Photograph by Ben Rollins
On a recent Friday, more than a dozen nonprofit arts leaders logged into Zoom for a weekly discussion about the joys and challenges of running their organizations. Formed during the Covid-19 pandemic, the virtual meeting has served as a space where attendees can share resources with one another—from props to recent news to new grant opportunities—and invite each other to upcoming events.
It has also served as an outlet for the metro Atlanta arts executives to discuss how they’re each navigating ongoing funding challenges. From corporate sponsors to local, state, and national grants, annual funding they could previously set their watch by has contracted significantly in recent years. The resulting budget cuts come as arts participation remains below pre-Covid numbers, but labor and materials cost significantly more.
The weekly meeting doesn’t have a set agenda, but attendees are rarely out of topics to discuss. And, because they often rely on the same funding sources, the discussion typically unfolds organically. On this day, Waduda Muhammad, executive director for the advocacy group Georgians for the Arts, informs everyone that her organization recently held its annual retreat and was pleased to have both a Democratic and a Republican state representative in attendance. Bipartisan support, she says, is crucial to securing government funding for the arts in the future.
Alexander Scollon, managing director for Actor’s Express, chimes in. He says he had two major takeaways from talks with the lawmakers. For one, the oft touted statistic that Georgia has consistently ranked at or near the bottom of public arts funding in the U.S. is “not an argument that holds any water, and they do not care.”
For at least a decade, arts executives have cited the statistic with the hopes of showing that, despite celebrating itself as an entertainment hub, the state doesn’t do much to support homegrown nonprofits in the arts. But this messaging doesn’t seem to be working on legislators, who often cite their support of the arts through legislation such as Georgia’s film tax credit.
Scollon notes that the two lawmakers did, however, care about the media coverage the state had been receiving. “They referenced getting negative press and no positive press” from arts groups, he says. “And they would pull that out as reasons to not continue supporting programming, because they would say, ‘Well, remember, you were beating us up in the press about this thing?’”
“What kind of good press do they want us to give them?” Lisa Adler, cofounder of Horizon Theatre Company, responds. “I mean, really, what on earth could we possibly say?”
Scollon agrees. But he says the discussion let him know that organizations such as Georgians for the Arts and the newer coalition Arts Capital | Atlanta should “find additional ways to communicate with [politicians] around successes, and maybe sometimes in spite of the way that they treat the industry.”
Muhammad chimes in, too, noting that arts leaders could discuss funding cuts with more nuance. For example, the Georgia Council for the Arts didn’t cut $3 million in funding. The reduction is a result of federal Covid aid disappearing. Sure, it’s disappointing that the funds are going away, regardless of the reason. But why this funding is shrinking does matter.
Arts organizations are also facing shifting waters at the National Endowment for the Arts. For the 2025 fiscal year, the NEA comprises roughly $1 million of the Georgia Council for the Arts’ $4.9 million grant pool. But, earlier this year, President Donald Trump renewed his proposal to eliminate the NEA in fiscal year 2026 after failing to do so in his first term. Arts leaders worry that with Covid funding coming to an end and the NEA facing an uncertain future, the arts council would have only $976,356 remaining to distribute via art grants statewide. Representatives with the Georgia Council for the Arts declined to speak with Atlanta magazine for this story.
NEA funding cuts have already hit the arts organizations directly. In May, hours after the president suggested eliminating the independent federal organization, the NEA emailed hundreds of arts nonprofits to inform them that their grants had been terminated. NPR obtained a copy of the email, which read, in part, “The NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the president.”
Among the nonprofits that received the email was the Atlanta Film Festival. Christopher Escobar, the festival’s executive director, says the festival’s $20,000 NEA grant had already been received and spent. “I was blindsided by the fact that something that’s already a done deal was getting retracted,” he says. “They’ve yet to ask for it back.”
JoJasmin López, a board member for drawchange, says half of her organization’s $100,000 NEA grant was rescinded before the arts nonprofit received it. The organization, which provides arts therapy programming to impoverished youth, has an annual budget of less than $500,000, so the loss is significant. López says it will impact drawchange’s ability to bring arts to homeless shelters.
“There is no elsewhere. If there was a magic tree that I could go get $40,000 from, I would have been at that tree. That tree don’t exist. We’ve already cut our budgets so razor-thin that there’s nothing left.”
The funding challenges don’t stop there, though. In the days prior to the Zoom meeting, Fulton County had begun sending out emails that announced how much grant funding arts organizations would receive this year. Last year, the county provided $3 million in grants to local arts groups and artists, with recipients receiving between $1,000 and $50,000. But, earlier this year, the county’s board of commissioners voted to approve a budget with a $1.7 million cut in funding. The reduction means the county will provide $1.3 million in grants which will be spread out among an expanding number of arts organizations.
Mack Headrick, managing director of 7 Stages Theatre and leader of the virtual meetings, says the theater company’s typical county funding was cut by 60 percent. Other organizations say they experienced similar cuts.
This was expected. Arts leaders knew Fulton County was slashing arts funding to reallocate money toward fixing the Fulton County Jail as federally mandated in the aftermath of a Department of Justice investigation. Still, the emails with the reduced grant amounts from the county was yet another frustrating blow to the arts in Atlanta.
On the day of the Zoom session, many of these arts leaders say they face a new fiscal year that would begin in less than a week, on July 1, and that they are forced to consider making cuts to personnel and programming.
“There is no elsewhere,” Headrick says. “If there was a magic tree that I could go get $40,000 from, I would have been at that tree. That tree don’t exist. We’ve already cut our budgets so razor-thin that there’s nothing left. Georgia Power is not going to take less for their bill. There’s nothing to cut except for programming and people.”
• • •
In some ways, the pandemic was both a wrecking ball and a salve.
“We felt like we had the money we needed to do what we wanted to do,” Laura Flusche, executive director of Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA), says of Covid relief funding. “Even though we couldn’t open the doors for a long time, it was still like, Oh, okay, we can focus on the work.”
But nonprofit arts organizations have had to contend with the sluggish return of audiences even after restrictions were lifted. Alexander Scollon of Actor’s Express says he can’t fully blame people, although the trend is frustrating. Prior to the pandemic (during which he also became a dad), he went to the movies two or three times per week. Since the pandemic, he’s gone only three times. “We have seen a steady increase since returning from the pandemic, but we’re still about 35 percent down on single ticket sales from 2019,” he says. “Costs have risen pretty significantly, both in labor and material costs. Everything’s about 20 percent more expensive, so we’re having a really hard time balancing that.”
The theater company builds all the sets for its shows. But Scollon says the prices of materials have fluctuated significantly in recent years, making it hard to create a realistic budget. “We build five or six sets a year,” he says. “That can add up to $150,000 over the course of the year that we had initially budgeted at half that cost.” With small margins for each show, increased production and labor costs mean the nonprofit may spend more money to produce a show than it earns back in revenue.
The Friday Zoom calls started as a meeting for theater groups during the pandemic before expanding to the larger arts community. In 2023, The Lyric Theatre cited financial issues for closing abruptly in the middle of its 42nd season. The news rocked the arts leaders. In their weekly meeting, they confided in one another about their lack of reserves and how precarious the future felt.
For MODA’s Flusche, the conversation affirmed that her organization wasn’t the only one struggling. “I do actually think the camaraderie and the sharing of these challenges that this group has produced is extraordinarily valuable, because there were times when I thought MODA was the only one [struggling],” she says. “I thought, Oh my God, we’re the organization that just can’t figure it out. To discover that this is a systemic problem and that we all are impacted by the way the arts are funded is actually empowering, and it makes me want to keep going.”
“There is this sort of background myth of, like, Well, if the arts can’t stand on their own feet, then should we be propping them up?”
The arts executives quickly assembled an open letter and, eventually, founded Arts Capital | Atlanta with the hopes of creating more stable funding to prevent other companies from folding. The group, which meets weekly on Wednesdays and has a lot of the same participants as the Friday group, features representatives from more than 22 organizations but seeks to represent the approximately 210 nonprofit arts organizations operating in metro Atlanta. According to Arts Capital, 108 of these organizations are based in Fulton County.
After collecting data from 173 of these arts nonprofits, the group has calculated that it would need to raise $100 million to provide stability for the community. Organizers say this is the first local effort of its kind that is spearheaded by leaders within the arts community.
In December 2023, the coalition convened more than 100 people—including representatives from roughly a dozen foundations and nearly two dozen local arts organizations—for a “town hall” hosted by Moving in the Spirit, the youth-development organization based in Edgewood. Inside the nonprofit’s facility, arts executives anonymously responded to a real-time poll about their organization’s financial health.
“We asked the people in the audience, ‘How many months of operating reserve do you have?’” says Laura Hennighausen, Arts Capital’s facilitator. “How long could you survive if you lost a major grant?’ Those are questions that usually funders don’t really hear honest answers to.”
Arts Capital says only five of the arts nonprofits surveyed in metro Atlanta have an endowment. And 40 percent of organizations have zero dollars in operating reserves. Funding challenges aren’t exclusive to the smaller or lesser-known nonprofits, either. “I know of five that are moments away from closing, and some would blow your mind,” Headrick says.
Photograph by Mary Kelly
In 2022, MODA reported a revenue of $1.2 million, but the organization’s expenses totaled nearly $1.4 million. “We’re doing okay right now,” Flusche says. “I don’t think the prognosis for the next few years looks great. We, like many organizations, very much live month to month. Sometimes we’re in a better position than others, depending on what’s happening.”
Nonprofits seeking funding usually face a conundrum. They need to be honest about their finances, but if they’re too honest about their monetary struggles, they risk being seen as unstable and incapable of stewarding a donation. “In order to get a grant, you have to talk about how rosy everything is and how good you’re doing,” Headrick says. “You tell them how you’re impacting people. You never tell them what’s really happening on the financial side or the back side.”
Perhaps this is why the responses at the town hall elicited audible gasps. “The majority of these organizations have less than three months, [and] many of them have one month of operating reserve [or less], and funders just did not understand that,” Hennighausen says. “They thought it was better than that.”
• • •
Arts leaders cite the “culture wars” in the ’90s, as well as the 2008 recession, when discussing previous eras when funding for the arts was limited. For the latter, Georgians for the Arts’ Waduda Muhammad says the state’s arts funding “was cut by 80 percent, and it has not been restored since then.”
She joins others in echoing the sentiment that this period seems like an escalation from the struggles of the past. “This moment is a lot more catastrophic, just to be very clear,” she says. When funding was cut at the state level in 2008, arts organizations still had grant funding from the NEA, the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta, Fulton County, and the City of Atlanta to buffer the loss. Now, arts groups are facing reductions from all of the agencies at the same time in the same year.
“Georgia is the only state that has not restored its funding prerecession,” Muhammad says. “The conversation has been centered around funding ever since then.”
Still, the arts advocate thinks the community leans too heavily on the notion that Georgia has consistently ranked at or near the bottom of state arts funding nationally.
“If you’re going to stand behind the Oh my gosh, Georgia is 50th in funding, then my follow-up question is, What have you done to impact that?” Muhammad says. “Have you reached out to your representative? Are you attending these meetings that we offer?”
Muhummad says one of the biggest challenges is competing with larger arts organizations, such as the Woodruff Arts Center, or the larger entertainment ecosystem in Atlanta. “When we talk to elected officials and we’re like, ‘Georgia is not supporting the arts,’ they’re like, ‘Yes, we do. We have the film industry. We have all of these other major events that are happening.’ It’s like, no. Those are larger entities. What we are supporting and fighting for is for the small nonprofits.”
According to a data compiled by Arts Capital | Atlanta, 75 percent of arts nonprofits in Atlanta operate on a budget of less than $500,000 per year. For the 50 percent that have an annual budget of $5,000 to $150,000, losing a grant worth $20,000 could be paralyzing.
The Atlanta Film Festival’s Christopher Escobar says he believes it is important that arts leaders reframe the way they’re presenting their request. This is not a charitable bailout, he emphasizes. Instead, he says, it’s an investment in an industry that has significant economic impact. A 2024 study conducted by Americans for the Arts found that the nonprofit arts and culture sector generated $1.3 billion in economic activity statewide in 2022.
“There is this sort of background myth of, like, Well, if the arts can’t stand on their own feet, then should we be propping them up?” Escobar says. “I think it’s important to call that out. First of all, if this were the case in other instances, we wouldn’t have sports stadiums. We wouldn’t have utilities. There’s a whole lot of things, both essential and nonessential, that that logic is not applied to. Well, if K–12 and college-level sports can’t stand on their own feet without needing all of this fundraising and all of these government dollars, then maybe we need to rethink their model. No one ever says that out loud.”
Muhammad agrees. “We’re not just asking for money because we’re begging for money, we’re asking for money because we know that we play a major role,” she says. “So how can we increase our visibility to our elected officials?”
As government funding has been cut, some funders have emphasized that grants are only a portion of income that supports arts organizations. W. Imara Canady, vice-chair of the Fulton County Arts & Culture Council, points to individual donors as the “greatest opportunity” for funding growth.
On the Friday weekly call, Lisa Adler of Horizon says her theater company has seen a rise in donations from individuals as news about grant funding has spread, but they have also lost two-thirds of their funding from Fulton County and the Georgia Council for the Arts due to budget cuts.
Nena Gilreath, cofounding director of Ballethnic Dance Company, quickly chimes in to say that this isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Smaller organizations, especially ones run by and serving minority communities, don’t often have access to individual donors with deep pockets.
Angela Harris, executive artistic director at Dance Canvas, notes that her organization operates within the larger world of ballet, which has historically been exclusionary toward Black dancers. Because of systemic racism, Harris says, White organizations within ballet tend to have larger networks and access to wealthy donors. They also tend to have board members who can donate when the organization is in need of a financial boost. “If the boards of organizations don’t have those networks, you’re also running into the same problem, because a lot of the foundations you have to be introduced to,” she says. “You have to be brought into those foundations and put in front of them.”
Corporate sponsorship for arts organizations has also dwindled in recent years, creating a perfect storm. Many arts groups say they’d previously received large, annual donations from companies such as Mailchimp, Spanx, and Warner Bros. Discovery. In recent years, though, through acquisitions and changing corporate priorities, these funding sources have all but dried up.
• • •
In late June, Arts Capital | Atlanta established a fund at the Community Foundation for Northeast Georgia and actively began fundraising efforts with a goal of $100 million. The news came after months of internal discussions among the group regarding what an equitable share of resources could look like for Atlanta’s arts community.
Hennighausen says working with the Community Foundation for Northeast Georgia is the best fit for what Arts Capital wants to do with the fund. “They are flexible, they are innovative, and they’re willing to really offer a lot of great things for the nonprofit partners that we work with,” she says, adding that the foundation also provides a new and welcomed funding partnership as well as exposure to organizations that are based outside of the perimeter.
Mack Headrick of 7 Stages attends both meetings and says he often informs the more informal Friday group about the Wednesday discussions of Arts Capital. The latter’s meetings are more structured, focused explicitly on creating bylaws and committees that will help it achieve its $100 million goal.
Once a month, funders such as the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, The Imlay Foundation, and The Zeist Foundation join the meetings. Frank Fernandez, president and CEO of the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, says recent conversations among funders have centered around how they can continue to support arts organizations in the changing landscape. The funder’s annual support of local arts has included its management of the Metro Atlanta Arts Fund for nearly three decades.
“They are really starting to build some energy around figuring out how Arts Capital becomes a sector intermediary that really convenes the arts community, that advocates on behalf of the arts community in terms of what its needs are,” Fernandez says. “We’re very supportive of that model because we’ve supported it in other sectors successfully and think it’s a good way to support and create a healthier ecosystem, especially for the arts.”
Regarding Arts Capital’s funding distribution model, Dance Canvas’s Angela Harris says she expressed a desire for all of the arts organizations to get the same amount of funding, regardless of their budget size. “It doesn’t matter if you are a $5,000 organization or if you are a $3 million organization. Everyone gets the same amount of money,” she says.
Harris says this recommendation stems from a frustration with how funding has traditionally benefited larger organizations at a disproportionate rate. “Most funding streams—especially government funding—base the amount of funding that you’re eligible for on your budget size,” she says. “If your budget size is $300,000 and you’re eligible for 40 percent of your budget, and my budget size is $150,000 and I’m eligible for 40 percent of my budget, you’re going to get more money than me, no matter if I’m doing more programming.”
Ultimately, the coalition decided to base funding on budget size, but in an inverse manner, in which the smallest organization would be eligible for the most amount of funding. Hennighausen says that unlike the government-funded grants, this funding would not be competitive. Rather, any organization that is within metro Atlanta and meets “a very general criteria” would simply have to fill out a form to receive its share.
Scollon of Actor’s Express says this model could be “transformational” for the city, if fundraising is successful. “This idea that the smallest organizations would get the largest percentage of their budgets to support them and also—because there are so many of them—the most amount of money would go to smaller organizations is pretty exciting for these organizations that haven’t had an opportunity to have transformational gifts in their history.”
Headrick says he’s worked in arts administration for roughly 15 years. During this time, he’s heard every recommendation and tried every piece of advice about diversifying income for arts nonprofits.
7 Stages has made reduction and changes to the size, scope, and quantity of its fully staged productions due to reductions in funding. As labor costs have risen, it has had to rely more on part-time staff. There’s long been a notion that people in the arts should accept making less money because they get to do work they’re passionate about. But people’s mentalities around work changed during Covid, and they’re not willing to experience grin-and-bear-it suffering anymore.
Headrick says he’s felt the shift, on a personal level, having just turned 50. “There’s no way that you could possibly see everything that’s happening every weekend in Atlanta,” he says. “It’s amazing, but it’s been borne on the backs of the artists and the arts administrators for decades, and we’re not doing it anymore.”
This article appears in our September 2025 issue.
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Jewel Wicker
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