Doris Duke Charitable Foundation

How the Review Was Conducted

Overview

As part of the DDCF’s ongoing cycle of evaluation, the Arts Program periodically assesses every initiative, and no grant or initiative is renewed without an assessment by an independent consultant.

A Program Review offers a different kind of scrutiny, with attention shifting from individual initiatives or strategies to the Arts Program as a whole. Program Reviews are designed to assess program achievements, analyze changes in the field, identify areas for improvement, and define priorities and strategies for the program’s next phase of grantmaking. Each of the foundation’s programs conducts this type of review roughly every five years.

The core element of a Program Review is bringing together a panel of outside experts to discuss the foundation’s impact and make recommendations for the DDCF’s grantmaking moving forward. Extensive materials are prepared for the panel in advance to document the program’s strategies, outcomes and lessons learned, and to present an analysis of the opportunities and challenges facing the fields it supports. The panel’s findings are presented to the DDCF Board, which is then asked to endorse future activities proposed by the program staff.

The Arts Program has been involved in such a review since July 2006.

Preparation for the Review

The Arts Program gathered information,
commissioned reports and completed assessments
in preparation for the review:

• Field Conversations:

  With DDCF support, Dance/USA, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters and Theatre Communications Group convened field-wide conversations about the state of dance, presenting and theatre, respectively. Twenty-two conversations took place in 17 cities, involving more than 600 individual artists, management leaders, artistic leaders, board members and artist managers. All meetings were professionally facilitated, and the service organizations produced full reports of the conversations to be shared with the larger fields.
  
  

• Assessment of Endowment Strategy:

  AEA Consulting conducted a comprehensive survey and assessment of the Arts Program’s endowment funding strategy.
  
  

• Thought Piece on Endowments:

  The foundation commissioned a paper from Russell Willis Taylor, CEO of National Arts Strategies, to provoke a thoughtful conversation about both the benefits and challenges associated with endowments for performing arts organizations.

These reports and papers were shared with the expert review panel and are available under Program Review Resources. The panel also was asked to review prior assessments of Arts Program grants and initiatives; select outside materials on issues such as demography and changing patterns of social behavior; and tentative ideas for future grantmaking proposed by the staff.

Expert Review Panel

The panel was an aesthetically, culturally, geographically and racially diverse group. To encourage an expansive, forward-thinking conversation, the panel included a mix of arts practitioners and outside experts.

Members of the panel included:

• Philip Bither

  Senior Curator, Performing Arts
  Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN)

• Ronnie Brooks

  Director
  James P. Shannon Leadership Institute and
  Amherst H. Wilder Foundation Center for Communities
  (St. Paul, MN)

• Alan S. Brown

  Principal
  Wolf, Brown & Co. (offices in CA, CT and VA)

• Stephanie S. Hughley

  Executive Producer
  National Black Arts Festival (Atlanta, GA)

• Cynthia Mayeda

  Deputy Director for Institutional Advancement
  Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY)

• Clara Miller

  President & CEO
  Nonprofit Finance Fund (New York, NY)

• David Rousséve

  Artistic Director, David Rousseve/REALITY
  Professor of Choreography, UCLArts World Arts and Cultures Department (Los Angeles, CA)

• Molly Smith

  Artistic Director
  Arena Stage (Washington, DC)

• Clyde Valentín

  Executive Director
  Hip-Hop Theater Festival (Brooklyn, NY)

• Andrew Zolli

  Founder & Lead Partner
  Z + Partners (Brooklyn, NY)

Laura Mendeles of Wolf, Keens & Co. facilitated the panel meeting. Consultant Suzanne Sato summarized the panel’s discussion and recommendations in a report, which was presented to the DDCF Board on February 13, 2007 (see Program Review Resources for highlights of the report).