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WE’RE LISTENING: THIS IS WHAT WE HEARD
we’Re listening: this is what we heaRd
2) Funding Pipeline
If this past year was an exciting time for Black content with the mega box office success of Black Panther, it was also a frightening time in public media as the Trump administration threatened to eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by phasing out its funding, as well as that of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. These threats compounded the already precarious situation in which many non-commercial content producers find themselves. It underscored the need for reevaluating existing financing and funding structures for Black content.
challenges with fOundatiOns
At the summit, media producers and funders alike lamented the lack of consistent opportunities in the funding pipeline and cited money as the primary cause of filmmaker attrition, i.e. the phenomenon of first-time producers never returning to make
a second film, and/or experiencing lengthy gaps between content production. In addition, creatives expressed fatigue around having to submit several applications to different foundations, often times answering the same questions over and over again with little guarantee of success. Funders
such as Lauren Pabst of the John T. and Catherine S. MacArthur Foundation concurred that there is a need to create systems for more equitable distribution of philanthropic funds and new entryways, so that the same seasoned media producers do not receive the bulk of funding every time. She used the example of the MacArthur Foundation, realizing that their rolling media grants resulted in the same grantees year in and year out, revised their grant making process. They first included an open call for applications
and broader publicity of their media grants
and later settled on a partnership methodology wherein regional media organizations identify and redistribute funds to promising content producers on the ground.
Even with these reforms in philanthropy, however, panelists and audience participants agreed that foundation support has inherent shortcomings. Farai Chideya highlighted there simply is not enough money in philanthropy to support all the content- worthy projects in the capital-intensive film and media industries. Foundation endowments only account for $800 billion of the US economy (Callahan 2018). Within this, foundations are only required to give away 5% of their endowments every year, an estimated $40 billion dollars. The majority of these funds go toward religion (32%), education (16%),
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