I couldn’t help thinking about work as I leafed through the program at a Minnesota Orchestra concert last night.
MCF members’ logos were prominently displayed throughout . . . General Mills, Target, 3M, United Health, U.S. Bancorp, Wells Fargo and more. Some of these organizations rank at the top for arts funding in Minnesota.
But they also rank high in another subject area on which we report in our annual Giving in Minnesota research: Education. For instance, Target and General Mills top the list of education funders in Minnesota.
So, are these discrete funding areas for these corporations, or do arts and education grantmaking intersect?
To find the answer I only needed to turn back a few pages in the program to a story on “Music in our Schools.” The Minnesota Orchestra is connecting with students in every school in Minneapolis and St. Paul as part of “UPbeat Metro” and “Kinder Konzerts on the Road.” Here’s what Aura Wharton-Beck, principal at Jenny Lind Elementary in North Minneapolis, has to say about the music education programs:
“This was a great example of integrating the arts into the curriculum, with the students thoroughly enjoying hands-on learning about music theory in the Sound Factory and interactions with ‘real live’ musicians. Our Jenny Lind students also learned that practice and perseverance are essential elements in the development of musicians. This early involvement opens new doors for students.”
Hmmmm. In the field of philanthropy, there’s great debate about whether “enough” (how does one define that?) grant funds benefit our diverse minority communities. Funding of major arts institutions is often held up as an example of the “elite funding the elite.” Here, though, is a specific example of the complexity of the “who benefits” question: More than 90% of the students at Jenny Lind school are children of color, and nearly that many are eligible for free and reduced lunches (an indicator of poverty). So, in what light should one view grantmaking to the Minnesota Orchestra?
The answer is not easy. And it illustrates the challenges of producing accurate, complete grantmaking research. Who benefits is often not “either/or.” It’s “both/and.” So we need to capture those exacting beneficiary details in order to understand the current grantmaking landscape . . . and begin to map out future directions and goals.
Join the Conversation: MCF is focused this year on improving collection of grants data. At your nonprofit, do you track demographic data about those you serve and report it back to your corporate and foundation supporters? At your foundation, do you ask nonprofits to report information about the constituencies they serve?
– Wendy Wehr, MCF V.P. of Communications and Information Services
This blog post does a good job of illustrating the complexity of telling the whole story of philanthropy’s impact with current data gathering methods. Great example, Wendy! It is in both the foundation’s and fund recipients’ interests to understand why it is important to gather and share how, who and where grant dollars help.