In March 2014, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (the Hewlett Foundation) engaged consultants from Olive Grove in partnership with Informing Change to assess the effectiveness of the Foundation’s approach to support regranting intermediaries as a means to resource small arts organizations, individual artists, and communities or arts disciplines with which program staff have limited expertise (for instance, folk and traditional arts).
The purpose of this study was three-fold:
To forecast the fluctuating funding environment for the Performing Arts Program’s (the Program) current intermediaries;
To better understand which artists, organizations, and communities benefit from the Program’s current intermediary funding strategy and where gaps or overlaps lie; and
To develop a set of recommendations for how the Program’s regranting approach could adapt in order to better serve the Bay Area performing arts ecosystem, according to the goals and priorities of the Program’s strategic framework.
The primary audience for this assessment is the Performing Arts Program staff, who will use the findings and recommendations to inform decision-making about how to best use intermediary funding to help the Program achieve its goals. The leaders of the current intermediaries are the secondary audience, since the Program staff wants to work in a spirit of partnership with these organizations. The tertiary audience is the larger arts and culture field, which could benefit from excerpted “lessons learned” from this assessment.