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Local Arts Groups Score Funding Bonanza Jonathon Hollander was nervous as he opened his mailbox one Saturday last month. For weeks he had been anticipating the envelope from the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs that would tell him how much funding his Battery Dance Company would receive in the coming year. “It was a tense time for us,” Hollander said. “We had a huge gap in the budget and a big festival coming up.” To Hollander’s surprise—and great relief—the envelope contained very good news: His dance company had been awarded $35,000— seven times what it received from the city last year. “It was a great moment,” Hollander said. “I called our managing director on her vacation just to tell her the news.” The Battery Dance Company was only one of many Downtown arts organizations receiving good news recently from the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) this summer. In past years, arts groups relied on City Council representatives for funding through individual line-items in the budget. This year the department did away with that often politicized process, funding city-owned cultural institutions with $119.7 million and channeling all other arts funding through peer-reviewed grants from a $30 million Cultural Development Fund. The change has meant big gains for Lower Manhattan arts groups, many of which have seen their grants from the city increase by seven- or eight-fold. Downtown Community Television, a 35-year-old video production house, training center and community media group, received $35,000 from the city, more than double what it received the previous year. “Percentage-wise it’s not that big because we run a budget of $2.8 million,” said Sandy Spencer, DCTV’s managing director, “but for a non-profit, every bit helps.” For smaller organizations, the extra aid from the city is especially valuable. Mano a Mano, a two-year-old Mexican arts and cultural organization on Fulton Street, relies primarily on state and city grants to survive. It saw a fourfold increase in its city funding this year, said Emily Socolov, the group’s executive director. “That extra money is going to allow us to expand beyond organizing our annual cultural events to move into the schools,” Socolov said. “We’re creating resources that public school teachers can use to introduce their students to Mexican art and culture.” Hollander said the extra revenue will help cover the costs of his company’s student productions and annual seven-day Downtown Dance Festival, which features 19 dance companies. “These are programs that have literally run us into debt in the past,” Hollander said. “Having the money up front is going to make an enormous difference. In the past, we’d often wait until March for the city funding for an event that we had already put on in August. It creates a level of security that arts groups rarely have.” Jim Staley, the director of Roulette, a venue for experimental music, said his organization is also expanding its offerings in the wake of a big increase in Department of Cultural Affairs funding. Roulette received $80,000 from the city this year, eight times the size of its previous grant. The Flea Theater on White Street in Tribeca received seven times its usual funding from the city, said producing director Carol Ostrow. “Before this year, the support from the DCA had been nominal,” Ostrow said. “That’s not to say we weren’t grateful—we listed them first in our programs—but it was kind of like the Queen’s seal of approval, just a symbolic proof that we were official and legitimate. Now they’re giving us so much money that we actually are legitimate!”
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