Giving to the arts when people are hurt or hungry

Posted at 11:28 AM on November 23, 2009 by Marianne Combs (6 Comments)
Filed under: Funding

In the wake of last week's giving frenzy, I had a chance to review some of the numbers in a little more detail. After cozying up with a 99 page pdf file over the weekend, and perusing Minnesotans' generosity, I was left to wonder: how do we decide who to give our money to?

For instance take a look at these numbers from last week's "Give to the Max Day" - note: they do not reflect the "match" by GiveMN, but simply the donations made by the public.

Guthrie Theater - $40,075

Children's Theater Company and School - $57,545

Minneapolis Institute of Arts - $19,058

Walker Art Center - $9,120

Animal Humane Society - $67,069

Habitat for Humanity - $12,539

Graywolf Press - $9,185

American Cancer Society - $7,880

American Composers Forum - $20,314

American Red Cross Twin Cities Chapter - $23,825

Dorothy Day Hospitality House (homeless shelter) - $645

Advocates against Domestic Abuse - $255

Second Harvest Heartland - $183,291

YMCA of Greater St. Paul - $117,175

YWCA of St. Paul, Minnesota - $3,230

It's interesting to see the range in generosity to both arts organizations and those non-profits that provide crisis services such as food and shelter. I realize some of these numbers may simply reflect an organization's efforts to get the word out, but it also made me think about the decision to give.

How do we balance our giving to the arts alongside the needs of the homeless and hungry? What questions do you ask yourself before you decide to give to a particular non-profit? How do you 'justify' giving money to an organization that many see as a luxury, not a necessity? And if you're willing to share, who are you giving your money to this year, as unemployment is at its highest level in 25 years and social services are being cut?

No answers in today's post - just questions. I welcome your thoughts.

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Sadness, terror, and hope in "Precious"

Posted at 4:15 PM on November 20, 2009 by Euan Kerr (0 Comments)
Filed under: Film

I have never seen people flinching in a press screening of a movie until this week, when a group gathered to watch Lee Daniels "Precious."

It's probably a good sign that even today in the age of 3D gorefests cinema has not lost its ability to shock with an all-too-real story.

The tale of Claireece "Precious" Jones is brutal. She's a 350lb teenager pregnant with her second child by her now absent father. She lives at the beck and call of her monstrous mother Mary. She sees Precious as a servant, and simply a way to squeeze extra money out of the welfare office. When verbal abuse doesn't produce the results Mary wants, she turns to violence.

Precious escapes into herself, sitting at the back of her classroom she dreams of being a celebrity, dressed to the nines and dancing with handsome young men. She goes there too when the blows fall about her head.

All might seem lost, but Precious catches a glimmer of hope when she transfers to a special school dedicated to getting at risk youngsters their GED. But can she make it through without her mother dragging her back into her old life?

Gabourey Sidibe (right) is simply astonishing in the title role.

She shows how tough Precious can be, displaying her determination mixed with a vulnerability which can set her back as quickly as push her forward. For a first time screen actor to carry this film is remarkable. To portray this character and turn in her into a symbol of hope is even more so.

She get a great deal of help from Mo'Nique who gives a nuanced performance as Mary, eventually explaining how she became the depraved individual she is. Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz both shed their musical personas to portray a social worker and a nurse who try to help Precious. Don't be surprised if you hear these names again come awards season.

Precious is not an easy film, but if it provokes discussion of the abuses which are sadly all too common through out all strata of society then it will have done a service. And if it convinces even one person that there is hope that is even better.

You can watch the trailer here.

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Your Weekend Arts Outlook

Posted at 2:23 PM on November 20, 2009 by Marianne Combs (0 Comments)
Filed under: Events

'Corleone: The Shakespearean Godfather' at Gremlin Theatre
Photo by Jim Clifford

One of the hits of past Minnesota Fringe Festivals was "Corleone" - a Shakespearean re-imagining of The Godfather. The one-hour piece has been expanded into a full evening's entertainment, with Coppola's iconic mobsters spouting off in iambic pentameter. It opens tonight at Gremlin Theater in St. Paul.

Franklin Art Works celebrates it's tenth anniversary tonight with the opening of a new show. The highlight? "Hello World!..." - a large-scale video installation comprised of thousands of unique video diaries gathered from the internet. The work measures 15' high x 48' long and featires multi-channel audio. Artist Christopher Baker says the project is a meditation on the contemporary plight of democratic, participative media and the fundamental human desire to be heard.

Walker Art Center went through its storage bins to put together an exhibition that shows how a particular event can shape artistic ideas around that time. Event Horizon features postwar art, from avant-garde film of the 1960s to newly created environmental works.

Uri Sands and Toni Pierce-Sands are back with their company TU Dance and a new line-up of work at the O'Shaughnessy Auditorium in St. Paul this weekend. The program features the company premiere of Danial Shapiro & Joanie Smith's "Dance with Army Blankets," presented in its first full staging since being commissioned by Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble in 1992. Uri Sands presents two premieres: a new duet performed with Marciano Silva Dos Santos; and Sense(ability) Sketch III - Earth, the latest in his series exploring the dynamic synergy between the human senses and the elements.
Photo by Ed Bock

And, can 34 years of packed audiences be wrong? This weekend marks the opening of the Guthrie's 35th performance of A Christmas Carol.

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Non-profits on Give to the Max Day

Posted at 6:22 PM on November 19, 2009 by Marianne Combs (0 Comments)
Filed under: Funding

I spoke to the heads of a range of Minnesota non-profits today. Here's some of what they had to say about their experience with GiveMN.org and "Give to the Max Day."

Janet Bisbee, Director of Development, Resources for Child Caring, Inc:

We were very excited about it, because we had not done a lot of online giving before. We found that people took advantage of it. What was exciting was that 8 of the 20 donors we got were brand new, and one donor we hadn't heard from since 1990... It really encouraged organizations like mine to get our houses in order and get our Facebook pages spiffy and start to communicate more about ways to give online. Going forward we will definitely continue to use GiveMN.

What I really liked about the day was the sense of camaraderie with other organizations, knowing that we were all sitting at our computers watching this incredible thing unfold. I really can't think of anything else like this that has brought non-profits and donors come together this way.

About the match - I'm concerned about it, because I know some people are feeling misled by organizations. Going forward I think this is going to enforce us all to be clearer about what exactly the matches are.

Gunnar Liden, Executive Director, Youth Farm and Market Project

It went really well, we raised a good amount of money. I think also giving us the publicity and the reason to link up with our donors about what we're doing and the needs we have was a very good thing. I think it has the potential to be great but I'm hesitant to evaluate the impact of it until possibly the first of the year. For a lot of organizations this time of year is big, so if Give to the Max either makes that easier for organizations to connect with their donors or allows an easier way for new donors to come in, I think it will be even more successful.

The downside potential would be if after the 17th, the majority of the people who are doing giving in the Twin Cities are sort of done.

A one-stop-shop is great. That being said, organizations develop relationships with donors and if donor A took this chance to give $10 to 15 organizations instead of $110 to the one organization they've given to for the past ten years every year, that would be a potential downside for those organizations that have those relationships.

Louise Wolfgramm, President of Amicus

It was fantastic. Pretty effortless. We understood that we didn't know exactly how much the match would be, that it depended on the response. So our expectation wasn't great around the matching part of it. I don't think it was misleading to our donors either.

I think everybody is just overwhelmed by the generosity of Minnesotans to respond to the charities they care about.

I think one of the concerns people have when they do their giving online is that the organization is not getting the full amount, so maybe it would be better if I sent a check, but if they can do it online - people read your material, they feel motivated when they see it, and if we can make it easy enough for them to give online it's a really efficient way to do it for everybody, especially if they don't take a fee out of it. So I think we will definitely encourage people to give that way.

Susan Haas, Producing Director, Open Eye Figure Theatre

It came up really suddenly - I heard about it mid-week last week and we scrambled to get something up. I've been looking at it to see what would we have gotten anyway, because I would say that almost 40% of it was from board contributions that would normally have come at the end of the year, so I think it drove a lot of the end of the year giving into this just because of the idea of the match.

To my mind I'm just blown away by the tool that has been handed us through the site. It was really easy to use, it's a real service as far as I'm concerned. Open Eye has one administrator - me! - so I really appreciate it.

I think there was a lot of miscommunication and the fact that they did change things as they went along, and I can't even say that I really followed all of it because we're just adding this to everything else we're doing. So that was unfortunate but I sort of look at it like the way we do things here at Open Eye- it's like "well it's not perfect yet, but you've got to start somewhere."

That's it for tonight... you can read/listen to the story I did on GiveMN here. Tomorrow I'll take a look at how arts organizations fared on Give to the Max Day.

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How MPR did in "Give to the Max Day"

Posted at 8:56 AM on November 19, 2009 by Marianne Combs (1 Comments)
Filed under: Funding

During the past few days I've sensed some confusion about why I've paid so much attention to the launch of GiveMN and "Give to the Max Day." Some people have assumed that their must be a connection to the fact that I work for MPR, and my reporting reflects MPR's views on the new website and its aim to streamline charitable giving.

That's simply not the case. Here's what I wrote in a comment to yesterday's post:

For me, at the heart of my reporting and my questions, is the belief that any new endeavor that affects so many people and involves so much money must be looked at closely and thoroughly. That remains true whether it's a for-profit or a non-profit organization.

GiveMN Executive Director Dana Nelson and Razoo CEO Sebastian Traeger both said that this is a bold experiment, something which has never been attempted at this scale. If this really does mark a significant shift in how non-profits will receive their donations in the years to come, then we owe it to those non-profits and their donors to make sure it's the right tool for the job.

Yes, MPR is a non-profit that also conducts fund drives. It also participated in Give to the Max Day, and placed 8th amongst all the organizations in terms of the number of donations it received. The final numbers are out, and while I'll do more in-depth analysis of how organizations did later today, I want to at least give you MPR's numbers right away:

Number of contributions to MPR: 422
Amount contributed to MPR through GiveMN: $54,794
Amount eligible for the match*: $52,294
Total match given to MPR: $2,113.50

*The "match" from GiveMN ended up being four cents on the dollar. This is because only the first $2,500 of any one donation was counted toward the match. E.g. if you gave $3,500 to the Animal Humane Society, only $2,500 of it would be matched. At four cents on the dollar your contribution would have raised the Animal Humane Society an additional $100.

Any questions? Feel free to ask them.

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Art Hounds: Vic Chesnutt, Dash Shaw and student art

Posted at 7:09 AM on November 19, 2009 by Marianne Combs (0 Comments)
Filed under: Art Hounds

This week's art hounds sniff out a new book by a local comic book artist who will soon be animating his creations, a gut-wrenchingly honest singer-songwriter who's coming to town and some great deals on art from artists at the start of their careers.

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Katherine Werner is an amateur artist and avid arts supporter who will be at the MCAD student art sale this weekend. She loves the sale because it offers a glimpse at the great art being taught and made locally and she always finds some amazing deals. She's pictured here with a piece she purchased at the sale in the '70s and has since made several cross-country moves with her.

Tom Kaczynski is a cartoonist living and working in Minneapolis. He thinks Dash Shaw's new book The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. represents why Shaw is one of the most innovative comic book artists working today. The book includes several short comics as well as designs for Shaw's upcoming animated series for IFC.com.

Wendy Lewis is a musician and vocalist with The Bad Plus. Vic Chesnutt is one her favorite singer-songwriters who will be appearing at the Cedar Cultural Center tonight. Wendy loves the recordings of his gut-wrenchingly honest songs, but she says he surpasses them when he plays live. He'll be playing with the musicians who joined him on his most recent album, members from the bands Fugazi, Thee Silver Mt. Zion, godspeed you! black emperor and Witchies.

Composer David Evan Thomas recommends checking out the Minnesota Orchestra's performance of "future classics," works by seven emerging composers.

Barbara Sibley suggests taking in the Brass Messengers with NOMO at the Cedar Cultural Center on Friday night.

Janis Lane-Ewart is looking forward to hearing the Afro-Cuban rhythms of Dafnis Prieto Sextet Saturday at the Walker Art Center.

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GiveMN: a look at the preliminary numbers

Posted at 10:27 AM on November 18, 2009 by Marianne Combs (13 Comments)
Filed under: Funding

At 8am this morning, GiveMN's "Give to the Max Day" came to a close. The ticker on the site has now stopped surging forward.

The totals? $13,045,154 were given to 3,111 non-profits (Update: later today GiveMN revised that number to $14 million to 3,141 non-profits). A couple of pretty stunning numbers, don't you think? The three non-profits that received the most contributions (but not necessarily the most money) were Second Harvest Heartland, College of Saint Benedict and Twin Cities Public Television. They will receive awards of $5,000, $2,500 and $1,000, respectively.

I spoke with GiveMN executive director Dana Nelson shortly after 8am to get her take on how the day went. In short, Nelson says she is emotionally overwhelmed at the generosity of Minesotans. She says today will be spent verifying the totals. Tomorrow GiveMN will publish all the detailed results, i.e. how much each non-profit raised, and how much of the $500,000 match they will get (if my math is correct, non-profits will receive about 3.8 cents on the dollar).

I also asked her to respond to some questions that I have seen popping up both here on the blog and in my in-box. First question - does Nelson think people would have been as generous if they had a clearer understanding of the giving guidelines?

I think ultimately a small portion of the communications were inaccurate. We, my team, we were doing a full court press with all of our outreach partners .... Everyone in the sector was working as hard as possible to make sure that people had correct information and wouldn't have a bad taste in their mouth a day after. The whole purpose of the matching funds was to inspire giving and gosh it worked.

You say you were working hard to make sure people had the correct information, but the home page of GiveMN.org continued to say "have your donation matched" until late yesterday evening. Why?

That's a true statement - every donation that went through in the 24 hours - a portion will receive a match. Bush Foundation's Scott Cooper said it really well when he said that ironically it was Minnesota's generosity that caused the match to go down. And in the end I think inspiring a huge dollar amount in the hands of our non-profit sector is ultimately a very very successful result of the day.

Who gets access to the data of all these donors?

The privacy policy is listed on the site but it is one of utmost respect for donor information. So no one at GiveMN sees it, no one at our foundation partners, either. It's a huge key to our being successful that we do not solicit to the donors. The relationship is between the organization and the donor, and that's it.

How is Razoo (the server provider, and a for-profit entity) paid?

Razoo is paid an annual contracted amount by GiveMN. That money comes from our funding partners. Razoo does not take a commission or get paid more based on activity on the site.

The more than $13 million raised translates to more than $600,000 in transaction fees. Who is paying those fees?

Again, that money comes from our funding partners. And it should be made clear, that's $600,000 that would have come from the non-profits, but now it's covered by the GiveMN site. The money goes to Network for Good, a non-profit that handles the transactions.

What have you learned in the course of "Give to the Max Day?"

Lessons learned - gosh, I mean I knew it, but it certainly confirmed the generosity of Minnesotans. When you ask folks to step up, we sure are a caring people and it's really really wonderful.

In the coming days I'll be looking more closely at the strategies behind the real success stories and how to be an effective fundraiser going forward. Ultimately will we be effective in changing people's behavior(i.e. moving people from writing a check to going online because it makes sense for the non-profit financially and is more efficient)? Quite honestly If we're not of value to the sector we shouldn't exist, and we'll continue to make decisions based on that belief.

As for me, today I'll be talking with non-profits that participated in "Give to the Max Day," and see how it went for them. I'll be asking how this could affect end-of-year giving, or whether it will take the place of a year-end campaign for some organizations. And how helpful was GiveMN at directing new donors to non-profits?

Tomorrow, once the final numbers are published, I'll take a closer look at who benefitted the most, and how smaller organizations fared compared to the big-hitters.

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Plowing new ground: the sequel to 'King Corn'

Posted at 6:16 PM on November 17, 2009 by Euan Kerr (0 Comments)
Filed under: Film, People

A couple of years ago Curt Ellis (left) and his friend Ian Cheney decided to teach themselves about agriculture by planting, growing, harvesting, and selling an acre of corn in Iowa. They filmed it all of course and released a documentary about the experience called "King Corn."

The neophyte farmers travelled the country with their movie which explored the impact of subsidies on US farms, and on food choices for American consumers.

Now they are back with a sequel. Curt Ellis admits that's a little unusual in the documentary game.

"I think that's probably for good reason," he laughs.

Yet they have done it all the same.

"I guess from the minute we finished 'King Corn' we had a realization we hadn't told the full story. 'King Corn' is really the food story of one acre of Iowa farmland, and we spent a year growing one acre of corn and following our harvest off the farm. But by the end of the year, having learned our harvest was going to become high fructose corn syrup and corn-fed confinement-raised meat, we realized there was something else at least as valuable as the corn we had grown, and that was the land we had tended and the way we had tended it."

Ellis and Cheney went back to Iowa and explored the ecological impact they'd had on their acre of soil, through the way they had plowed it and applied various chemical herbicides and fertilizers.

"We really only spent two hours over the course of the year actually farming," he says. "And most of that time was spent spraying things, injecting anhydrous ammonia, or spraying a cocktail of herbicides on our field of corn that had been genetically modified to make it withstand a direct spray. So there was clearly a chemical process as much as a biological process going on. "

Ellis and Cheney followed the run-off from their land through the watershed and into the Mississippi. They also talked to various experts about the health impact of modern farming methods.

"The goal of the "Big River" film was to create a follow-up to "King Corn" that would introduce people to these consequences that are hidden behind our everyday meals," Ellis says. He talks about the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the flow of fertilizers in the run-off from Midwestern farms, and about reports of cancer clusters in some farm communities.

Ellis will bring both films to a screening at the Riverview Theater in Minneapolis on Wednesday. Several local organizations are sponsoring the show, which will include a panel discussion of some of the issues raised.

He says at other similar events there have been a number of farmers in the audience and there has been a great discussion. He expects that to be the case in Minneapolis too.

"It's not always friendly," he says. "But I've been pretty amazed by how friendly it is. Both "King Corn" and "Big River" are pretty moderate films. We are not taking a finger-wagging approach to these problems. You know we are really all in this together. The reality is our food system is in trouble right now, and the only people who can fix that are all of us coming together."

"Big River" is just 30 minutes long and Ellis hopes it will have use as an educational tool in schools and for environmental advocacy groups.

Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis look to the future in "Big River" (Image courtesy WickedDelicate Films)

Ellis laughs when asked if there will be a King Corn III, but then mentions the next big project will be called "Truck Farm" which is about how the two film makers took the rust 1986 Dodge pick-up truck which appeared in "King Corn" and put a roof on it so they could grow vegetables. In time they turned it into a community supported agriculture subscription farm serving 20 people. This maybe the only farm which can actually drive around town.

"It started just because Ian and I moved to Brooklyn after we finished our film projects and we wanted to grow food, but we didn't have any land, so we turned to the only open space we knew of which was the bed of the old pick-up truck."

You can see episodes from the project at WickedDelicate films. Ellis sees it as a fun way to spur discussions of the very real problem of so-called 'food deserts,' areas in cities where healthy food is hard to find.

"We had a neighborhood kid who kept eating the parsley down to a stump," Ellis says. "So that was our only pest problem."

The hour-long version of "Truck Farm" will probably premier next spring. They are also working on a film about light pollution from urban areas.

You can hear our conversation here: Listen

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GiveMN: More questions, more answers

Posted at 4:35 PM on November 17, 2009 by Marianne Combs (1 Comments)
Filed under: Funding

Earlier this afternoon I took a look at the top ten ranking for non-profits in GiveMN's "Give to the Max Day." 1st place: Second Harvest Heartland. 2nd place: Animal Humane Society. 3rd place: Desiring God Ministries.

Now the first two I'd heard of, but the third didn't ring a bell. My colleague Bob Collins brought me up to speed. It turns out the man at the pulpit of Desiring God Ministries, John Piper, is pretty adamant when it comes to homosexuality. Here's an excerpt from one of his sermons:

We want to be a church where homosexual people can either overcome their sexual disorder, or find the faith and courage and help and love and power to live a triumphant, joyful, celibate life with the disorder.

My immediate reaction was "do Minnesota foundations realize they are supporting this sort of worldview with the GiveMN site? And that this organization may end up winning an extra $1,000 for generating so many donations today?"

I called the Bush Foundation to find out its stance, and was connected with C. Scott Cooper, Director of Engagement and Communications. He said situations like this are bound to come up.

This is democracy in action - it's people deciding for themselves where to put their dollars and our focus has really been on making sure that it's as easy as possible for people to make their contributions when non-profits are providing all sorts of critical services in the community and are suffering because of the economy.

Certainly there are non-profits that do all kinds of different things, some of which we may love or we may hate, but the idea behind GiveMN is to make it as easy as possible for people to give and have their dollars go farther.

Fair enough - so some people may give to Desiring God Ministries, while others may give to Planned Parenthood.

Meanwhile, as I write this, GiveMN's total donations ticker registers $8,583,342. Only the non-profits themselves know how much they've made today - that information is not readily available to other users. So I can't tell you who's making the most off of this.

However I can calculate that non-profits stand to gain less than six cents on the dollar in todays "match." I asked Cooper about the confusion surrounding the match, and how some donors, and some arts organizations were expecting at least a 50 cent match on the dollar for every donation made. Cooper says it's unfortunate that some people didn't get the message clearly.

The initial plan had been to give away this five hundred thousand dollars in matching money to the first million dollars in contributions during the day. But then some concerns were raised about the volume of traffic that would happen at 8 oclock in the morning and so the decision was made to spread the money throughout the day and the amount of the match would depend on the amount of contributions made in the course of the day.

Cooper says the irony is that Minnesota's generosity is what's caused the value of the matching funds to go down.

Because it's going so well, a huge amount has been contributed - it is going to be a smaller amount per contribution. It's actually a great problem to have. When you think about it, the combination of these things, the covering of the transaction costs, and the partial match means instead of making a contribution and having 95 cents of your dollar get to the organization, this organization is getting maybe 1.08 for every dollar you give, which seems like a good thing and a good reason to give today.

"Give to the Max Day" ends at 8am tomorrow morning.

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GiveMN raises over $5.5 million

Posted at 1:39 PM on November 17, 2009 by Marianne Combs (14 Comments)
Filed under: Funding

As I write this, the ticker at GiveMN states $5,532,363 has been give since 8am to 2,206 Minnesota non-profits. Now that's a great day by any standards, so congratulations the folks at GiveMN, and their supporters.

However I'm a little concerned that people still think that if they give money to a non-profit on the GiveMN site today, their donation will be "matched" - i.e. a $25 pledge will earn the non-profit $50. This is simply not the case.

As I wrote yesterday, a group of foundations gave GiveMN $500,000 in to use as "matching funds" to inspire people's generosity. That set amount is being spread out over all the donations made today.

So as of 1:30pm, that $500,000 equals approximately ten cents on the dollar. As the number of donations accumulate, that ratio will drop further. Yet the main page on GiveMN continues to state that "all donations will be matched!"

You have to scroll down and look at the detailed writing to find these words:

Every donation made on Give to the Max Day will receive a portion of a $500,000 match. The exact amount matched per dollar donated will be determined after Give to the Max Day concludes, and the $500,000 in matching funds will be divided by the total donation amount raised over the 24-hour period.

It should also be noted that while Executive Director Dana Nelson says she hopes GiveMN will always be free to participating non-profits, that depends entirely on funding. In addition to relying on its funding partners, GiveMN is soliciting donations today right along with all the other non-profits.

A couple of people have asked me "so does this mean that foundations are paying for credit card transactions with money that would have gone directly to non-profits?" I put the question to Dana Nelson. Her response? Minnesota foundations view GiveMN as a lucrative investment that will inspire more people to give more generously to more non-profits. They're thinking of it as seed money, and as such, money well spent.

Nelson says she's overwhelmed by the response that's come in so far today. Her hope is that word continues to spread about the generosity of Minnesotans, and even more are inspired to join in.

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