Chicago’s heartbeat is its rich cultural tapestry, where BIPOC arts and cultural organizations stand as pillars of resilience and inclusivity. Chicago’s Cultural Treasures, a unique four-year initiative that supports BIPOC-led and -focused arts and culture organizations in the city, leads these pioneering efforts.
Unlike traditional grant programs, Chicago’s Cultural Treasures goes beyond providing financial assistance. Instead, the initiative is rewriting the narrative of equity in the arts by offering tailored support and capacity-building to ensure the preservation and advancement of BIPOC-led initiatives for generations to come.
Administered by IFF with the Chicago funders group, the effort serves BIPOC arts and culture institutions that have long operated as neighborhood anchors, tradition-keepers, and community-builders to help ensure that experiences are broadly shared and heard. IFF champions nonprofits across the Midwest to shape more equitable and vibrant communities through community-centered lending, development, and real estate solutions.
Tara Townsend, President of IFF’s Social Impact Accelerator, shared the importance of how uplifting and investing in BIPOC-led initiatives not only honors the richness of Black history but also actively contributes to a more inclusive and equitable future.
(This conversation was edited for length and clarity).
How do you ensure that initiatives such as funding, capacity-building, and technical assistance meet the needs of arts organizations and contribute to their long-term sustainability?
When the funding collaborative reached out to IFF – knowing they needed a community partner with relevant expertise and credibility in BIPOC communities – we, in turn, knew that the initiative could only be successful if it were deeply embedded within the community it serves.
IFF accepted the role because we saw it as an opportunity to support the long-term financial resilience and sustainability of BIPOC arts organizations. As administrators, we designed the grant program, developed an open nomination process to select the participatory grant committee, and facilitated the grant committee in developing decision-making criteria to review the proposals and ultimately make the funding recommendations.
The grant committee members, comprised of a diverse group of community members, civic leaders, and artists embedded in Chicago’s rich arts and culture scene, all appreciate how art fits into the community fabric in the Chicagoland area. The Committee was given near total control over the process, from design to decision (with IFF as an organizer and facilitator), ceding a great deal of power to the communities the initiative intended to serve.
The Grant Committee’s process wasn’t so different from other grantmakers. However, they were different deciders who made different decisions. Examples are focusing criteria on BIPOC-rooted art forms rather than more common criteria focused on BIPOC representation and acknowledging cultural expressions that traditional forms of grant support have historically passed over.
Beyond the critical general operating funding, capacity building and technical assistance were also co-created with the arts communities to meet their needs. Grantees had the opportunity to self-select which offerings they wanted to pursue, enabling IFF to meet each organization where they were in terms of their current capacity and future priorities.
We intentionally designed this, to the best of our abilities, to genuinely meet the needs of the organizations and their communities.
Capital alone cannot provide long-term sustainability, but capital paired with resources like financial management, peer learning, real estate consulting, and more does.
Tara Townsend
Chicago’s Cultural Treasures aims to address both immediate challenges and long-term systemic issues faced by BIPOC arts organizations. Can you share some specific strategies or programs that exemplify this balance?
When IFF agreed to administer ChiTreasures, it was with the understanding that we were not just administering grants. IFF works at the intersection of finance and facilities, ensuring nonprofits have what they need for long-term sustainability.
All of the programs that IFF administers focus on providing technical assistance in addition to capital. Capital alone cannot provide long-term sustainability, but capital paired with resources like financial management, peer learning, real estate consulting, and more does. So, while our involvement in ChiTreasures differed from other work we engage in, it still follows this program model: providing unrestricted grants – in this case, a total of $14.4 million – with access to workshops and resources in fundraising, board development, marketing and communications, financial management, and facilities planning and support. All of these are identified as key needs to help strengthen organizations and manage grant funds for sustained longevity.
Being named a Chicago Cultural Treasure significantly impacted organizations’ sustainability through grants and resources. It also broadened recognition of types of cultural treasures that have historically been overlooked for traditional forms of grant support. We hope that it opened up opportunities for Chicago’s arts and culture organizations—especially those deep in communities rooted in BIPOC culture—to receive additional support.
Beyond this, one of our commitments is to share the learnings and recommendations gathered from the initiative to support long-term changes in funding for organizations rooted in BIPOC arts and culture.
By design, ChiTreasures was not a standard grantmaking initiative. It was a race equity initiative for Chicago’s arts and culture sector.
Tara Townsend
The initiative recognizes the compounding historic inequities faced by BIPOC arts organizations. Could you discuss how Chicago’s Cultural Treasures specifically addresses these inequities?
By design, ChiTreasures was not a standard grantmaking initiative. It was a race equity initiative for Chicago’s arts and culture sector. By ceding decision-making power to members of the community and by using an LOI (letter of intent) process, as opposed to a standard grant application, we aimed to disrupt the “regular” ways of grantmaking in hopes of countering historic inequities. The LOI process allowed us to explore organizations without using standard metrics for arts funding, which focus on artistic excellence rooted in Western European cultural standards and financial strength, which would naturally disadvantage these organizations due to decades-long histories of underfunding.
The initiative revealed—by the fact that over 140 letters of intent were received—that there are no hidden treasures; they had been buried by years of un-investment. And revealing that was one important step in the initiative’s success.
Since this unprecedented infusion of grant dollars, Chicago’s arts and culture organizations, especially those deep in communities and rooted in BIPOC culture, have received additional support, and we hope it continues. Two years after the grants were made, the funding collaborative and IFF continue to meet and work towards more equitable cultural funding practices.
Our hope is that the initiative’s collective impact will be the ongoing disruption of historical trends in funding for BIPOC-led and -focused cultural organizations as anchors in equitable community development.
As President of IFF’s Social Impact Accelerator, you oversee various initiatives. What unique challenges or opportunities does Chicago’s Cultural Treasures present? How does the focus on BIPOC arts organizations shape your strategies and approach?
The Social Impact Accelerator (SIA) was created in 2018 to deepen and grow IFF’s impact by scaling what works, innovating new solutions, and driving systems change.
What sets ChiTreasures apart is not how the IFF team operates but the elements that were intentionally designed to make it a unique initiative. For one, the funding collaborative operates to shift funding decision-making and distribution powers to the community.
Another challenge was operating under a participatory grantmaking model and ceding power to the community members. Still, IFF is committed to doing things differently in order to ensure different results and long-term change.
The initiative revealed—by the fact that over 140 letters of intent were received—that there are no hidden treasures; they had been buried by years of un-investment.
Tara Townsend
With sustainability a key goal of Chicago’s Cultural Treasures, how do you measure the long-term impact and success of the support provided to BIPOC arts organizations?
We know that funding from philanthropic sources has been limited for BIPOC arts organizations. This requires these organizations to depend on other revenue sources that may be more fluid, like earned revenues from performances, resulting in uneven cash flows throughout the year. When organizations do receive funding, it is often program-specific or one-year, which limits their ability to plan for the long term.
So, to understand sustainability, we look at an organization’s revenue sources, whether it is reliant on just one source, and how much liquidity it has to weather leaner times. We also look at whether organizations receive more general operating or multi-year grants to understand whether philanthropy is adopting practices that lead to more sustainability for their grantees.
That ties into the initiative’s long-term influence. Observing how the funding landscape continues to evolve, specifically with BIPOC arts organizations, will enable us to evaluate the progress made.
IFF is committed to gathering and sharing what we have learned and monitoring what unfolds in the future to support a positive change for more treasures across Chicagoland and beyond.
Imagery courtesy of IFF.