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Abstract

Major philanthropic organizations are increasingly turning to the arts for social change [AFSC] to address racial injustices ranging from racialized poverty and mass incarceration, to health and educational disparities. This article problematizes the emergence, and increased celebration, of AFSC philanthropy by situating it within successive articulations of racial neoliberalism. Focusing on the Canadian context, I argue that this ‘progressive turn’ in arts philanthropy is the product of a series of neoliberal political-economic and ideological shifts that uniquely punish(ed) the racialized poor on a material level, while simultaneously producing these same communities and their artistic practices as attractive sites of investment for a primarily white and increasingly empowered philanthropic base. Drawing on a series of examples, I show how contemporary approaches to AFSC philanthropy – particularly those that mobilize ‘business-like’ strategies, priorities, and tools in pursuit of social change – function to extend and legitimize the ‘post-racial’ ideological foundations of the racial neoliberal project, resulting in a paradoxical phenomenon that I term ‘racial neoliberal philanthropy’. In addition to making the case for centering race in extant critical work on the political economy of philanthropy, this article – as well as the concept of racial neoliberal philanthropy – highlights how well-intentioned organizational responses to racial injustice can, in fact, reify racial inequities through policies and programming that are seemingly ‘beyond race’.

Keywords

Arts for Social Change Critical Management Studies Nonprofit Marketization Philanthropy Racial Neoliberalism

Main document

Major philanthropic foundations are increasingly calling on artists and arts organizations to address racial injustice. In 2019 alone, the US-based Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Surdna Foundation, Barr Foundation, and Kresge Foundation directed nearly $100 million to ‘arts for social change’ initiatives [hereafter, AFSC] that target issues ranging from racialized poverty and mass incarceration, to health and educational disparities. In order to rationalize the AFSC as a priority funding area – specifically, as a mechanism to combat these, and other, manifestations of racial injustice – donors and advocates echo the claims of a growing body of research that identifies and measures the economic, social, and pedagogical impact of experiences with the arts. Shaped by the imperatives of an ‘evidence-based’ policy framework (Belfiore and Bennett, 2007), this research attempts to prove whether or not the arts do a wide array of things from improving educational performance (e.g. Deasy, 2002) to fostering tolerance (e.g. Williams, 1995) to spurring economic growth (e.g. Hearn et al., 2014). Beyond the striking heterogeneity of these claims, it is important to note that they all adhere to a positivist conceptual framework that positions the arts as a ‘thing’ or ‘substance’ that can be observed and measured, and that can produce predictable outcomes in individuals and communities that encounter them (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013). As a result, the proliferation of AFSC philanthropy over the past 25 years is typically attributed to the fact that: (1) there exists more empirical evidence that experiences with the arts produce the kinds of positive impacts – at individual, community, and societal levels – that can combat racial inequities; and (2) more than ever, (arts) philanthropists are shifting their grantmaking priorities to address various social injustices.

In this article, I take a different approach to understanding the emergence, and increased celebration, of AFSC philanthropy by situating it within successive articulations of racial neoliberalism (e.g. Goldberg, 2007; Roberts and Mahtani, 2010). By ‘racial neoliberalism’, I am referring to the ways in which neoliberal policies of privatization, austerity, tax cuts, and deregulation (Harvey, 2011) – coupled with a market fundamentalist ideology grounded in principles of individual responsibility, self-interest, and race-blind meritocracy – actively target and adversely impact the racialized poor (Baghat, 2019). Focusing on the Canadian philanthropic context, I suggest that AFSC philanthropy emerged in the mid-1990s in response to a series of neoliberal political-economic and ideological shifts that uniquely punish(ed) poor communities of color on a material level, while simultaneously producing these same communities and their artistic practices as attractive sites of investment for a primarily white and increasingly empowered philanthropic base. However, despite stated aims to combat racial injustices, contemporary approaches to AFSC philanthropy function to extend and legitimize the ‘post-racial’ ideological foundations of racial neoliberalism, resulting in a paradoxical phenomenon that I term ‘racial neoliberal philanthropy’. With this analysis, I suggest that the rise of AFSC as a strategic philanthropic funding category has less to do with an increasingly informed and progressive arts philanthropy community, and more to do with a series of alarming political-economic and ideological shifts that signify the depoliticization of racialized poverty (Swyngedouw, 2014) and corporate capital’s co-optation of struggles for economic and racial justice (Dauvergne and LeBaron, 2014; King and Busa, 2017). In this way, I argue, the seemingly progressive field of AFSC philanthropy can, in fact, help to construct and maintain racial neoliberal hegemony (Arnove, 1980; Roelofs, 2003).

The rest of this article follows in four main sections. The first section historicizes the relationship between arts philanthropy and ‘social change’ in Canada. In doing so, I highlight the foundational role that race played, and continues to play, at various points in this relationship, while also establishing AFSC philanthropy as a unique and distinct form of giving in the arts. The second section situates AFSC philanthropy in Canada in relation to racial neoliberalism in two parts. First, I demonstrate how the institutionalization of neoliberal political-economic policies and ideology in Canada has uniquely impacted the racialized poor, both materially and by constructing them as ideal subjects of philanthropy. Second, I document the particular ways in which nonprofit marketization, alongside welfare state retrenchment, has empowered Canada’s elite white philanthropic community as an agent for addressing racial injustice, including through novel funding categories like the AFSC. The third section draws on a series of case studies to examine how emerging strategies, priorities, and discourses within contemporary AFSC philanthropy – specifically, an emphasis on measurement and metrics; entrepreneurialism and entrepreneurial risk-taking; and the philanthropist as a hands-on investor – functions to legitimize the ideological foundations and political-economic policies of racial neoliberalism. The final section summarizes my argument and discusses the relevance of racial neoliberal philanthropy for organizational scholars interested in racial justice, as well as researchers studying the political economy of philanthropy.

Arts funding, social change, and race in Canada

In Canada, the philanthropic funding of AFSC organizations – organizations ‘rooted in furthering social, environmental, and political justice’ (ICASC, 2016: 1) – is a recent phenomenon that is quite distinct from previous approaches to funding in the arts. Unlike other forms of grantmaking or charity, giving in the arts was not originally intended to relieve suffering, help the poor and marginalized, or target structures of inequality (Sidford, 2011). That being said, arts funding in Canada has always been shaped by race. Likewise, arts funders have always aspired to create social change, though often not in pursuit of justice and equity. The bulk of 19th century arts funding – both pre- and post-confederation in 1867 – focused on building formal institutions that would preserve and present art (particularly, visual art and music) from an exclusively white European colonial canon. The National Museum of Canada, for example, which later became the Canadian Museum of Nature, began with a grant from Queen Victoria in 1841, while Queen Victoria’s son-in-law, the Governor General Marquis of Lorne, founded the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1880. Here, the relationship between arts philanthropy, social change, and race mapped onto the objectives of a white settler colonial project (Razack, 2002). Beginning in the 20th century, debates around arts funding in Canada took on a distinctly nationalistic tone. As new systems of mass communication were encouraging American advertisers to seek untapped Canadian markets to sell their goods, a growing Canadian cultural and intellectual elite argued that the arts were essential to national development and securing a national culture distinct from the United States (Gattinger, 2017). It wasn’t until 1949, however, and the appointment of the Massey Commission that this opinion was elevated to the level of national policy, backed by anxieties that Canada was succumbing to the influence of American philanthropic interests (Woodcock, 1985). The major outcome of the Massey Commission was the creation of the Canada Council for the Arts in 1957: an arm’s-length Crown Corporation that remains a key source of grants, fellowships, and services to professional artists and arts organizations in Canada.

In its early stages, the Council’s main objective was to create new opportunities for white Canadian artists with a deeply nationalistic mandate rooted in the European high arts and national identity. Notably, this involved the active erasure of Indigenous peoples from the Canadian national imaginary, as well. In its first annual report in 1958, for example, the Council defined itself as ‘a characteristically Canadian pioneer measure, related to the geography of the country and the character of the people’, further adding: ‘material prosperity alone will not make a great nation. As we press on to push back the frontiers of material progress, we must aim to advance on the spiritual front, and advance in our artistic expression as a nation’ (Canada Council for the Arts, 1958: 18). This appeal to spirituality in service of settlement points to another common early articulation of the relationship between arts funding, social change, race, and a white settler colonial project. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the Council began to pay more attention to questions of representation in artistic work, specifically focusing on ‘culturally diverse’ (or non-European) artistic disciplines. This was partly facilitated through the Council’s ‘Explorations’ program, which sought to ‘create a heightened awareness of Canada’s cultural diversity’ (Canada Council for the Arts, 1978: 17). This newfound emphasis reflected ongoing shifts in the political management of racial difference in Canada including: (1) the implementation of an immigration points system in 1967 that ‘officially’ lifted ethnic, religious, or racial barriers to immigrants; (2) the designation of multiculturalism as official state policy in 1971; (3) the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, which contained strong anti-discrimination provisions (Banting and Thompson, 2016); and (4) the implementation of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 1988, which aimed to ‘preserve and enhance the multicultural heritage of Canadians while working to achieve the equality of all Canadians in the economic, social, cultural and political life of Canada’ (Canadian Multiculturalism Act, 1988). The Council’s appeal to the democratizing power of art and culture further echoed a parallel ‘cultural turn’ occurring in global development contexts – a ‘turn’ that elevated the arts and culture of the Global South in an effort to reject post-WWII Eurocentric grand narratives of global development (Da Costa, 2010). In this context, art was heralded for its ability to resist the homogenizing tendencies of development, foster tolerance, and function as a key force for growth in the creative economy (Stupples, 2014).

As cultural diversity was increasingly prioritized in Canadian arts funding, the Council began to feel the squeeze of austere budgets. From 1992 to 1996, for example, the nominal value of government funding to the Council dropped from $108 million to $91 million annually (Canada Council for the Arts, 1993, 1996). At the same time, new managerial approaches were institutionalized throughout both the nonprofit and public sectors (Evans et al., 2005), requiring the Council to articulate and evaluate grant performance using quantitative metrics if they wished to receive government funding. This presented a unique challenge for a Canadian arts sector that had, to this point, been organized around issues of identity, national sovereignty, nation building, and cultural representation. The Council soon succumbed to these pressures. For example, their 1995–1996 annual report featured a section titled ‘Just the Facts’, which included a range of economistic claims about what the arts do in Canada: ‘Canada’s cultural sector directly contributes some $16 billion to the economy. Spinoff effects generate a further $8 billion each year [. . .] More than 670,000 Canadians earn their livelihoods in the arts and culture’ (Canada Council for the Arts, 1996: 13). This shift in Council rhetoric further mapped onto larger cultural policy trends in the Global North increasingly dominated by instrumentalist claims about what the arts do, why funders should invest in the arts, and how to best measure these outcomes (Belfiore, 2004). While the previous era of arts funding emphasized liberal multiculturalism and cultural diversity, the neoliberal politics of austerity brought with it a new articulation of race, art, and social change: namely, the reconstitution of the racialized poor as sites of intervention via philanthropic investment.

Since before Canadian confederation in 1867, the relationship between arts funding, social change, and race in Canada has remade itself in line with the dominant cultural and political-economic logics of the time, whether through fortifying the cultural and political interests of the European colonial elite, solidifying a white cultural nationalism, advancing a depoliticized liberal multicultural agenda, or producing a quantifiable social impact in poor communities of color in austere times. Canadian AFSC philanthropy is a product of this most recent articulation of the arts, social change, and race. According to a 2016 report by the International Centre of Art and Social Change [ICASC], approximately 73% of AFSC grantees in Canada originated after 1995. And while 12% of these were created after 2010 in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the vast majority of them originated in the mid-1990s. In Canada, this was a period of severe austerity, welfare state restructuring, and nonprofit marketization – societal shifts that disproportionately punished communities of color. This timing is not a coincidence. It helps explain the proliferation of both AFSC philanthropy and AFSC grantees, which, unlike traditional arts organizations, receive roughly two-thirds of their funding from private sources (ASC!, 2016). In the following section, I situate the emergence of AFSC philanthropy within this political-economic and ideological context known as racial neoliberalism.

Racial neoliberalism

The emergence of AFSC philanthropy in Canada coincided with Liberal Party Finance Minister Paul Martin’s infamous 1995 budget, which dramatically reduced public expenditure and slashed social programs. Of the $15.6 billion predicted in federal budget savings between 1995–1996 and 1996–1997, $13.4 billion was to be generated through cuts in spending (McBride and Whiteside, 2011). The budget also fundamentally restructured federal involvement in social policy in ways that punished the poor and benefited the rich. The Canada Health and Social Transfer, for example, combined federal grants for health and post-secondary education with social assistance into a single block grant. As healthcare and post-secondary education held greater public support than social assistance programs, the latter were placed at a significant competitive disadvantage (McKeen and Porter, 2003). Concurrent changes in social assistance eligibility requirements and benefit levels resulted in a decrease of social assistance recipients in Canada from just over 3 million in 1995 to 1.68 million in 2005 (McBride and Whiteside, 2011). On the other end of the economic spectrum, the following decade (i.e. 1997–2007) saw the incomes of the top 20% of Canadian families rise by 10%, and the richest 1% of Canadians accounting for 32% of all income gains (Yalnizyan, 2011).

The economic stratification brought on by this neoliberal restructuring was magnified in communities of color already suffering from significantly lower household incomes and higher poverty rates relative to white communities, alongside overrepresentation in low-income sectors and non-unionized work (Galabuzi, 2001). Pendakur and Pendakur’s (2002) longitudinal Canadian study outlines a pattern of slight shrinking of earnings differentials between people of color and white people throughout the 1970s, stability during the 1980s, and enlargement of earnings differentials between 1991 and 1996. The following year, as Martin’s austerity policies took hold, the gap between the median after-tax income of people of color and white people increased again from 23% to 26% (Galabuzi, 2001). These trends continued into the next decade. From 2000 to 2005, a period when the Canadian economy grew by 13.1%, the earnings of white people grew by 2.7%, while the average income of people of color declined by 0.2% (Block and Galabuzi, 2011). Similar patterns presented in other areas of the labor market. While unemployment rates for people of color decreased during the 1990s, they registered at nearly double that of the general population at the end of the decade (6.7%–12.6%). Likewise, poverty rates within communities of color remained well over double that of the white population (32%–13.8%). It is important to stress that these material disparities were not uniform across communities of color in Canada. In 2000, for example, while 32% of people of color were considered ‘low-income’, that number was much higher in Black (35%) and Arab communities (43%), and lower in Chinese (27%) and South Asian communities (23%) (Statistics Canada, 2001). These differences reflect the uniqueness of anti-Black racism (Cooper, 2007; McKittrick, 2006; Maynard, 2017) and Islamophobia (Abu-Laban and Gabriel, 2014; Zine, 2012) in Canada.

These inequities cannot simply be explained by the fact that neoliberal policies disproportionately impact the poor, and that the poor in Canada just happen to be racialized. As Roberts and Mahtani (2010) argue, we must ‘examine not just the momentary eruptions of race or racism that seemingly result from neoliberal policy reforms, and instead consider race as an organizing principle of society that neoliberalism reinforces and modifies’ (p. 254). In other words, we must understand how neoliberalism – as a set of policies and an ideology – reinforces the already fundamental function of race within capitalist social relations. Critical race and critical ethnic studies scholars have long argued that it is impossible to separate capitalism from racism insofar as racism provides the inequalities in human value that capitalist accumulation requires (e.g., Gilmore, 2007; Robinson, 1983). Melamed (2015) explains this succinctly:

Capital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups – capitalists with the means of production/workers without the means of subsistence, creditors/debtors, conquerors of land made property/the dispossessed and removed. These antinomies of accumulation require loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires. Most obviously, it does this by displacing the uneven life chances that are inescapably part of capitalist social relations onto the fictions of differing human capacities, historically race. (p. 77)

In this sense, race organizes capitalist society into distinct hierarchies of human value that legitimize the accumulation of capital through various modes of exploitation and dispossession (Pulido, 2017).

Neoliberalism – or the neoliberal variant of capitalism – is unique insofar as it reinforces these hierarchies of difference through its emphasis on a post-racial meritocracy, wherein racial difference is believed to have no bearing on political or economic inequities (Davis, 2007). Detached from one’s racial identity, the neoliberal subject is free to operate under the assumption that hard work will be rewarded if they follow the rules of the market, so to speak. Likewise, any lack of success indicates personal failure. Paradoxically, then, it is through the camouflaging practices of a post-racial meritocracy – which conjures a utopian vision of a post-racial, society – that race as a category is solidified (Roberts and Mahtani, 2010). Neoliberal ideology’s erasure of race from the political realm – specifically by appealing to an ethos of meritocracy – reinforces race by naturalizing and justifying racial privileges and inequities (Da Costa, 2016; Melamed, 2011). As a result, racism within the racial neoliberal state is defined not by explicit forms of exclusion and/or oppression, but by the refusal to acknowledge the role that race and racism plays in producing and maintaining economic, social, and political inequities (Goldberg, 2007).

Neoliberalism, nonprofit marketization, and philanthropy

As it pertains to social policy, neoliberalism is characterized by an ideological shift in responsibility away from the state and onto the nonprofit and philanthropic sector. Such a shift is premised on a few key assumptions including: (1) markets are more efficient and innovative than governments, even when it comes to providing social services; (2) the production of social and economic inequities is exogenous to the capitalist modes of accumulation that create private wealth; and (3) governments should encourage philanthropic/charitable giving through a variety of policies including attractive charitable tax incentives. The resulting welfare governance paradigm focuses on building centralized capacity within the state for the facilitation of horizontal management of social services to be delivered by a range of non-governmental actors, and via new partnerships between the state, businesses, and nonprofit actors. This radical reimagining of state-civil society relations demands the institutionalization of the values, tools, and logics of the marketplace within the nonprofit sector – a phenomenon known as nonprofit marketization (Frumkin, 2002; Maier et al., 2016). In practice, nonprofit marketization involves the state being kept organizationally separate from service providers, with relationships managed by short-term contracts. In Canada, this model differs significantly from previous state-nonprofit relationships characterized by long-term core funding grants (Baines, 2010). The resulting competitive contracting regime is justified by the belief that markets impose economic discipline upon nonprofit providers, while redistributing risk away from the state. Forced to respond to this ‘centralized-decentralization’ of social policy (Evans et al., 2005), nonprofits have institutionalized market values and logics within their own organizations as well, focusing on efficiency and innovation, creating a disciplined labor force, and the generation of commercial revenue (Eikenberry and Kluver, 2004), often through entrepreneurial means (Dees, 1998).

Another key component of nonprofit marketization is the rapid expansion, diversification, and empowerment of private philanthropy as a social policy mechanism tasked with filling the gaps in public services created by neoliberal austerity measures. In Canada, this market-based form of damage control was initially incentivized through major reforms to the Income Tax Act that magnified the scale of charitable tax credits (e.g. raising the limit for charitable donations as a percentage of net income that could qualify for a tax credit from 20% in 1995 to 75% in 1997), as well as broadening the scope of donations one could claim a tax credit for (e.g. the inclusion of public securities and mutual funds, as well as donations to private foundations) (Raddon, 2008). These changes were intended to make it economically and politically worthwhile to donate, allowing philanthropists to redirect public dollars away from democratically designated causes to the ones they support, often through their own family or corporate foundations. Unsurprisingly, these changes to the Income Tax Act, coupled with dramatic income tax cuts in general, significantly altered the landscape of the Canadian philanthropic sector. For example, from 1990 to 2019, the number of philanthropic foundations in Canada increased by 84% to roughly 10,958 (Philanthropic Foundations Canada, 2019), with the vast majority of this growth occurring through the creation of private foundations (e.g. family foundations). More recently, from 2008 to 2017, the total assets of foundations in Canada rose from approximately $34 billion to $84.5 billion, with the bulk of this amassing in a select few private family foundations. In fact, even within the exclusive field of organized philanthropy, foundations are stratified with the richest 150 philanthropic foundations in Canada accounting for half the entire sector’s assets (Phillips, 2018). These trends in philanthropic sector makeup further map onto the racial dimensions of neoliberalism as well. For example, of the 38 largest private foundations in Canada (according to assets), only one has a non-white founder – the Li Ka-shing (Canada) Foundation. As well, a recent study of Canadian private foundations found that only 24% of foundations surveyed included a single person of color on their board of directors (Kassam and Phillips, 2019).

As Anheier and Leat (2006) note, the particular form philanthropy takes is a product of its time and context. In this way, AFSC philanthropy’s emergence in Canada in the mid-1990s, as well as its continued celebration and proliferation, should surprise no one. Racial neoliberal policies dramatically increased the assets of wealthy white individuals and families, decreased or stagnated the wealth of the racialized poor, and destroyed social programs through austerity measures and nonprofit marketization. In doing so, racial neoliberalism created the conditions for wealthy white donors to step in and support the artistic and cultural practices of the racialized poor in support of social change in their communities. And yet, the question remains: why would a donor choose AFSC philanthropy over some other form of philanthropy targeting the racialized poor? Likewise, why would established arts philanthropists opt for AFSC philanthropy over traditional arts philanthropy if they receive the same tax incentives for supporting elite art forms? The answer, I suggest, resides in the mainstreaming of business principles, tools, and strategies within philanthropy, and the unique ways in which this ‘venture philanthropy’ approach intersects with race and the arts to extend and legitimize the ideological and political-economic components of the racial neoliberal project. In the following sections, I draw on a series of examples from the Canadian philanthropic context to show how this occurs.

Venture philanthropy, the arts for social change, and racial neoliberalism

Venture philanthropy (also known philanthrocapitalism and the ‘new’ philanthropy) is an approach to grantmaking that draws upon the strategies, techniques, and tools of finance capital (e.g. performance metrics and financing models developed and refined in the private sector) and applies them in pursuit of a wide range of philanthropic goals, from education and prison reform, to positive health and economic development outcomes. Premised on the notion that markets are more efficient than governments, and that social and economic inequality is a ‘technical’ issue, exogenous to the contradictions of capitalist development, venture philanthropists identify markets, market logics, and investments in hybrid organizations as the most promising approach to achieving increasingly ambitious social change objectives. While most often associated with billionaire celebrity philanthropists, many who earned their wealth in the 1990s within the technology or finance sectors (e.g. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and George Soros), the venture philanthropy approach is also championed by mainstream development institutions such as the OECD, the IMF, and the World Economic Forum. In Canada, organizations like LIFT Philanthropy Partners and the LEAP Centre for Social Impact are partnering with large financial institutions like TD Bank and BMO Financial Group, and consulting firms like KPMG and Ernst & Young, to ‘leverage’ private equity and know-how to ‘scale’ social impact because, as LEAP Centre for Social Impact’s 2019 promotional video claims: ‘making an impact in the world is about more than just good intentions’. In other words, the good intentions of nonprofits, the public sector, and traditional philanthropy mean nothing without the tools and know-how of the private sector – specifically, finance capital.

It’s important to note that the venture philanthropy approach is less prevalent in the world of arts funding than in other fields such as health (e.g. the Gates Foundation’s role in global development contexts) or education (e.g. the bankrolling of the American charter school movement by the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Broad Foundation). In fact, the perceived incompatibility of a ‘business-like’ approach to philanthropy and the arts was expressed quite (in)famously in a 2013 interview with Bill Gates by the Financial Times. During the interview, Gates, drawing upon an argument by utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, questioned why anyone would donate money to build a new wing for a museum if the alternative, for example, were to spend that money on preventing an illness that could lead to blindness. ‘The moral equivalent’, he explained, ‘is we’re going to take 1% of the people who visit the [museum] and blind them. [. . .] Are they willing, because it has a new wing, to take that risk’ (Financial Times, 2013)? However, young Canadian donors simply do not accept Gates’ framing of arts philanthropy and impact in terms of opportunity cost. Studies show that the desire to have a ‘social impact’ is the primary motivator for young Canadian grantmaking in the arts (The Strategic Counsel, 2015). Moreover, there has been a notable uptick in explicit discourse around venture philanthropy and the arts since Nina Kressner Cobb’s largely speculative 2002 piece in The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society about this very topic. Recent articles published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review (e.g. Lerner, 2016; Moss, 2016), the Independent (e.g. Bazalgette, 2015), and Americans for the Arts (2017), as well as reports by the Upstart Co-Lab in the United States (Moellenbrock et al., 2018) and the Metcalfe Foundation in Canada (Mackinnon and Pellerin, 2018) suggest that the arts are starting to be viewed as a site for social impact investment. Organizations like the UK-based Arts Impact Fund – ‘a 7 million pound initiative set up to demonstrate the potential for impact investment in arts’ with the goal of ‘artistic, social, and financial return’ – and the Reinvestment Fund which has invested $95 million in arts-related projects in low-income communities of color throughout the United States – highlight the range of new financial mechanisms, strategies, and tools that can potentially unite social impact philanthropy with the arts. Such optimism reflects the (uncritical) celebration of venture philanthropy as a mechanism for social change in the management and organizations literatures (e.g. Kingston and Bolton, 2004; Pepin, 2005; Quinn et al., 2014),

And yet, while it would seem that venture philanthropy’s ‘business-like’ and ‘outcomes-oriented’ approach would be ideal for AFSC organizations targeting racial injustice, I argue that it paradoxically serves to extend and legitimize the racial neoliberal project. In the following sections, I draw on a diverse range of case studies and examples from the Canadian philanthropic context to show how this occurs in relation to three key pillars of the venture philanthropy approach: (1) demonstrable impact; (2) the entrepreneurial spirit; and (3) the philanthropist as investor.

Demonstrating impact (and racialized citizens as burdens to the taxpayer)

In June 2016, Art Basel – one of the world’s premier for-profit international arts fairs – hosted a panel in Basel, Switzerland titled, ‘Venture Philanthropy or Bust?’ Moderated by Scott Stover, Art Basel’s President of Global Art Development, the panel assembled a number of prominent voices in the world of arts philanthropy – to discuss the future of venture philanthropy in the arts. Stover began the conversation by putting forth the following hypothesis:

The future success for those of us involved in philanthropy in the arts will be dependent on our ability to begin to formulate some framework of measurable [and comparable] impact, or philanthropy is likely to decline. My theory is that this phenomenon will become increasingly problematic as millennials become the major donors to the arts. Millennials are no longer convinced by the same ‘ask’ which was successful with previous generations [of philanthropists].

In doing so, Stover invoked one of venture philanthropy’s defining characteristics: its unapologetic reduction of ‘impact’ to universal metrics and, as was made clear in the aforementioned Financial Times interview with Bill Gates about arts philanthropy, its concurrent dismissal of other understandings of social impact. While arts organizations and advocates have felt intense pressure from cultural policymakers to demonstrate the social and/or economic value of the arts in a quantifiable way using what are commonly referred to as ‘impact studies’ since at least the early-1990s (Belfiore and Bennett, 2008), venture philanthropy has magnified the ‘evidence-based’ ethos of neoliberal managerialism quite dramatically. Even quantitative arts impact studies – for example, measuring how learning to play an instrument improves one’s spatial reasoning (Hetland, 2000) – are increasingly illegible in contemporary AFSC philanthropic contexts as they fail to provide a measure of relative (non-financial) return for the investor/philanthropist. In response, AFSC organizations have had to develop new strategies to communicate social impact to this new generation of philanthropists.

Take, for example, the ASC! Project: a 6-year (2013–2019) collaborative study that examined the current state and future needs of the AFSC in Canada. As part of the project, the ASC! team developed the Monitoring and Evaluation in Arts for Social Change website, an online resource that ‘seeks to clarify some of the diverse theories, methods, and techniques that may be useful for evaluating [AFSC] projects’ (ASC! 2019a). The website is expansive, containing a range of tools including an evaluation guide, a mini course, quizzes, interactive scenarios, and an archive of relevant scholarly articles. In addition to being practical and informative, these resources illuminate the racial hierarchies and assumptions that structure AFSC philanthropy. For example, in one interactive scenario titled, ‘Responding to a funder’s request for evaluation’, we are asked to imagine ourselves as ‘part of a collective that is running a dance program for urban youth with marginalized lifestyles’ and further informed that ‘your funder wants to evaluate your program’. Here, the words ‘urban’ and ‘marginalized lifestyles’ are used to let us know that the youth in this program are racialized. In fact, of the initial graphic of seven youth, only two are white – one with dreadlocks (an explicit nod to Black culture) and the other with a stereotypical punk aesthetic. We are then presented with four possible responses to the funder’s evaluation request: (a) ‘Panic!’; (b) ‘Tell the funder that you don’t believe in evaluations as the dance program’s intrinsic value shouldn’t be denigrated by having to be reduced to something that can be “evaluated”’; (c) ‘Call a friend with a PhD in astrophysics and ask him what to do’; and (d) ‘Have a discussion with the funder so as to understand what indicators are most important to them’. The first three responses are clearly meant to be humorous. And yet, this humor is layered with racist condescension, as the AFSC organization’s only options are to ‘panic’, seek the help of someone ‘more knowledgeable’ (the astrophysics PhD or the funder), or declare their opposition to any form of impact evaluation – as if they lack the capacity to articulate the value of the AFSC program on their own terms. This scenario further highlights that the (non-raced and, therefore, white) philanthropic funder’s definition of meaningful metrics is the only reasonable framing of impact. What, exactly, this looks like is underscored throughout the Monitoring and Evaluation in Arts for Social Change website, where we are repeatedly informed that ‘funder-driven evaluations are often associated with an expectation of well-defined quantitative data showing the ‘value’ of the program to demonstrate a return on investment’ (ASC! 2019b). These sorts of resources for evaluating and measuring programs have become mainstreamed in varied AFSC contexts. For example, Americans for the Arts recently partnered with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to produce the ‘Arts + Social Impact Explorer’: ‘an online primer that draws together top-line research, example projects, core research papers, and service/partner organizations about 26 different sectors, all in an effort to make more visible the incredible, wide-reaching impact of the arts’ (Lord, 2018).

Specific approaches to measurement and metrics are increasingly commonplace within AFSC philanthropy as well. In their 2017 Impact Report, VIBE Arts (2017: 5) – a Toronto-based charity ‘that works collaboratively with children and youth in under-resourced communities to innovate, build resiliency, and lead social change through arts education programming’ –reported that their programs ‘return $4 of social value for every $1 invested’. This ratio was calculated by the Calgary-based consultancy firm SIMPACT and refers to a ‘social return on investment’ [SROI]: a measure of extra-economic value relative to financial resources invested, calculated by using public spending figures as proxies for social impact. In other words, SROI figures estimate what a given nonprofit organization’s program would otherwise cost taxpayers, and impact is determined through a cost-benefit analysis (Mook et al., 2015). Thus, the attractiveness of one grantee over another is measured by how much each grantee can theoretically save the taxpayer. In the case of AFSC philanthropy – as well as other forms of philanthropy that specifically target poor or ‘under-resourced’ communities of color – SROI can therefore be understood as a tool for determining how to best extend neoliberal austerity policies and nonprofit marketization that disproportionately harms the racialized poor. In doing so, the discourse of SROI further reinforces racist cultural pathologies, as well as stereotypes of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people as burdens to the taxpayer (Roberts, 2014; Wacquant, 2008) – for example, the racialized and gendered ‘welfare queen’ (Hancock, 2004) – who must be turned into responsible post-racial neoliberal subjects in order to relieve the strain they place on society. Presumably, this is achieved through market-based means like AFSC philanthropy. Because it fulfills the desire for a measure of relative social return from arts organizations, SROI has, unsurprisingly, become one of the main metrics of choice for venture philanthropists in general (So and Capanyola, 2016), and the AFSC specifically (The Strategic Counsel, 2015).

By demanding AFSC grantees frame themselves as cost-effective replacements for a retreating welfare state – a retreat that disproportionately affects the racialized poor – venture philanthropy rejects the role of the arts as a site for community transformation, reflection, and critique in pursuit of economic and racial justice (e.g. Boal, 2000; Greene, 1995; Hanley, 2011). The emphasis on relative (non-financial) return is, thus, paradoxical: on the one hand, venture philanthropists are turning away from high culture white institutions like the theatre or the opera, proclaiming that they will only fund arts organizations that draw on the artistic and cultural practices of the racialized poor to produce measurable social impact. At the same time, however, AFSC philanthropy’s cultural ‘resistance’ to white elite colonial aesthetics (e.g. the opera) in favor of racialized arts and cultural practices demands AFSC organizations communicate their value in ways that rationalize welfare state cuts in social spending. This shifts the role of AFSC organizations from racial justice organization to a metaphorical caulking gun responsible for filling in the gaps of the retreating racial neoliberal state. In other words, while demanding quantifiable progress and outcomes in regard to combatting racial inequities, AFSC philanthropy simultaneously elevates the mythology of the post-racial meritocracy. In doing so, AFSC philanthropy delineates dominant terms of the racial neoliberal state, thereby promoting its reproduction.

The entrepreneurial spirit (and the darker side of entrepreneurship)

If you look at the new entrepreneurial class, the people making new money today in America, they’re also just rewarding experimentation. [. . .] I think they’re saying, ‘Go try something new. Go for the fast fail. Go put something out there.’ Because that’s their world and they want to see the art world act more like that. – Stephen Reily, Co-Chair Creative Capital

In the above excerpt from the Art Basel panel, Stephen Reily of Creative Capital – a US-based non-profit that utilizes a venture capital model to support artists – uses language typically associated with artistic production (e.g. ‘experimentation’, ‘try[ing] something new’, and ‘go[ing] for the fast fail’) to describe the qualities of what he calls ‘the new entrepreneurial class’. This use of vague artistic tropes to describe an entrepreneurial spirit is quite common in mainstream discussions of entrepreneurship (e.g. Bova, 2017). For example, in a 2011 interview with Founderly, Silicon Valley billionaire entrepreneur Steve Blank proclaimed that entrepreneurs, ‘should understand that even though they might be engineers or MBAs, they’re not. Founders are artists. Artists in the true sense of the word. Artists like Michelangelo and Picasso and Beethoven’ (Blank, 2011). Here, Blank is appealing to a Kantian conception of artistic genius, situating the entrepreneur’s ‘artistry’ in a realm beyond the rational or explainable, while advancing a model of artistry that is explicitly white, Christian, and European. As the descriptive boundaries between (white) artistry and entrepreneurialism are increasingly blurred in mainstream entrepreneurship discourse, we are witnessing a concurrent desire to see entrepreneurialism and entrepreneurial risk-taking by prospective AFSC grantees. This is evidenced, in part, by the proliferation of entrepreneur-centric grants by AFSC organizations, grantmaking geared toward helping artists deliver social impact ‘at scale’ (e.g. Upstart CoLab), and the deployment of novel terms like ‘Artepreneur’ to describe ‘people who pursue their social mission through artistic means and create models that are innovative, scalable and measurable’ (Heinecke, 2019).

In Unmasking the Entrepreneur, Jones and Spicer (2009) argue that the entrepreneur should be thought of as an empty signifier – a ‘fantasy which coordinates desire’ (p. 38). The resulting slipperiness of ‘entrepreneur’ as signifier means that the term is not only constructed differently depending upon social context, but that it can be (and is) mobilized in pursuit of different political, economic, and social outcomes. The authors note that despite this, the entrepreneur – and entrepreneurship in general – tends to be associated exclusively with positive outcomes like moneymaking and innovation, as well as white male celebrity entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and Richard Branson. And yet, Jones and Spicer caution that we must not ignore ‘the darker side of the entrepreneur and entrepreneurship’ (p. 1). To illustrate this, they point to the photograph on the cover of their book. In the image, a homeless Black man sits on a sidewalk in a major American city, huddled under a blanket, holding a sign. The man’s sign states that he is not a beggar, but rather an entrepreneur whose business is cleaning car windows. There is much to unpack from this image. On a material level, it reminds us that the practice of entrepreneurship is embedded within the violence of racial neoliberalism, where entrepreneurship (in its true sense) is more likely to be a hustle – a product of desperation – or a failure – given the high costs of risk-taking for people with few resources – rather than the fairytale of the young genius with a successful startup company who likely had resources behind him somewhere. It shows that ‘risk-taking’ can have serious economic consequences, particularly for the racialized poor within the neoliberal state. At the same time, the figure of the homeless man is not, despite his claims, discursively legible to the venture philanthropist as an entrepreneur. This is due to his class status (poor), his appearance (dressed in rags), the physical space he occupies (a street corner), and the type of enterprising activities he engages in (car window washing).

Furthermore, and while unaddressed by the authors, the decision to feature a Black homeless man engaged in this kind of survivalist entrepreneurship (Ranyane, 2015) as the embodiment of ‘the darker side of entrepreneurship’ is important for a number of reasons. As Levine and Rubinstein (2017) observe in the United States, entrepreneurs – defined, here, as the incorporated self-employed – tend to be white, male, and from high-income families. They also observe that entrepreneurs tend to engage in more ‘aggressive, disruptive activities [. . .] as youth’ (p. 21) including skipping school, using alcohol and marijuana, and theft. What they leave out of their analysis is that the types of behaviors that produce the white entrepreneur are the same behaviors that lead to the incarceration of Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies. In Canada, for example, Indigenous and Black folks account for 26% and 9% of the country’s prison population respectively, while only making up 4.3% and 2.8% of the general population (Chan et al., 2017). In this way, the ‘darker side of entrepreneurship’ might better refer to the ways in which race not only shapes whether or not someone is discursively legible as an entrepreneur in the moment (as argued by Jones and Spicer), but also how structural racism – including, for example, labor market segmentation (Galabuzi, 2006), racialized policing (Maynard, 2017), and the school to prison pipeline (Meiners and Winn, 2010) – redirects youth of color away from popular and celebrated white embodiments of ‘entrepreneurship’ toward ‘the darker side of entrepreneurship’ from the moment they are born. Venture philanthropy’s emphasis on a post-racial entrepreneurial spirit functions to obscure the material dimensions of this ‘darker side of entrepreneurship’. This erasure is successful in the AFSC context due to the unique ways in which ‘entrepreneurial’ discourse is commonly mobilized in regard to both racialized artists and nonprofits in general.

In the arts world, the ‘darker side of entrepreneurship’s’ taken-for-granted market orientation is made explicit in the recent burgeoning of arts entrepreneurship programs in universities and colleges. According to Bridgstock (2013), there are three distinct meanings of arts entrepreneurship present in these programs: (1) arts entrepreneurship as new venture creation; (2) arts entrepreneurship as ‘being enterprising’, (which refers to training students on how to recognize opportunity, improve resilience; and ‘entrepreneurial behavior’ in general; and (3) arts entrepreneurship as employability and career self-management. Each of these meanings of arts entrepreneurship reconstitutes the artist as a market subject who is expected to fend for themselves in an increasingly precarious economy. For racialized AFSC practitioners competing for philanthropic grants, the entrepreneurial spirit can be understood as a spirit of survival within a post-racial meritocracy. Similarly, nonprofit efforts to become more ‘entrepreneurial’ are often a product of deficits in funding caused by state rollbacks. As organizational energy and resources are expended on securing funds rather than core programming, other civil society organizations are reconstituted as competitors for limited grants, rather than partners – a phenomenon that Stirrat (2006), writing in the international NGO context, calls ‘competitive humanitarianism’. This competition leads to a well-documented phenomenon known as ‘advocacy chill’ whereby non-profits, forced to focus solely on organizational survival, develop a fear of advocating for their client base, as their clients’ interests might conflict with those of their funders (Scott, 2003).

It becomes clear, then, that when applied to AFSC organizations and practitioners, the spirit of ‘entrepreneurship’ signifies little more than learning to fend for oneself in the post-racial marketplace. ‘Risk-taking’ and ‘experimentation’ – to use Reily’s words – do not apply to artistic content by venture philanthropists but to strategies of survival. Likewise, ‘creative solutions’ function as code for de-politicized innovation by AFSC organizations within a market-based post-racial model of social welfare. In this way, the ‘spirit of entrepreneurship’ functions as an ‘anti-politics machine’ (Ferguson, 1990), removing politics and race from that which it touches. In this particular case, racial neoliberalism’s assault on the welfare state, its elevation of technical solutions to racial injustice, and its emphasis on the post-racial individual is reframed as cultivating an ethos of ‘entrepreneurialism’, ‘artistry’, and ‘risk-taking’. The discursive limits placed on what is understood as ‘entrepreneurial’ or ‘artistic’ is additionally problematic in the case of AFSC organizations that advocate for racially and economically marginalized groups as it reinforces a politics of survival based on market-based solutions (Mitchell and Sparke, 2016). Taking the ‘artist entrepreneur’ as model, it is implied that the most marginalized must learn to fend for themselves. However, this politically limited conception of ‘risk-taking’ and ‘thinking outside the box’ should not be surprising considering the aforementioned emphasis on metrics, measurement, and SROI. If venture philanthropy metrics demand a strictly economistic conception of social value, how can they possibly make room for AFSC organizations to truly engage in ‘experimental’ social change practices that likely will not be legible to funders both in terms of metrics (or lack thereof) or politics? This proliferation of venture philanthropy logics highlights the ways in which AFSC philanthropy is embedded within, and extends, the racial neoliberal state.

The philanthropist as investor (and the racist savior fantasy)

On November 9th, 2017, Business for the Arts [BftA] – a Canadian charity that advocates relationship-building between the business community and arts organizations – hosted its 39th annual Arts Awards Gala at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario. Promoted as ‘one of Canada’s most prestigious and long-standing events’ (Business for the Arts, 2017), the Gala event brought together 300 prominent Canadian business and arts leaders ‘to celebrate extraordinary contributions and commitment to the arts sector through philanthropy’, and ‘better collaborate to design healthier communities for years to come’. The exclusive black-tie affair included a cocktail reception, a three-course dinner, international performers, a dance party, an awards ceremony, and speeches. Attendees were able to purchase an individual ticket for $1250 or table packages that ranged from $10,000 for arts charities to $40,000 for ‘Legacy Partners’.

BftA’s programs help Canadian community arts organizations acquire the skills and capacities to work with the private sector in order to keep their organizations afloat. And these skills and capacities, unsurprisingly, reflect the priorities and demands of the venture philanthropy approach, from an emphasis on ‘impact measurement’ and developing ‘SROI measures’ as part of ‘a more compelling, data-based approach to arts support’ (The Strategic Counsel, 2015: 5), to the exaltation of entrepreneurialism and entrepreneurial risk-taking. During the Gala, for example, Nichole Anderson Bergeron, BftA’s President and CEO, spoke at length about what she calls, ‘that force, that spark that some of us have – in fact, all of us have – but some of us actually listen to and strive toward, which is that gift of having an idea and making it happen’. She describes this entrepreneurial ‘spark’ as ‘what makes us human’, before adding: ‘as I look around the room – and I was looking at the guest list the other day – I realize that each one of you has done that in your lives’. Continuing along these lines, Bergeron announces that the main takeaway from the Gala is ‘the power of the individual to make change’. She draws on a few examples to illustrate what this ‘power of the individual’ looks like. For example, she tells the story of Jesse Thistle, a successful Metis writer and academic who spoke at a recent BftA event:

He suffered from drug addiction. He was homeless. He was on the streets. He ended up in jail. And while he was in that jail cell, he had a moment where he thought, ‘this is not me. This is not who I am. This is not who I’m going to be.’ And he made that change.

In sharing Thistle’s story, Bergeron brushes aside a Canadian context where centuries of settler-colonial policies and institutions have produced an epidemic of Indigenous homelessness and incarceration. She fails to mention that in Toronto (where Thistle works and teaches), Indigenous people make up 15% of the homeless population, yet only 0.5% of the city’s total population (Menzies, 2010). Likewise, she leaves out the fact that Indigenous people account for over 30% of Canada’s prison population and only 5% of the country’s total population (Bronskill, 2020). This framing of Thistle’s story furthers the neoliberal myth of the post-racial meritocracy, while underscoring the potential role of the arts in a post-racial ecosystem of individual uplift.

During the same speech, Bergeron also speaks of Mitchell Cohen, President of the Daniels Corporation, one of the largest real estate developers in Canada. Referring to Cohen’s presentation at a recent BftA event, she tells the audience:

He didn’t just focus on the success of what he’s done. He focused on the challenge and the struggle that he had to get there. He talked about his own personal life which was challenging and how he turned that into helping others and how that has made such a difference in his life. His big word was, ‘he wants to have social impact.’ That’s what drives him. That’s what motivates him.

Taken together, Thistle’s and Cohen’s stories highlight how, within the AFSC ecosystem, the ‘power of the individual to make change’ has two distinct meanings. For the racialized artist, it’s the ‘spark’ to pull themselves up by the bootstraps so to speak. It is the capacity to realize ‘this is not me’, and ‘make that change’ and become an entrepreneurial citizen in a post-racial meritocracy. For philanthropists like Cohen, on the other hand, this ‘spark’ refers to the ability to ‘create a social impact’ within poor communities of color through philanthropic ‘investment’. In this way, both the racialized artist and the wealthy (white) philanthropist are key figures within this post-racial story of the ‘power of the individual to make change’. As one Gala speaker later asserts: ‘I stand on the shoulders of great artists, but also great philanthropists. And the reality is, whether today or in the past, great art doesn’t exist without the two coming together’. But how do the two come together and what does it look like?

Venture philanthropy discourse frames the relationship between the white wealthy philanthropist and the racialized artist using the language of finance capital. Impact is reframed as (social) return, grants as investments, evaluation as performance measurement, and philanthropists as hands-on investors (Saltman, 2009). During the Gala, for example, the evening’s host described the event as ‘[a celebration of] some of the most important and innovative investments in arts and culture in [Toronto] and in [Canada]’, while BftA’s flagship mentorship program is appropriately named artsvest. The use of this language is important because ‘the vocabulary we use to talk about the economy in particular, has been crucial to the establishment of neoliberal hegemony’ (Massey, 2013: 4) and, I argue, AFSC’s extension of the racial neoliberal project. We see this language in use in the work of Social Venture Partners [SVP] Toronto, a philanthropic organization that recently selected ArtStarts TO – a Toronto-based AFSC grantee that, according to their website, ‘inspires and cultivates social change by bringing professional artists and Toronto residents together to create community-building art projects in all artistic disciplines’ (SVP Toronto, 2019) – as one of their three ‘investees’. In addition to referring to their community partners like ArtStarts TO as ‘investees’, SVP uses a ‘venture philanthropy model’ to help Toronto philanthropists ‘make smart and leveraged investments in vetted organizations’. ‘Vetting’–a term used in the venture capital world to refer to carefully selecting an investment in order to generate the greatest possible return – is conducted by an SVP investment committee, thereby ‘ensuring that your money is wisely invested’. Venture philanthropists are not simply looking to ‘give’ or ‘donate’; rather, they are selecting the ‘investment’ that will provide the greatest return even if, in the case of AFSC philanthropy, that return is social rather than financial.

It is important to consider what types of AFSC organizations can perform what is necessary to become ‘vetted’ by SVP or similar venture philanthropy organizations. SVP’s ‘investment committees’ are composed of wealthy, primarily white, philanthropists who have volunteered their time to participate in this vetting process. SVP committees begin by learning about the issue they are funding, as well as about what good grantmaking practice looks like, solidifying their identity as outsiders, albeit outsiders with all the power. Together, they review letters of inquiry and proposals from community organizations, and debate whether an organization is a ‘safe investment’. In the case of AFSC philanthropy, AFSC organizations must demonstrate their merit as a worthwhile investment through a written application, which requires significant cultural capital, alongside the performance of a kind of depoliticized approach legible as ‘a safe investment’. Similarly, racialized power relations shape BftA’s artsvest sponsorship model. As one Gala attendee explains, ‘if you have a project that you’d like to do, go and find a business sponsor, and tell that sponsor that for every dollar they will provide, you will be able to get a dollar from this fund’. But who can simply ‘go and find a business partner’ and present themselves as a ‘safe investment?’

It is also worth noting the racialized dynamics of philanthropic ‘vetting’ in practice. In the case of SVP, vetting committees are invited to the community organization’s workplace to meet staff and board members, and witness their work firsthand. SVP centers this philanthropist ‘experience’ in their promotional literature, claiming that ‘[SVP] partners consistently say that participating on an investment committee is one of the most rewarding experiences at SVP’ (SVP Toronto, 2019). Likewise, BftA’s artsScene program emphasizes volunteerism and patronage, and connecting young business professionals with volunteer board positions with arts non-profits. In this way, the venture philanthropy model’s emphasis on ‘vetting’–particularly within AFSC context – not only reinforces racial boundaries between, and discourses of, the white hands-on investor/philanthropist and the racialized grantee who must present themselves as a ‘safe investment’, it also facilitates (and often encourages) arts philanthropists to live out charitable/savior fantasies, using poor communities of color as ‘the dumping ground for humanitarian ideals and fantasies’ (Kapoor, 2012: 13).

Conclusion: Racial neoliberal philanthropy

In this article, I have challenged the characterization of AFSC philanthropy as a ‘progressive turn’ in arts philanthropy borne out of a better empirical understanding of the social impact of the arts, as well as a more enlightened philanthropic community. Focusing on the Canadian context, I contend that AFSC philanthropy is a form of racial neoliberal philanthropy that is a response to, yet further entrenches, the racial inequalities and ‘post-racial’ ideological foundations of neoliberal capitalism. This argument builds on extant critical work that highlights how philanthropy (as a social welfare mechanism) rationalizes austerity policies and reallocates public dollars toward causes undemocratically designated by the wealthy. It also contributes to what Raddon (2008) calls the ongoing ‘erosion of social rights’ –a cultural shift in philanthropic discourse that has transformed citizens from equal rights bearers into two classes: the venerated (white) hands-on philanthropist/investor, and the less privileged person of color who consumes services/investment. This cultural shift has also elevated philanthropy above social and community values such as paying taxes, grassroots social organizing, caring for family and community, and public expenditure as social welfare tool. However, the concept of racial neoliberal philanthropy further captures the particular forms of philanthropic organizing that, while intended to combat racial inequities and injustices, function to consolidate and advance an explicitly racial neoliberal project even as it articulates differently at different moments.

Scholars have drawn on Gramscian work to highlight how philanthropy – and the realm of civil society more generally – functions as a tool of hegemony, whereby the capitalist class maintains its control of the market, obscuring exploitation and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few (e.g. Morvaridi, 2012). In this way, philanthropy functions as a tool to maintain elite domination of politics by consensus rather than force. What racial neoliberal philanthropy highlights is how this is a racialized process as well. Racial neoliberal philanthropy refers to the ways in which the violence of austerity policies and the accumulation of philanthropic assets (Saifer, 2020) are felt differently in poor communities of color, and how concurrent tax reforms produce a context where wealthy (often white) philanthropists are motivated to invest money in the cultural forms of poor communities of color as a mechanism of social change, thereby reproducing pernicious discursively constituted racial hierarchies and stereotypes of the benevolent white savior. Racial neoliberal philanthropy highlights how grants that support individual and group uplift in poor communities of color through market-based means are simply promoting strategies of survival, albeit coated in a discursive veneer of ‘creativity’ and ‘artistry’. Grants are temporary – they must be spent rather than invested. So, while this artistic agility is needed to secure the grant, once an AFSC artist or organization has received it, they are, in fact, kept on a very tight leash. Finally, racial neoliberal philanthropy demonstrates how organizational responses to racial inequities and injustices can actually further entrench racial difference and racial hierarchies by framing themselves as seemingly ‘beyond race’.

Related to this last point: it is important to note that this analysis focused specifically on the institution of AFSC philanthropy rather than the grounded practices of the artists and arts organizations funded by AFSC philanthropy. While I have attempted to outline how the phenomenon of racial neoliberal philanthropy is constraining, I recognize that it does not ‘confront . . . docile bodies but the situated cultural practices and sedimented histories of people and place’ (Moore, 1999: 658). Following this, the most critical extension of this research would be an examination of the cultural politics of AFSC philanthropy (e.g. Da Costa, 2015; Li, 1999) grounded in place. In other words, how does AFSC philanthropy materialize through grounded struggle and, following this, how do AFSC interventions function as sites of contestation carved out through situated cultural practices?

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Adam Saifer

Author biography

Adam Saifer is a postdoctoral fellow at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His research draws on theories of capitalism, nation, and race to critically examine the possibilities, limits, and tensions of philanthropy’s role in fighting for social and economic justice.

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Racial neoliberal philanthropy and the arts for social change

Abstract

Keywords

Main document

Arts funding, social change, and race in Canada

Racial neoliberalism

Neoliberalism, nonprofit marketization, and philanthropy

Venture philanthropy, the arts for social change, and racial neoliberalism

Demonstrating impact (and racialized citizens as burdens to the taxpayer)

The entrepreneurial spirit (and the darker side of entrepreneurship)

The philanthropist as investor (and the racist savior fantasy)

Conclusion: Racial neoliberal philanthropy

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iD

Author biography

References