organizations is that people who end up running them are passionate about what the organization does, but they don't have business training," said John Dixon, the executive director of the Academy of Music.

Dixon came to the organization eight years ago with an extensive background in business.

After leaving England, where he grew up, Dixon received an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1982. He then returned to England, where he worked in the shoe business for four years.

Eventually, Dixon and his wife started their own business in Essex, England, becoming international distributors for a mystery game sold by a Norfolk company, Decipher Inc.

After moving to Hampton Roads in 1988 to work for the company, Dixon eventually left Decipher and bought a local peanut brokerage in the early 1990s, Waller Whittemore & Co.

Dixon still has the business, but also devotes his time to the academy as its executive director.

He's also an organist at Providence Presbyterian Church in the Kempsville area of Virginia Beach.

"Every nonprofit works so hard just to balance the budget," Dixon said. "We don't have a business model; we work toward a mission."

The academy is considered a mid-sized organization, with paid staff.

"You don't do better by increasing your turnover, because you're not in the business to make money," he said. There's a delicate balance nonprofits must master, from a business perspective.

"In the years that we had good funding through our grants with the Virginia Commission for the Arts, we were able to sleep at night and it really made the difference," he said.

But since state funding for VCA fell nearly 50 percent since 2008, organizations like his "are in that sleepless night scenario" again, he said.

When funding was at its peak, organizations could operate smoothly, making more use of the state's funds.

In the 1990s, the state legislature voted that the arts should be funded at a support level of $1 per capita. Currently, the Virginia Commission for the Arts receives $0.42 per capita.

Pressure to continue cuts to state spending will more than likely call for continuous lobbying to secure state funding.

"When funding is up, the benefit comes to us more rapidly," Dixon said, allowing arts organizations to produce a bigger return on the state's investment.

Conversely, "if the grant is cut, arts organizations feel the pain very quickly," he said.