Maine Arts Commission does more with less

When life handed the Maine Arts Commission lemons, it made lemonade. Really good lemonade. At a time when other states were bringing watered-down Country Time to the table, Maine was working on the policy equivalent of Snapple.

Drastic funding cuts led to the unique partnership between the arts commission and state government, and Maine managed to do more with less. This is one of the reasons why a researcher for the Wallace Foundation in New York, N.Y., has chosen to study Maine as one of three states in the nation whose arts agencies are taking innovative approaches to their state political leaders and publics.

“I’m particularly interested in this idea of partnering with other cultural agencies to make a case for the arts and culture as important and valued in terms of state government,” said Julia Lowell of the RAND Corp., the principal investigator on the project. “It has proved to be extremely beneficial. … Maine is the only state in the country that I know of – other states in the country have partnerships – but this is one of the most successful and serious partnerships. These groups really are working together in a very positive way.”

The study is part of the Wallace Foundation’s State Arts Partnerships for Cultural Participation, START, initiative. The foundation aims to “expand learning and enrichment opportunities for all people,” and much of its recent work focuses on building arts participation. In addition to Maine, Lowell also is studying Montana. The third state has yet to be determined.

Lowell will examine four projects – the Maine Arts Commission’s Discovery Research Program, Partners in Arts and Learning, New Century Community Program and the Blaine House Conference on the Creative Economy – and the way in which they “may be helping to integrate the arts and culture more fully into Maine communities, and thus into the creative process.”

As part of the study, Lowell will track the changes that the arts commission has made in recent years, and the way in which the Maine experience may serve as a model for other states.

Until 1996, the Maine Arts Commission was primarily a grant-giving agency. But when its primary funding source, the National Endowment for the Arts, came under fire for supporting controversial exhibits and artists, Congress slashed its budget. This didn’t have much of an impact on larger states, which draw from a variety of sources for their funding. But for smaller states, such as Maine, the cuts were dramatic.

At the time, a handful of large arts organizations in the state received the lion’s share of funding, but that was no longer feasible, according to Maine Arts Commission Chairman John Rohman. This “changed the whole philosophy of what the arts commission was,” he said.

The agency found itself at a crossroads, according to former chairwoman Suzanne Olson. It could continue to give grants to the usual recipients on a much smaller scale, or it could re-evaluate its role.

“We had a full staff of people, and a whole lot less money to give out in grants,” Olson said.

So the staffers hit the road, traveling to Maine towns, plotting a map of areas that had already received grants, and working to find ways to reach out to underserved regions. The discovery research program, which allows communities to identify and catalog existing resources and people involved in the arts and humanities, was in its early phases, and the results were encouraging.

But when they looked at the map, commission members realized they hadn’t been serving all of the children in the state, Olson said. They developed Partners in Arts and Learning, PAL, which gives matching grants to individual schools for arts education programs. It didn’t take legislators long to see the benefits of PAL in their communities, and when budget time came, they appropriated funding for the program.

The New Century Community Program built on the success of that, and it called on diverse agencies in the arts and humanities to collaborate, rather than compete, for funding.

“One of the things [that happened is] all of these agencies started talking to each other and found a lot of common areas of interest,” Lowell said. “If we work together we can be a lot more effective than if we separately are trying to scurry for funds. … This is surprisingly difficult to find in state government.”

In recent years, the commission has taken the lead with the Blaine House Conference on the Creative Economy, partnering with Gov. John Baldacci to show the ways in which the arts and culture can stimulate the economy, and to show Maine communities how they can foster this growth.

It is too early in the study for Lowell to make any concrete conclusions, but she said the Maine model appears to work because it takes a bottom-up, rather than a top-down, approach.

“The kinds of things being funded and supported … are things that average people care about, and that helps a lot,” she said.