Sunday, October 05, 2008
Wall Street's woes worry charities, arts groups
washingtonpost.com: "Financial services firms and their well-paid executives have historically been generous givers to museums, colleges, hospitals and social service organizations, both in New York and around the globe."
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7 comments:
Its only natural to think that the financial troubles being experienced at the higher levels will also trickle down to umbrella organizations. Hopefully the nonprofits have enough reserve to hold on. It would be awful for this to mark a downfall in artistic growth. The business people need to keep us around, because we offer an escape from everything "out there." maybe they'll go to strip clubs instead...
I'm probably going to sound like a bad person but something in this article really bothered me. "The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University said that in 2007, Americans gave $306.39 billion to charity. About 74.8 percent of that total came from individuals; 7.6 percent were from bequests; 12.6 percent was from foundations and 5.1 percent from corporations. " Even though charity is great and all right now the # 1 organization that needs our money right now is the US government. Charity is worthwhile and important but we need to stop being world police and worry about ourselves right now. Of course bush is singlehandedly responsible for this deficit but hey we all let him get elected so everyone should know who they are voting for before they vote.
"We could see an exponential increase in need and potentially fewer dollars coming in the door," Campbell said. Well then, what should we do about this? As an american I think it is our own self duty to begin to be selfish at this point and simply focus on america? once we are completely and fully stable we can then worry about helping other countries which I feel extremely passionate about as well, but we should come first in our situation. Tax is something I think this current election thrives upon and it honestly can go either way. If we, the middle class, need so much help... what about the crisis's happening all over the counrty? We need to stop, think about things and then act upon them.
So basically we are SOL... So we need to find a way to cut costs again and again and again, or we need to find more money. In this market, that may not happen. Evey one is tightening the purse strings. At least last year the NEA was able to get more funding. Let's hope that trend continues.
Most importantly, I am sure that a new administration will be able to over come these problems. (At least I hope so.) The question is, will they be too late because the current administration has done too much damage already. Once again, only time will tell.
it's so insane to see those strong standing companies like Lehman brothers or even goldman sachs to just fall down over night. there's no other kinds of news on paper but about the economy dying. and of course, it directly affects the arts group since they are being sponsored by a lot of them. i mean, obviously we are the obvious price cuts, but i hope we can all manage to survive thru this wisely.
This is just more evidence of an economic slow down. When people are losing money, the arts are the first things that are going to be cut from their budgets as food and gas prices continue to increase. I think that while this is a big problem, there is not much we can do about it except wait for this whole situation to blow over and hope that it didn't cause too much damage.
The government should focus more on the economic situation than on helping poor money-hungry theaters make a profit. I think that theater is vital to our society, but in that case, we need a society to support it.
i am going out on a limb on this one and saying, "GOOD!"
some of the best art in history comes from the most financially troubled times. the only period in american history were there was an National Theater program was during and after the great depression. i think more interesting and thoughtful things are going to come out of this "financial disaster" and more of the BS spectacle will go away.
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