Innovation Through Philanthropy - Silicon Valley Community ...

Finding Value in the Arts
Donors Step Up for Local Culture
Jaci Hall knows the joy of playing her flute for an
audience. She saw the way her son’s world changed
at age 7 when he first played the bagpipes; now
it’s his career. And she helped her mother become an
accomplished weaver at age 50.
The San José resident and retired teacher also knows
joy is not enough to sustain the arts. That is why she
has volunteered for local arts organizations, established
a donor advised fund in her mother’s honor at Silicon
Valley Community Foundation to support elementary
school arts programs and, most recently, joined likeminded
individuals in the donor circle for the arts.
The donor circle is funded by those individuals,
as well as the James Irvine Foundation, the National
Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the community
foundation. In its first round of grants, it issued $55,000
to 16 organizations and artists as diverse as the people
of San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, mixing hip-hop
and quilting, exercise and experimental dance, jazz
and ancient music. The circle of 10 donors plans to
publish guidelines for a second round of funding
in summer 2009.
Hall speaks about creative value, but she realizes
bottom-line-oriented people want a different kind of
value in difficult economic times. “We say arts foster
beauty, creativity, vitality,” Hall says, “but what is now
being proven is that the arts create jobs and contribute
significantly to the community and the economy. Arts
are good business.”
Hall points to a 2007 study by Americans for the
Arts stating that the national nonprofit arts-andculture
industry generated $166.2 billion in economic
activity in a year and supported 5.7 million full-time
jobs. But numbers for artists themselves are not so
positive now. An NEA study published in March
places their unemployment rate at twice that of
other professional workers. The donor circle aims
to provide help in a time when the arts are often
seen as a luxury, says participant Phil Kurjan, a
Distinguished Engineer at Applied Materials and a
community foundation fund advisor.
“The place where this donor circle really shines is
in grants to small groups that may not have access to
big donors and other forms of funding,” says Kurjan,
of Sunnyvale.
The circle also involves donors directly with the
artists and the grantmaking process, says Noel
Butler, an avid reader, dancer and former database
engineer from Los Gatos. Butler shares a love of
the arts with her 13-year-old son, William, both as
patrons and participants. And through the circle,
Kurjan and Butler learned more about artists the
couple already admired and gained admiration for
others they didn’t know before, including a group
dedicated to preserving China’s oldest stringed
instrument, the guqin.
People too often fail to recognize that great music,
dance, theater and other arts live outside the biggest
cities, Butler says. “We have genius right in our
backyard. We just need to find what’s
out there and support it.”
—Chris Blose one
Donors interested in participating
should contact Jennifer Kane at
jbkane@siliconvalleycf.org
or 650.450.5501.
Mark L. Hannah
www.siliconvalleycf.org