The Impact and Equity Funder: Gary Steuer
“FUNDERS are so immersed in solving a problem, with all good intent, that we fail to invest in policy, advocacy and imagining a future where these problems have been solved.”
5 QUESTIONS WITH Gary Steuer
CEO & President, Bonfils-Stanton Foundation
Denver, CO
Gary Steuer joined the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation as President and CEO in 2013. Since that time, he has led the foundation’s transformational efforts to deepen its investments in arts, culture and leadership, as well as a heightened focus on bringing an equity lens to everything the foundation does. This has led to a dramatic increase in the foundation’s investment in communities of color and other historically marginalized communities, as well as a deepening utilization of impact investing to ensure the foundation’s assets are deployed in a mission-aligned way.
Prior to joining BSF, Gary served as the Chief Cultural Officer and Director of the Office of Arts, Culture & the Creative Economy for the City of Philadelphia. He also served as Vice President of Private-Sector Affairs and Executive Director, Arts & Business Council for Americans for the Arts in New York. Gary also spent 12 years as President and CEO and Director of New York Programs for Arts and Business Council Inc. in New York, prior to its merger with Americans for the Arts.
Before his stint at the Arts and Business Council, Gary spent significant time in the theatre and cultural industry holding Director positions at National Actors Theatre, New York State Council on the Arts and Vineyard Theatre. He holds a Bachelors of Arts from New York University, where he also completed studies for a Masters of Arts in Performing Arts Management, as well as studying at the Stern School of Business.
Gary has been a regular writer and speaker on topics such as cultural policy, philanthropy, creative economy, arts management, equity and impact investing. He has served on many local and national boards, including Grantmakers in the Arts, Philanthropy Colorado (which he chaired), Clyfford Still Museum, Alliance for Nonprofit Management, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Gary grew up in New York City, going to public School, including Music & Art High School which is now part of the LaGuardia High School for the Arts. He played basketball, was an avid cyclist, and deeply absorbed the diversity and cultural riches of New York. After growing up as one of five sons, he has been delighted to be the proud father of three daughters, as well as grandfather to three girls.
1. Under your leadership, Bonfils-Stanton Foundation has dramatically elevated its commitment to applying an equity lens to all its operations, grantmaking and investments. You spent 2020-2021 engaged in a thorough racial equity assessment, training and planning process (all while continuing your grantmaking work!). Could you summarize a key takeaway from this assessment and planning process?
Regarding the fact that we maintained “business as usual” while going through this process - I cannot imagine doing it any other way, so I do not think that should be considered laudable. I think it is terrible philanthropic practice to say to your community “Oh, sorry, we are going to pause grantmaking for a year or two while we do planning.” Nonprofits do not have the luxury of doing that and neither should funders.
BEFORE engaging in strategic planning work we (board and staff) engaged in a year-long deep process around racial equity (as well as other elements of equity, but centering race, as it is an overlay across all other types of historically marginalized identities) with an outside firm. This included: review of all systems and materials - HR, grantmaking, mission/vision/values language, website, business practices - to make recommendations of how to do everything we do in a more equitable way; as well as a program of staff and board training, retreats and readings. This resulted in a comprehensive racial equity plan that became the grounding of a strategic planning process - our North Star, if you will. I think this made for a much more efficient and effective strategic planning process, though it did add some time and expense.
2. I say that we live in the era of impact: grantmakers and recipients alike are re-examining traditional organizational and funding practices, determining what could be a more relevant, effective, equitable and democratic framework for the work. How did you center impact in your assessment and planning process?
A cornerstone of our strategic framework, which is already well underway, is to ultimately align as close to 100% as possible of our investments towards impact. This includes allocating a portion of our endowment to be available for Program Related Investments (PRI’s) and Mission Related Investments (MRI’s) as well as looking at our entire endowment through a lens of values alignment and socially responsible investing, including ESG screening, screening out potentially harmful investments and looking for opportunities to invest in BIPOC and women-owned firms that to date have been largely underrepresented in finance. These investments cover a continuum, from PRI’s where mission alignment is strong but we accept modest returns and return of capital, to MRIs where there may be some concessionary returns but still strong mission alignment, to investments where expectations are market rate, but we accept higher risk in return for strong alignment with our mission and values. So assessment must then be a blend of financial and mission/programmatic criteria, matched to the objectives of each investment.
On the programmatic/grantmaking side, measuring impact is more challenging and something that for us is an evolving process. If you are engaging in trust-based philanthropy, if you are doing more general operating support grants, being able to point to specific outcomes can be difficult and more nuanced. Also, if you are a smaller funder (like us) your capacity to make really big game-changing bets is more limited. And, of course, you have environmental factors that are beyond your control. The COVID impact is a great example of that. If we made (as we did) a significant investment in COVID relief for arts and culture, but at the same the federal government was making significant investments, and organizations were taking significant organizational and artistic actions to respond, survive and serve the community, what was the impact of our investments? Can we take credit for groups weathering the storm?
I think the answer is in measuring different things - do BIPOC and other historically marginalized led and serving arts groups in our community feel more “seen”, trusted and respected by our foundation. Did our investment in them help leverage other funding? Since we are making a portfolio of systemic investments, can we also measure positive systems change? Are these groups healthier financially and artistically? Are so-called Eurocentric groups, which we also support, focussed more on being more equitable in how they serve the community? Did we have an impact on any behavioral shifts? Can we do a better job capturing anecdotal evidence - telling the stories of our grant partners - and by communicating those stories and our values, leverage our investments into greater support from other funders?
3. Through your grantmaking, programmatic activity, and community engagement, the foundation hopes to inspire and cultivate a cultural sector that also embraces equity in their work. (I would argue that equity is a key part of organizational wellness, required for health, sustainability, and longevity.) How do you see equity relating to organizational wellness?
In the business and investment world, we have learned that diverse senior leadership actually drives better performance. You have a team that better understands different cultures, different customers and markets. As a result they can develop products and services that a homogenous White male, non-disabled team could not even think of. A diverse team can also help avoid making disastrous actions that could offend a market segment or even an entire country.
I think the same thing is true in the nonprofit cultural sector, and it is a bit of a domino effect where a holistic approach is important. A symphony orchestra that does not create a diverse staff team and inclusive culture will find itself less successful at attracting younger more diverse audiences and musicians. An orchestra that does this work successfully is healthier from an organizational culture perspective and also financially.
I think the Colorado Symphony has been an example of this. In recent years their structure has been one of teamwork between musicians and management, they were a founder of the Alliance for Music Education Equity (which Bonfils has funded since its inception) working to develop systemic solutions to engaging more young people from diverse backgrounds in music education, especially in classical music which has been especially inequitable. They created their Imagination Artist program where three different artists have been in residence, including RZA of Wu-Tang Clan, Nathaniel Raitliff, and Mary Mitchell Campbell, who specializes in the American Songbook and Broadway canon. They have truly embraced partnering with a diverse array of artists, both in their regular season and art Red Rocks in the summer - Hip Hop, Folk, Pop, Reggae, World Music. I think as a result of this they are better positioned to weather the trends of aging audiences, declining subscription sales, declining perception of community relevancy, as well as community support, that many orchestras are facing. It does not mean they are “out of the woods” - there is still much work to be done - but to your original question, I think they are healthier as an enterprise than they would otherwise be.
4. The sector desperately needs funding for transition & reinvention to help solve the myriad of issues its facing, particularly to allow organizations to experiment with new models of operating. How could funders best serve as catalyst, creating and funding programs to help with this transition?
Performing arts groups needing to reinvent their entire business models will take time and money. Can we create and fund programs to help with this transition? Do we also need to redirect funding to groups successfully making this transition and wind down support of groups not making the transition? In other words is there a “tough love” triage needed to make room for new artists and new orgs, even new models, which since it is sort of a zero sum game, may need to be at the expense of “legacy” groups? I don’t have all the answers but these are the difficult questions we need to be asking and developing answers to. I would also argue that even though much attention has been directed to performing arts challenges, visual arts groups have not been immune to these transitions in consumer behavior, demographics, etc.
Another aspect of this “nonprofit model” issue is the need for foundations (and other types of funders) to change their rules and systems to embrace other modes of making and delivering art. In Denver, for example, we have the wonderful asset of the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, a taxpayer supported regional funding mechanism. Yet it cannot consider for eligibility fiscally sponsored arts organizations. There was a similar situation in Philadelphia where the most prominent local arts funders only funded groups that had their own 501c3. So on the one hand, evolving best practices say not every arts group needs to be a 501c3 - we have many fiscal sponsors that can handle their financial operations, allowing the group to focus on their art, not on board management, or bookkeeping. But our systems force groups to become 501c3s to become eligible for key sources of support. In addition, the philanthropic sector has not developed effective ways to support for-profit creative enterprises. There is an equity overlay to this as BIPOC creatives, especially from refugee and immigrant communities, increasingly look to express their creativity and culture in entrepreneurial ways, not by forming nonprofit 501c3 arts groups. This is why impact investing targeting creative enterprises is so important - why the work of Upstart Col-Lab is so needed, and why investing in the capacity of local CDFIs to provide loan capital to creative enterprises is also vital.
5. You’re an advocate for foundations directing more resources and focus on policy and advocacy. Tell me more about why you see this as essential, especially in the context of creating deeper relevance for the arts among rising generations?
Private foundations have historically shied away from both doing their own advocacy as well as supporting groups directly engaging in policy and advocacy. I think that has been especially the case in the cultural space. There is the often told story of people rescuing babies floating downstream in a river, a continual flow that could go on forever. But the problem will never be solved unless someone travels upstream to discover how the babies are getting into the stream and taking action to stop it.
Trista Harris, the philanthropic futurist, also talks about the challenge of the nonprofit sector, including funders, being too much “in love with the problem.” We are so immersed in solving a problem, with all good intent (homelessness, poverty, delivering more great relevant art) that we fail to invest in policy, advocacy and imagining a future where these problems have been solved, or at least tackled more impactfully. So we get stuck on a hamster wheel of never ending service without ever “going upstream.”
In the case of Bonfils, our new strategic framework explicitly addresses advocacy, policy, and communications/storytelling (they are interrelated) as core programmatic functions. We created a new Director of Communications position. We fund our local arts advocacy organization, CBCA. We are creating a major component of our web site to use narrative and digital media to better tell the story of why an equitable vibrant cultural sector is crucial to all aspects of our civic life, and then delivering these messages to other philanthropic, business, government and individual decision makers. We are actively tracking policy actions that might affect the creative sector and using our voice not just our dollars to try and have an influence. If, for example, we do not have affordable housing for young, emerging artists and culture workers, then our cultural sector will become stagnant and will not thrive. The same is true for cultural enterprise space for new, emerging cultural enterprises, as well as well-established groups that may be pushed out by rising rents. So if we care about our cultural sector, we must become active in addressing the middle-income workforce housing crisis. We must be thinking about how rising rents as well as rising property taxes are affecting the cultural sector. And our equity values make this work especially important in BIPOC communities that tend to be acutely impacted by gentrification and displacement.
The Path Forward interview series, an initiative of MCW Projects LLC, investigates how industry leaders are re-envisioning the future.