Agency Testifies in Support of Governor’s H. 2 Spending Plan – Mass Cultural Council

Mass Cultural Council Testimony
Joint Committee on Ways & Means – FY25 H. 2 Budget
Friday, March 8, 2024 | Gloucester City Hall

Presented by Deputy Executive Director David T. Slatery and Senior Director of Public Affairs Director Bethann Steiner

Good afternoon to the Chairs, and through you to the Members. It is a pleasure to be with you this afternoon in Gloucester.

For the record, my name is David Slatery, I am the Deputy Executive Director of the Mass Cultural Council. With me is our Senior Director of Public Affairs, Bethann Steiner.

We are here on behalf of the Agency’s governing Council, staff, and of course Executive Director Michael J. Bobbitt. Unfortunately, Michael could not join us this afternoon as he is in western Massachusetts hosting our regional arts funding colleague, Harold Steward, the new Executive Director of NEFA (the New England Foundation for the Arts) for a long-planned “get to know you” tour of the creative and cultural sector. Please know Michael sends his best regards and is certainly available if you have any follow-up questions for him directly.

The Healey-Driscoll Administration’s FY25 House 2 budget recommends $25.5 million for Mass Cultural Council. This figure is a modest 2.2% increase on our current $25 million operating budget. We view this as a maintenance budget, and, if enacted, we expect to be able to use this appropriation to maintain our current programmatic investments in the coming fiscal year.

The Mass Cultural Council both deeply appreciates the Administration’s recommendation and understands the challenging economic realities the Committee must contend with as it develops a FY25 budget.  As such, we are here today to urge you to embrace this figure as you craft your spending plans.

$25.5 million will allow Mass Cultural Council to continue making equitable investments to support the creative and cultural sector. Specifically, we envision a FY25 spending plan that supports grant making with awards for Massachusetts artists, culture bearers, creative individuals, cultural organizations, youth arts and education programming, and arts and culture events and projects in every community.

I wish to pause and reflect that the Mass Cultural Council is truly proud to be one of the few state agencies that makes grants in every city and town every year. Through these investments we are able to fulfill our mission, which is to bolster the creative and cultural sector in every community of the Commonwealth.

Mass Cultural Council believes that arts and culture are essential – not only for economic prosperity, but for innovation, creative problem solving, and good health. We know the sector is vibrant and strong and key to a strong state economy in Massachusetts. And, even though our position as an independent state agency means we are not a part of the Healey-Driscoll Executive Branch, we are thrilled that just a week ago today, the Governor released her Mass Leads economic development bill and companion Executive Orders, both of which embrace arts and culture as a valuable and vibrant economic sector and a priority for the Commonwealth. Mass Cultural Council truly appreciates this recognition and support, as do our stakeholders.

We define our stakeholders as not just our direct grant recipients, or solely artists and cultural organizations working in the creative and cultural sector, but also all Massachusetts residents who enjoy engaging with arts and culture – audiences, school children, and employers in other sectors who benefit from increased economic activity supported by cultural convenings and workforce retention spurred by vibrant communities their employees wish to live in.

When considering the economic activity our sector supports in Massachusetts, the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, from 2021, defined arts and culture as a $27.2 billion industry in Massachusetts – representing 4.2% of the Commonwealth’s GDP, and 135,181 jobs.

Funding Mass Cultural Council with $25.5 million in FY25 will allow the Commonwealth to continue to prioritize arts and culture as essential – and will allow us to foster this vibrant economic engine and ensure that it continues to contribute robustly to the state’s economy.

To look at what we could do with $25.5 million next year, I thought it would be helpful to quickly review our current spending plan.

First, the positive. Our current state budget appropriation is the second highest in the Agency’s history, and we are using it, combined with other public sources of funding like casino tax revenues, federal monies from the National Endowment for the Arts, and our remaining one-time state pandemic recovery funds, to make approximately 2,600 grant awards.

And yet, even with these combined public resources, our application data shows the need is so much greater here in Massachusetts than what Mass Cultural Council can support. We know that it is extremely difficult to close a funding gap even in the best economic cycles, so we offer the following datapoints to illustrate that maintenance funding in FY25 will keep us on level pace to make investments, but the sector’s need for public support will continue to grow. Without public support, funding for the creative sector is relegated to private supporters, potentially creating inequities and inaccessibility for all the residents of the Commonwealth. Public support is essential to equity and access to the diversity of our sector.

This year we launched a new grant program to support artists, culture bearers, and creative practitioners with $5,000 awards. This Grants for Creative Individuals program received 4,462 applications, but our spending plan calls for us to make approximately 375 grants. This means the program will have about an 8.4% success rate to receive funding.

When considering the more than 3,500 individuals who were unfunded in FY23’s one-time pandemic recovery grant program for individuals and those who will be unfunded this year through Grants for Creative Individuals, the Agency has received applications requesting approximately $20 million in unmet demand from Massachusetts artists in the past two years. This staggering figure makes sense, given our application data for the pandemic recovery program showed that at that time 1 in 1,000 Massachusetts residents considered themselves to be a working creative.

As you know, in addition to the funding for Massachusetts’ creative individuals, each year Mass Cultural Council also administers several grant programs supporting communities, youth arts education, and cultural organizations. Unfortunately, we cannot fully meet the current demand on our resources for these programs, either:

• While the current FY24 grant cycle is in process, last year, in FY23, the Local Cultural Councils (LCC) network made over 7,000 grants supporting arts and culture in every city and town statewide, totaling $6.6 million, which met 43% of the amount requested – coming up $8.8 million short.
• This year, we received 91 eligible applications, proposing to serve 91 schools, totaling $500,000, that we were unable to fund through the STARS Residencies arts education program.
• Also, this year, our Festivals & Projects grant program had to decline 460 eligible applications, totaling $1.1 million in requests.
• And later this month we will launch the new Operating Grants for Organizations grant program for the first time. Today we fund 337 cultural nonprofit organizations through our current operating support program (the Cultural Investment Portfolio, or CIP). We have not accepted new applications to this program since FY22.  However, in FY23 we administered the one-time Cultural Sector Recovery Grant program to provide COVID relief to cultural organizations and received more than 1,300 applications.  Based on those applications, we anticipate 300 to 400 cultural nonprofit organizations not currently receiving operating support from the CIP will apply to the new program, resulting in $4.5 million to $6 million in new requests on our resources. Even at this early date we anticipate the number of applications received will far supersede the amount of available funding we have to make awards to these organizations in FY24.

In sum, across all the Agency’s grant programs, with a $25.5 million state budget appropriation, we anticipate approximately $35 million in unmet demand next year.  We hope that by working with the Administration and the Legislature to secure maintenance funding now, in a difficult budget year, we can make important investments and collect data that can be used to support an increase in the state’s investment into the creative and cultural sector in more robust economic times.

The Mass Cultural Council believes that culture is a dynamic force for enriching communities, growing the state’s economy, increasing accessibility, and fostering individual and workforce creativity. Culture is intrinsically valuable and unique in its ability to lift the human spirit and bring value across all sectors.  We know that here in Massachusetts, culture embraces everyone, drives growth and opportunity, and empowers a new, creative generation.

We thank the Committee for its partnership and support of the Power of Culture. We ask that you embrace the Governor’s recommendation of $25.5 million for the Mass Cultural Council. And we are here to answer any questions that you may have.

Thank you.