Lights, stage and sound equipment, tools, salaries, and more.
The show doesn’t go on at Mill Mountain Theatre in Roanoke without these behind-the-scenes necessities.
But the pot of money for these items — considered the theatre’s operating budget — isn’t typically a glamorous fundraising ask.
“It’s not nearly as interesting or exciting to help pay for the lights as it is to help pay for a program that is public facing or seeing the tangible results,” said Suzanne Cresswell, the theatre’s director of development.
Cue the Roanoke Cultural Endowment, a public/private fund created in 2015 to help provide at least 25% of the not-so-exciting operating costs for Roanoke’s arts and culture nonprofit organizations. Its mission is to be a stable monetary support for these groups, through fundraising, so that they remain vibrant.
The endowment’s aim is to reach $20 million and then, to dole out the funds in three-year grant cycles to organizations that apply and qualify.
Now, nearly eight years after fundraising began, the endowment is nearly halfway to its goal.
As of the end of 2024, its board members, along with friends of the endowment and the Roanoke arts community, raised approximately $7 million. Roanoke City contributed $200,000 during the year, for a total of $1.85 million since 2017.
“I feel like we have a lot of good momentum,” said Shaleen Powell, the endowment’s executive director, who took the helm in 2015 when the 501(c)(3) organization was in its infancy.
Getting to this point has taken work. Roanoke leaders and residents began discussing the idea of building a nest egg for sustainable arts funding in 2012. The group considered a variety of fundraising models. The idea of a large endowment fund for operating expenses, fueled by government and private donations, was a novel initiative, seen mostly in cities larger than Roanoke, said Douglas Jackson, the city’s arts and culture coordinator.
“This is not common for a city of our size, but neither is the amount of [arts and cultural] assets we have for a city of our size,” Jackson said, listing the symphony, opera, ballet, museums and other organizations in Roanoke. “It’s an arts capital for this part of the state.”
In most cases, they also found that a healthy nonprofit receives at least 25% of its operating budget from a dependable source, like an endowment.
But even with the many arts organizations in Roanoke, building an endowment to support them isn’t easy. It’s akin to contributing to a savings account over time.
“Endowment funds are the hardest to raise because you don’t have anything physical,” said Powell, whose background includes higher education fundraising. “We don’t have a building that we can put a name up on.”
Powell’s creative nature and love of the arts inspired her to take up the endowment’s cause.
“I like the challenge of creating something new,” said Powell, who plays the violin in the Roanoke Symphony. Her husband, J.P. Powell, is a musician and co-owner of several Roanoke restaurants. The Powells, along with their children, live in downtown Roanoke.
To fuel fundraising, board members and advocates often sell the economic benefits of having a strong arts and cultural landscape in Roanoke. According to a 2019 study by the nonprofit organization, Americans for the Arts, Roanoke’s nonprofit arts and culture industry had $64.2 million in direct expenditures. It supported 1,774 full time equivalent jobs and generated $6.5 million in local and state government revenue.
“I think the arts are underappreciated as an economic driver,” said Lucas Thornton, one of the endowment’s 10 board members and a developer of commercial and residential real estate in the city. “People tend to think of arts as charitable organizations. When you think about the success of Roanoke and where Roanoke can go, a vibrant and thriving arts community is a big part of it.”
Thornton is banking on the endowment reaching its $20 million goal in five years and going beyond that total.
“I think part of our success stems from the fact that Roanokers do appreciate the arts,” he said. “Our message it not hard. All of us benefit to the extent that Roanoke does well.”
The impact of COVID-19 on the arts industry locally and nationally was a real-time example of the need for a safety net for these organizations to remain vibrant, Powell said.
The pandemic also changed people’s spending patterns.
“People are living lives differently,” she said. “They’re maybe not going out in the same ways. They are curating their own experiences weekend by weekend instead of doing a full ticket series, so there are a lot of challenges placed on the arts world.”
Donors to the endowment are not expected to forgo their own giving to individual arts organizations. They are encouraged to give new money to build the endowment.
Also, the endowment accepts 10-year pledges and legacy gifts.
“Everything in the endowment right now is investing and rolling onto itself so it has a compound effect at this point,” Powell said. “It seems more real.”
Arts organizations make a big investment up front. Take the Roanoke Ballet Theatre, where dancers spend hours on rehearsals, stage set up and more before the revenue from ticket sales is even realized.
“Even though arts is a powerful economic power, we still need groups that are willing to invest up front so that we can create those things,” said Cari Koepplin, grants and developer officer for the ballet theatre.
“I think the collaborative spirit of it [the endowment] is really precious,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like every arts organization for themselves.”
And most all have the same needs.
“We’re hoping that the funding will help us to pay for those more immediate needs without having to do fundraising,” Cresswell of Mill Mountain Theater said. “If you can’t keep the lights on or can’t pay our employees, we can’t do the work that is outward facing.”
To be sure, Thornton said he and the other endowment board members don’t particularly like asking people for money.
“It’s not because we enjoy it,” he said. “Each of has a deep conviction that what we are doing is good and right. That’s its own fuel. We are this sort of umbrella that is designed to lift all of the arts organizations. That has been appealing to donors.”
