Woodruff Arts Center’s windfall

A $38 million-dollar seed grant still needs Atlanta to water it

The eye-popping $38 million grant recently won by the Woodruff Arts Center does not mean that Atlanta should just kick back and watch them spend the dough on glorious improvements. Huge as it is, the grant is just seed money for a major fundraising campaign launching early next year. The WAC’s message: It’s time for donors to get involved, not to get comfy.

And while the massive grant has a couple of well-publicized items set in stone — earmarks for renovating the Alliance Theatre and boosting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s musician head-count — the rest is extremely flexible. Grant money can be used to match donations to any existing program at the WAC’s various divisions: the Alliance, the ASO, the High Museum of Art, and the educational program Arts for Learning.

No program is off the table for funding from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation grant, says WAC spokesman Randy Donaldson.

“It’s arts and education. It’s people. It’s positions and programs,” he says. And donors will have major influence in where the money goes.

Of course, the WAC has its own wish list that was an official part of the grant application. That application began more than two years ago as a request for Alliance renovation funds, but expanded into support for various programs in collaborative talks with the foundation, Donaldson says.

But, Donaldson adds, the WAC isn’t publicizing its wish list beyond a few general suggestions. “That’s where we get a little fuzzier, intentionally,” he says.

The reason? Arts donation psychology. WAC doesn’t want to discourage donations to some program they don’t happen to mention — or to make donors think that the foundation grant has already covered their wish list.

In fact, Donaldson says, there are internal differences of opinion as to whether announcing such a huge grant makes it easier or harder to raise additional funds. And, he adds, there’s the question of how “you maintain annual giving in addition to a new fundraising campaign.” That’s because the WAC needs $30 million in donations, year in and year out, to float its current budget.

The $38 million grant helps everything, but foots the total bill for almost nothing. Most of it is matching funds for further donations. And it supports only existing programs. The long-term goal is freeing up room in the budget for new programming.

An $11.5 million chunk of the grant is dedicated to the Alliance renovation, and the WAC board has pledged another $4 million. While that’s a “great start,” Donaldson says, there’s “a good bit of fundraising to do yet” to design and carry out the work. Right now, it’s just conceptual drawings and a goal of having the work done by 2018.

Another $25 million of the grant is matching endowment funds for programming. Of that, $8 million is earmarked for boosting the ASO membership as required by the new musicians’ union contract. A previous 11-member cut in membership was a major issue in this year’s brutal WAC-ASO labor dispute that led to the cancellation of several concerts early in the symphony’s current season.

The ASO lockout was so ugly, it jeopardized the Woodruff Foundation grant application. Foundation President P. Russell Hardin “made clear none of this would have been granted if the musicians and the WAC had not come to an agreement” on ASO’s future, Donaldon says.

That’s why building ASO membership is an earmark. But with endowed ASO chairs costing $2 million to $2.5 million each, that’s only a start. Donations to endow more chairs is one wish-list item WAC mentions in a press release.

Other possibilities WAC mentions: the High’s “community engagement programs”; the Alliance’s Graduate Playwriting Competition; and the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra. But again, donors are free to set their own priorities with the foundation grant providing matching funds.

We’ll soon see WAC’s exact strategy for tapping donors and leveraging the foundation grant when it launches its fundraising campaign sometime after the first of the year. Stay tuned.