We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful O. Victoria Lakes-Battle. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with O. Victoria below.
O. Victoria , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
IFF agreeing to administer Chicago’s Cultural Treasures (ChiTreasures), while really exciting, was also a big risk as it’s a departure from what we have historically been a part of. IFF plays many roles in community development, but grantmaker was not one of them.
IFF was founded 35 years ago to dismantle the barriers around accessing capital that Illinois nonprofits faced from financial institutions. We do not shy away from a risk, especially when it will benefit communities that have historically had less access to resources. However, administering an initiative like ChiTreasures and convening philanthropic resources for the purpose of shifting funding decision-making and distribution powers from funders to the community was very new and very risky.
Born out of the Ford Foundation’s America’s Cultural Treasures, ChiTreasures is a four-year initiative focused on strengthening, growing, and preserving Chicago organizations whose mission is to enable the creation, preservation, and dissemination of art stemming from BIPOC traditions, leadership, and culture. Through a combination of critical general operating support and technical assistance, the goal is to bolster the long-term financial resilience and sustainability of these organizations. In 2020, six Chicago funders, some of whom IFF had never met before, came together to infuse capital into a sector that had been neglected and partnered with IFF to help lead the way.
As administrator, IFF was tasked with designing the grant program, developing an open nomination process to select the participatory grant committee, and facilitating the grant committee in developing decision-making criteria to review the proposals and ultimately make the funding recommendations for this long overdue investment in Chicago’s BIPOC cultural infrastructure. Through this process, we found that there were no hidden treasures in Chicago, they had been buried by years of lack of investment. Over 140 letters of intent were received and 40 extraordinary Black, Latine, Asian, and Indigenous arts organizations were chosen to receive a total of $14.4 million in multi-year unrestricted grants along with capacity building and technical assistance supports that were co-designed and tailored to meet the needs of the organizations.
One of the biggest takeaways is that “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” This was not a standard grantmaking initiative. This was a race equity initiative for the arts and culture sector. This was new for IFF, it was new for the funding collective, it was new for Chicago. However, there was no other option but to take it on as the collective impact of this initiative will be the ongoing disruption of historical trends in funding for BIPOC-led and -focused cultural organizations.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Grounded in equity and deep sector expertise, IFF is a nonprofit community development financial institution (CDFI) that champions nonprofits to shape more equitable and vibrant communities through community-centered lending, development, and real estate consulting. We believe that nonprofits are the strongest agents of change for driving positive social impact in communities and so we focus our lending, real estate, and programmatic offerings specifically on nonprofits and the communities they serve.
Chicago’s Cultural Treasures is one of the initiatives that we administer. It provided a long overdue investment in Chicago’s BIPOC cultural infrastructure by infusing a huge amount of capital – a total of $14.4 million – into a sector that has been neglected. With awards ranging from $140,000 to $575,000 and access to technical assistance workshops co-created with the arts community to ensure it meets their needs, being named a Chicago’s Cultural Treasure not only made a significant impact on organizations’ sustainability, but it also gave broad recognition to the types of cultural treasures that represent a wide array of arts and culture focus, many not considered to be classic forms and that have historically been passed over for traditional forms of grant support.
While there are so many stories to tell about the incredible grantees, and I encourage you to follow them at chicagosculturaltreasures.org, two examples of ChiTreasures supporting the grantees include Red Clay Dance Company and Asian Improv Arts. Red Clay Dance Company has participated in two technical assistance programs – one that has helped grow their board and another that will provide them with five short video clips to help tell the organization’s story as they celebrate their 15th anniversary. Asian Improv Arts immediately jumped on the opportunity to work with IFF’s Real Estate Solutions team on a facility feasibility study to support their purchasing a space of their own. They celebrated the grand opening earlier this year. Having technical assistance workshops that are co-created with the community ensures that they are valuable to those taking part.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
ChiTreasures is an initiative created to interrupt years of inequitable arts philanthropy and thus required a lot of pivots and checking of our assumptions. In the face of a very real need in the sector caused by the COVID-19 crisis, we made the hard decision to not issue emergency grants through ChiTreasures and to attempt to interrupt the urgency and crisis mentality by leading with the patience and intentionality needed to build a truly equitable process that would address the long-term sustainability of BIPOC arts organizations. A hastily, more easily implemented program also would have relied on offering opportunities to organizations we knew, those already receiving attention from arts funders. But this was an equity-initiative, and to be equity-centered, we had to question the old ways of doing things and ask who would be harmed if that system was maintained – and the answer was… we didn’t know because we didn’t know who we were missing.
To interrupt this, we paused to ask BIPOC-identifying arts groups to complete a Letter of Intent (LOI) to see who they were and how they might thrive if properly resourced. We had to go beyond the “usual suspects” that often populate funder networks, so we pushed the opportunity out through targeted social media advertising and encouraged word-of-mouth, leveraging communications strategies that are often robust in communities of color and communities often cut off from more traditional and formal networks.
Following the LOI process, ChiTreasures launched its first grants program, which operated through a participatory and community-based process. Grant Committee members – comprised of artists, art leaders, and community members who were highly engaged in the arts sector – were selected through an open nomination process. They were tasked with designing the funding criteria, vetting the applicants, and determining the grant amounts. IFF was deeply engaged with the Committee as an organizer and facilitator, but the Committee was given near total control over the process. This approach ceded power to the communities, but it also meant we didn’t have a roadmap of where we were headed because we were creating it in real-time.
These intentional decisions, however, all slowed down the process and, in the end, grants were made in July 2021 instead of what might have been February 2021. That delay matters for groups experiencing serious financial uncertainty, which was only exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. We are hopeful, though, that the investment of time led to a greater impact than a “crisis response” and returned a greater opportunity to get funds more deeply into communities and to co-create a suite of organizational supports that will help to ensure the long-term strength and financial sustainability of these organizations. And that the discomfort of the ambiguity led to new and different outcomes, which were needed. An important outcome being that success was not defined for these organizations, it is being defined by these organizations.
An equity initiative rooted in interrupting “business as usual” required us to show up in different ways, challenge assumptions, and be candid about what we didn’t know. Ultimately that has led to some powerful outcomes, opened new dialogues, and – most importantly – created space for 40 amazing organizations to begin developing new visions for what’s possible when properly resourced.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
IFF is an explorer and learning organization. With a strong grounding in mission, we have the critical resources and trusted expertise to explore and innovate around new opportunities and new directions for nonprofits and other stakeholders in the community development ecosystem.
For 35 years, we have been working at the intersection of facilities and finance to help nonprofits serving a variety of sectors increase their financial stability and programmatic offerings and achieve their missions. We do that by bringing together a powerful combination of financial solutions, real estate and development expertise, sector knowledge, and research and evaluation capacity to accelerate positive social impact and systems change.
IFF partners with nonprofits and their communities, getting ideas off the whiteboard and into activation by earning trust and building a mutual understanding of what is needed and wanted. We build community to help build places and spaces that put ideas, hopes, and dreams into service.
This has made us a trusted partner in the communities we serve and when a unique opportunity, like ChiTreasures, comes along it is the reason why we are called upon. As explorers, we are up for the challenge in service of our communities.
Contact Info:
- Website: chicagosculturaltreasures.org
- Twitter: twitter.com/iffcdfi