Dance/USA’s New Executive Director Says the Organization Needs to Rebuild

Dance/USA’s New Executive Director Says the Organization Needs to Rebuild Last month, when Dance/USA announced the end of its Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists (DFA) program, more than a few people in the field were disappointed—and confused. At a time when so many funding programs are contracting or sunsetting altogether, learning that dance’s national service organization was taking away such a major opportunity was heartbreaking. But DFA was funded solely by a grant from the Doris Duke Foundation, and when the grant ended, Dance/USA had no money left to give. It was exactly the kind of predicament that Dance/USA’s new executive director, Michele Kumi (久美) Baer, wants to avoid. Since landing in her role in April, she’s put together a new vision for the organization. She sat down exclusively with Dance Magazine to share her candid assessment of why the current model is unsustainable, and how she plans to make Dance/USA more helpful to the field. What do you wish people better understood about Dance/USA? There’s a misconception that we have a large staff and a big budget. In fact, we’re four and a half employees, including myself, plus a constellation of consultants. And Dance/USA’s annual operating budget is about $1.6 million. (By comparison, some other national arts service organizations have budgets in the $5 to $8 million range.) There’s also this perception that Dance/USA primarily serves larger-budget dance companies. There was definitely truth to this in the past, but today, most of our programs intentionally serve individual artists and smaller-budget companies as a part of the larger dance ecosystem. How have shifts in the funding landscape impacted Dance/USA? The entire field is facing heightened levels of uncertainty, and we have not been spared. Dance/USA needs to reimagine and rebuild its business model. Our existing organizational strategy and structure are not sustainable. I took this job knowing that that was the case. What exactly feels unsustainable? Much of the organization’s income has been contributed revenue, including revenue from foundation grants and individual donors. And several of our core programs have relied on time-bound, project-based grants from a single source. That creates a very precarious scenario if priorities change. Also, our membership revenue has declined by about 50 percent since 2018, partially because we cut rates to keep membership affordable. We’re projecting about $150,000 to come in through membership next year, when dues used to bring in well over $300,000. Throughout the arts, a lot of us have been contending with the fact that our existing earned and contributed revenue strategies are not enough to meet the needs of our artists, of our arts organizations, and of the communities that we serve. Those constraints are forcing us to make difficult decisions around downsizing staff, programs, and operations. Readers might know that Dance/USA went through a massive downsizing a couple years ago. What kind of money does Dance/USA have to distribute these days? As a fundraising organization that’s been a regranter, we’re only able to distribute what we’ve raised. With the end of the Doris Duke grant for Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists program, we no longer have any regranting funds. I can’t promise that we’ll be a regranter anytime soon. It’s a big loss. So what is the new strategic direction you see for Dance/USA? The focus is transforming into a field catalyst model. That means that we’re focused on activating networks of dance workers and their allies in the arts, in the larger nonprofit field, and in social movements more generally to make a thriving future for dance. There’s three pillars of work I see within this model. One is capacity-building work: How do we support leaders so they can make the institutional changes we need for dance to thrive? I’d love to give our members the incubation space to sit with alternative models—to explore, for instance, what it would look like to share back offices across institutions. Another is field-serving work: How do we strategically tend to persistent and emergent needs? And the third is field-building work, which is tending to larger change through advocacy, government affairs, and coalition work. Is this a make-do-with-less situation, or is there hope for a more abundant future? There’s hope for growth, for sure. But we need capital to do that. There’s a desire to transform and contract into a model that goes in this direction, and then to grow from there. We are fundraising for this pivot right now. This is an ambition. It has grounding, but we need the resources to make it happen.