The Unnecessary Evils of Necessary Evils

This is a (very raw) primer for understanding the stress of submitting grant applications.  It's a necessary evil if you work in galleries, museums, culture centres, theatres, and all the culture drivers therein (such as curators, artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, etc.).  If you already understand the perils of grant-based funding, none of this will come as a surprise.  It's more of a validation of the challenges you face.  I'm not offering solutions, or even taking a particularly deep look at this.  Maybe I'm just venting.  Some of what I'm talking about here relates to personal experience, but it's also anecdotal.  I've worked in the culture sector long enough to have heard all kinds of horror stories.  So, there you go.  Read on, if you dare.

Imagine, if you will, you work in the culture sector - okay maybe you don't - but you probably know someone who does.  This post probably applies to research scientists, too, for that matter, or anyone whose livelihood is directly tied to grant-based funding, donations, and sponsorship.  Even the big institutions and organisations, yes even the ones that appear sustainable (what's that mean, again?), survive in part on fundraising.  Big institutions tend to be better at finding funders because they have the resources to look for funders.  They have departments with people devoted to researching possible funders and donors, they have marketing departments to get the word out and drum up support.  Money breeds money, so they say.  So let's leave them out of this conversation, because when small and mid-sized culture organisations go up against the big'uns, most of the time, they lose.

For small institutions, the ones that don't have enormous donor bases, or large memberships, or who have subject area or interest that may not be immediately relatable for the average person, the struggle to find funding, especially long-term funding, is real.  I don't think it's an overstatement to say that the majority of culture organisations fall into this category.  In the science world, this probably equates to exploratory science, pure research.  It's where many of the most life-changing discoveries have happened, and yet these research labs are the ones most frequently scrambling to find funding to keep their research alive.  Small culture orgs are also often the innovators in their fields, because they have to do more with so much less.  They don't have access to the funds for big tech, or flashy exhibits, swish publications.  Usually, there are a few key individuals, maybe only one or two, who try to figure out how to create buzz, develop engaging programs, figure out how rent or utilities will be paid, etc., and very often, they don't work full-time, or they're volunteers, or they're only paid through project grants.  Often, they're highly educated, and typically, they're passionate about what they do.  So passionate, in fact, that the rest of the world takes for granted that these folks will just keep doing what they do for shockingly low wages.  And, sadly, many of them (myself included) will, at least for a while.

So, back to fundraising and writing grants.

We in the culture sector know the tear-jerking, breakdown-inducing stress of writing grants.  We put ourselves in front of funder after funder trying desperately to find one who will take an interest.  We take time and resources away from our often struggling organisations in order to lock ourselves up for a week at a time to write grant applications.  And we write many, many grant applications, don't we?  Oh yes we do.  It's like applying for a job: sometimes it's for a highly paid job, sometimes its for short-term unskilled labour, but every time, we have to make the case for why we're the right one for it - in this case, funds.  Only instead of applying for a job or two that will, hopefully, pay a living wage, culture orgs are applying for dozens of jobs.  Instead of one or two jobs paying the bills and allowing for a few new toys or a small renovation, it's more like one job to repair the roof, one job to put food on the table, one job to clothe, another to cover utilities, another to buy school supplies for the kids, another to keep the lights on... because none of the jobs alone will do more than one thing.  And every application has different requirements, different rules, and quite often, a host of invisible prerequisites you never knew the committees were looking for.

Like any worker who works multiple jobs, trying to make ends meet, culture organisations spend a lot of energy just making sure they can make it to the next month.  They exist, like so many people who just scrape by, hand to mouth, too concerned with where the next buck is coming from to spend time investing in their futures.  And, like so many salaries, funding is static or going down.  More requests on funders, for fewer dollars.

Then there are the funders.  There are any number of types out there, and if you've ever spent any time looking at the granting websites, you know that every single one of them has different (and sometimes variable) eligibility requirements.  This grant won't fund operations expenses (you know, like rent, utilities, light bulbs, toilet paper, etc.); that grant won't fund organisations with a military bias; this other grant will cover projects, but not the salary for the person who is working on the project; this one is only available in these three communities; that grant won't cover anything unless it supports literacy, or whatever.  Some grants look perfect, but when you research the projects they've funded, you discover that they only give money to projects at a university.  Sometimes a granting organisation will only allow applicants who they have invited and, please, no phone calls, emails, faxes, or any other form of outside solicitation, so unless you know so-and-so on the Board, forget about it.

Often, culture organisations rely heavily, some might say too heavily, on government and government supported funders.  Often, government grants are the only ones which cover operations.  They usually have a lofty mandate to support and empower organisations and to assist in making those organisations sustainable.  Of course, sustainability in the culture sector, especially as it is currently laid out, is more myth than reality for most orgs, because they are

a) not-for-profit,
b) subject to the whims and interests of membership and volunteers, and,
c) the culture of philanthropy in Canada is under developed and under rewarded by current tax laws. 

I'm sure there are other reasons that sustainability is more myth than reality for many orgs, but those are what came to me off the top of my head.

 Typically, and for very good reasons, government grants require the most paperwork.  No ministry or department wants to have backlash because "taxpayer dollars" have been wasted/misspent on a culture organisation that has misappropriated funds, or bought a desk chair and printer cart when the rules clearly stated that office fixtures are ineligible expenses!  They want to show that funds are being used for their intended purposes, and that both the funder and the recipient are accountable.  But sometimes, the hoops organisations are expected to jump through to secure often meagre funds, are unnecessarily evil.  There are grants that require orgs to submit an audit.  Audits are important, but they're also expensive.  To an organisation with a budget of less than $50,000, an audit that costs over $4,000 may well be prohibitive.  Especially since the audit comes before the grant, and the costs of the audit may not be eligible expenditures for the grant.  Imagine being required to submit an audit for a grant that won't provide more than $8,000, and the grant will take a solid 25 hours to complete.  Is that worth the pain?  Imagine your organisation has only one staff person.  And that person is paid out of a project grant which won't cover these unrelated costs!  Now imagine that you took the time, unpaid, to write that grant, your organisation paid for the audit, and then your organisation still failed to secure the funds... 

So you contact the funder to find out what you did wrong, or what you could improve for next time.  Sometimes, rarely, they offer real, meaningful advice.  I just recently learned a grant I'd applied for was declined, but they followed up with an invitation to re-apply and to contact them to find out how to improve for the next intake.  We did, and much to our surprise, we were told just how close we came to being funded and three ways we could strengthen our already strong application.  Wow.  You can bet we will reapply.  but, like all those HR departments who promise to get back to you, but rarely do, with their hiring decisions, culture orgs are lucky to get a form letter informing them their request was declined.  I've called funders to find out how to improve future applications and often they can provide so little feedback that I'm left wondering whether all the applications were just thrown in the air and those that landed face-up were selected and those that landed face-down weren't.  A colleague of mine told me about the time they weren't funded because their organisation didn't have a business plan.  A business plan was not on the list of required supporting documents, nor was it refered to anywhere in the grant guidelines.  Understandably, my colleague was pretty upset, but as with most funders, there was no appeal process. 

Sometimes an org is invited to reapply, is offered advice on how to improve, and then they still don't get funded, for any number of reasons.Maybe it was a financial short-fall on the funder's end, or a policy change at a top government level, or maybe the decision committee changed their mind - it doesn't even have to be a problem with the culture organisation's application.  Then you have to tell your membership where the money went, why it didn't come, which breeds little in the way of security or confidence, and then other potential funders become concerned... you can see how this might affect a museum's sustainability pretty quickly.

I am happy to report that while I've lived through the chest-clutching, hair-pulling horror of having desperately needed grants not come through, and will likely live through it again, I can demonstrate a 65% success rate for receiving funds or at least partial funds to support my organisations (and my livelihood).  But I probably spend a solid third of my time researching, planning, and writing grant applications, most of which do not in a real way support day-to-day operations, and usually not my salary, either.  So, there you go.  I hope this shed some light on a mysterious and often traumatising aspect of trying to run a culture org.  The challenges differ from place to place, country to country, but with few exceptions (lucky bastards), this struggle is very real. 

The next thing I write about, I promise, will induce fewer panic attacks. 

Want to read more about the horrors of budget cuts, demands on granting organisations, making do with less?  Here's what the Province of Ontario learned from its province-wide Culture Talks sessions?  You can download their summary here.  Here's a recent article about the situation for Canadian art museums (mind you, bigger, well-funded museums) from Canadian Art magazine. Here's a 2015 summary article relating budget cuts and stress levels from the Museum Association (UK).