Portland Oregon Changed How It Funds The Arts. Small Arts Organizations Aren’t Happy

On paper, the Portland Japanese Garden should be a shoo-in to receive money from the city’s new Office of Arts & Culture to help cover basic expenses.

Opened in 1967, the garden hosts a wide array of Japanese cultural programs across its 12½-acre grove near Washington Park. The nonprofit features three cultural centers: the Japan Institute (which opened in 2022 to strengthen the garden’s international relationships), an art and performance gallery, and a traditional tea house originally shipped in pieces from Japan. The garden takes part in Arts for All, a program that offers discounted admission for anyone with an Oregon Trail food assistance card.

Given all that, senior donor relations manager Valerie Egan wants to know why the garden was left off of the Arts Office’s list of GOS, or general operating support, grant recipients released Oct. 30. So does the Japanese Garden’s board of directors.

“It was nothing advertised publicly on the calendar that you could compete for,” Egan says. “I’m sure we are not the only organization where board members are like, ‘Why weren’t we considered for these grants?’”

As WW has previously reported, Oregon Contemporary director Blake Shell wrote an open letter Nov. 1 signed by 15 of the Arts Office’s 80 GOS grant recipients, voicing concern about the reduced amounts awarded to 45 smaller arts organizations in 2024 while six of the city’s largest arts institutions got award increases.

The Portland City Council voted last year to end its long-standing contract with the Regional Arts & Culture Council to manage the city’s arts dollars. One of the council’s chief criticisms of RACC stemmed from a lack of transparency in how it made funding decisions. When it formed the Arts Office this past July, the city pledged to be more formula-based in its disbursements than RACC.

But the Arts Office’s new formula now irks the small orgs, which feel left in the dark by the new process.

Egan, as well as Shell and the others who signed the letter, stressed no one resents larger organizations getting money they need. Rather, they have concerns about the city’s GOS grant process in its first year since decentralizing the award authority RACC once held.

“Smaller arts organizations are a key part of the overall arts ecosystem,” Shell wrote. “To be clear, we are not against giving larger groups more funding, but in this case, smaller organizations’ funding was decreased significantly despite an overall increase in available funds. We are asking you to retain the funding small organizations were counting on based on historical giving from the city.”

The city argues that its new method of funding organizations creates a more equitable process to sustain the city’s myriad creative centers. But many of Portland’s smaller arts organizations say the shift in who decides their funding has led to the exact opposite result, leaving them less money for the following year than expected.

According to emails this fall between the Arts Office and the smaller arts organizations, the city applied a formula: Organizations would get the same “base awards” for general operating expenses like rent and payroll that they received the year before. The big difference is this year’s “investment awards,” tacked on to the base awards. The city decided organizations would get investment awards equivalent to 40% of their base awards.

Previously, RACC distributed investment awards through a separate competitive application process, unlike the city whose new black-and-white formula for investment awards ultimately calculated lower amounts this year for many smaller recipients.

In an Oct. 30 email, Josh Hecht, artistic director for Profile Theatre, asked the Arts Office about its process for granting investment awards after his organization was notified it would receive 16% less funding than it did last year.

Grants program manager Jeff Hawthorne of the Arts Office wrote back that investment awards should be treated as a bonus, not a guaranteed amount that organizations could plan for ahead of time, because they are “contingent on many factors beyond our control, including Arts Tax collections, future budgets, and future priorities adopted by City Council.”

Arts Office director Chariti Montez wrote to Oregon Contemporary’s Shell in an email Nov. 1 that investment awards “have always fluctuated from year to year depending on the resources available.”

The smaller arts organizations also complained about the city’s application process, arguing it was rushed, resulting in a process that lacked the transparency the city promised when it replaced RACC with a funding system fueled by public dollars.

There was no open application process for the 2025 fiscal year, which could have given recipients a chance to tell the city about their funding needs next year. Instead, Montez tells WW, the city sent RACC’s award recipients for 2023–24 a one-page questionnaire on Aug. 29 that was due little more than a month later, on Sept. 30. The organizations were asked to demonstrate how their programming drew in people historically underserved by the arts.

Egan says she is perplexed by what she sees as the Arts Office’s lack of transparency and failure to communicate with any organizations outside of RACC’s fold of previously funded recipients. “It’s disappointing to feel like [the city] gave out the money to who got it before and left it at that,” she says.

Montez concluded in her email to Shell on Nov. 1 that “the city remains committed to supporting the arts ecosystem—from individual artists and creatives to small, medium, and large arts organizations alike.” The city would “strive to secure additional funding,” she wrote, but she later clarified to WW that it was not a “promise or guarantee.”

Hecht and Shell were dissatisfied with the Arts Office’s responses and say they will take their frustrations into planned meetings with city officials Nov. 20 and 21.

“I do think that the City Office of Arts and Culture [is] run by well-intentioned, experienced and talented arts advocates who believe in the power of art and the necessity of a thriving arts sector in Portland,” Hecht wrote WW via email. “But having made a series of individual decisions, I think they have not properly grasped the impact of these regressive funding policies on the arts ecosystem as a whole.”

“We’re asked to do more with less,” Shell tells WW, “and then when we do, we’re given even less.”

As for Portland Japanese Garden, Egan says she will keep an eye out for the city’s next award cycle. Until then, she’s still trying to make sense of what to do in the meantime, she says.

“I’m not trying to be picky here, but don’t we care about equity in funding and trying to make it accessible to all these organizations, and not just the really obvious ones?”

Clarification: We have updated one of Egan’s quotes to more accurately convey her intent.