Why We Need to Stop Treating Arts Funding Like Charity
Arts funding is often treated as charity. In practice, it functions as civic infrastructure.
That distinction sounds semantic until you look at what it actually determines: who gets funded, what gets measured, what's expected in return, and which communities get reached at all. Philanthropy and civic engagement are usually discussed as separate fields, but I've come to think they share the same underlying failure. Both tend to optimize for compliance and familiarity rather than participation or innovation — and both end up reinforcing exactly the disparities they claim to be working against.
In 2019, I co-founded The Slants Foundation as a scrappy, volunteer-driven effort to support Asian American artists and the communities they work with. I had already spent over a decade in the nonprofit world and higher education, working with foundations from a development and communications perspective, and I knew that existing systems were insufficient for artists who wanted to drive civic engagement in a meaningful way.
We often get trapped in what we know because those frameworks are familiar, convenient, and easy. Even voter engagement in 2026 is still primarily reliant on techniques from 1826: door-to-door canvassing, phone banking, and field organizing models that predate digital identity systems, algorithmic targeting, and networked communities entirely. These methods were developed by other generations for a completely different technological and cultural landscape. They're still effective with certain groups. But there are large numbers of potential participants in democracy who could be reached through outreach, coalition-building, and engagement models that haven't been tried at scale.
We saw this directly. When anti-Asian violence spiked during the pandemic, we launched Rock Against Hate, a series of virtual events partnering rising artists like the Linda Lindas with legacy performers like Lea Salonga, working with grassroots organizers to bridge generations. The result wasn't just visibility — it drove measurable increases in first-time voter registration, enrollment in bystander intervention training, and donations to democracy organizations across the country. None of that happened because we ran a more efficient version of a phone bank. It happened because we built something the existing models weren't set up to do.
Our organization wanted to support the traditionally unsupported: people addressing controversial and timely issues through a new lens. Here's what running it has taught me about why institutions — in philanthropy and in civic engagement alike — keep missing this.
Why Civic Engagement Strategies Fail to Reach New Voters
Most grant processes weren't designed to be exclusionary. They were designed to ensure funds are used responsibly. But the actual mechanisms — multi-stage applications, detailed budget projections for work that hasn't been created yet, narrative reports written in grant-speak, review processes with no direct feedback if you're rejected — function as a tax on familiarity with bureaucracy, not a tax on the strength of the work itself.
An artist who has done this before, who knows the vocabulary funders expect, who has a fiscal sponsor or an accountant who's navigated it previously, moves through the process easily. An artist doing genuinely innovative work, working with a community that has never engaged philanthropy before, or operating outside traditional nonprofit structures, hits friction at every stage. This structurally selects for organizations that already possess institutional proximity, regardless of whether their ideas are more effective. This means the organizations closest to communities — the ones with the deepest trust and the clearest read on what's actually needed — are often the least likely to be funded. The bias toward "safe" and "traditional" forms ends up reinforcing the very structures many philanthropic institutions claim to be disrupting, even ones that describe themselves as practicing participatory grantmaking or trust-based philanthropy. The disparities grow. They don't shrink. Institutions end up rewarding navigation skill, not the quality of the work or the idea behind it.
The same dynamic shows up in civic engagement, just with different paperwork. A campaign or coalition that already knows how to run a phone bank, already has the relationships with established community organizations, already speaks the language funders and partners expect, will always look like the safer investment — regardless of whether door-knocking actually reaches the people most disconnected from the process in the first place. Ask anyone who has tried to navigate a nonprofit grant application process from outside the usual circles, and you'll hear the same complaint in different words: the barriers aren't about the merit of the work.
Designing Civic Infrastructure That People Can Actually Enter
Asian PaCIVICS, our civic engagement and arts partnership program, requires participating artists to work directly with community organizations on their projects. That requirement seemed simple when we designed it. In practice, it surfaced a problem most funders never encounter, because they rarely ask for this kind of collaboration in the first place: many artists don't know how to approach a community organization, and many organizations — even ones genuinely eager to work with artists — don't have an existing model for what that partnership should look like.
If we'd made the requirement and stepped back, we'd have replicated the same failure I wrote about after the Starbucks Korea controversy: checking a box for representation without building the relationship underneath it. So we built the connective tissue ourselves — models for what a successful partnership looks like, data from past collaborations, facilitated introductions, ongoing support through the life of the partnership rather than a single check-in at the midpoint. The requirement only works because we built the infrastructure to make it achievable. A mandate without support is just a higher barrier with better branding, whether you're talking about a grant condition or a civic participation goal — requirements without infrastructure simply relocate the barrier rather than removing it.
Why Metrics Fail to Measure Real Community Impact
Most philanthropic impact metrics are built to satisfy funders and institutions: attendance, dollars leveraged, media mentions, geographic reach. Civic engagement metrics often look the same: doors knocked, calls made, registrations logged. These numbers measure activity, not change. They tell you something happened. They don't tell you whether it mattered to the people it was supposed to serve.
The harder question — whether a project shifted how a community understood itself, or how it was understood by people with power over its future — is what's sometimes called narrative change. It rarely fits a spreadsheet, and it often doesn't show up until well after a funding cycle or election cycle has closed. But it's frequently the only kind of impact that lasts. Rock Against Hate generated attendance numbers, sure. What mattered more was the increase in people who'd never registered to vote, or never considered bystander intervention training, deciding the moment was theirs to act on. That's harder to report in a year-end summary. It's also the entire point — proof that what gets measured determines what gets valued, and most existing metrics are built for funders, not for the communities they claim to serve.
None of this is an argument against accountability. Funders have every right to know their resources are used well, and civic organizations have every responsibility to demonstrate real reach. What needs to change is who the accountability is actually for. Trust-based philanthropy, at its best, isn't the absence of structure — it's structure built around the people doing the work and the communities they serve, instead of structure built primarily to protect the institution writing the check or running the campaign.
A decade in, this is the throughline: the goal was never to make philanthropy more generous, or civic engagement more efficient. It was to make both more accurate — about what culture and participation actually require to grow, about who's positioned to know whether something worked, and about what we're really investing in when we fund the arts or organize a community.
The next phase of both philanthropy and civic engagement will be defined not by efficiency, but by whether institutions are willing to design systems that people outside them can actually enter.
The Slants Foundation supports Asian American artists and the civic organizations they partner with, including through Asian PaCIVICS. If you're a funder, organizer, artist, or organization interested in how trust-based models work in practice, simontam.org/civic-engagement-democracy has more on this work.
