“A Huge Leap of Faith.” How a Nonprofit Theater Created a Relief Fund for its Actor Community

“The Real Queer Colors of Harlem,” a performance of Theatre of the Oppressed NYC. Photo by Ali Garber, courtesy TONYC

Theatre of the Oppressed NYC (TONYC) partners with community members to form theater troupes that create and perform plays based on their challenges confronting economic inequality, racism and other social, health and human rights injustices.

Like countless other performing arts organizations, its main source of revenue evaporated when the pandemic forced it to cancel live performances. Executive Director Meggan Gomez, who had been on the job for less than two years, found herself weighing a series of options, each one worse than the other. “I saw my peers laying off staff, furloughing people, and making pretty significant budget cuts,” she said. “I made the choice not to do that.”

Instead, with the help of funders, TONYC launched a $50,000 relief fund for its community of actors, many of whom come from vulnerable communities and experience housing and food insecurity. The theater is currently accepting applications, and will roll out a second fund next year, thanks to support from the Ford Foundation.

The formation of TONYC’s relief fund is a story of an organization with an operating budget under $1 million that prioritized the health of its key constituency during an unprecedented crisis. But it also provides an illuminating glimpse of what can happen when institutional funders let go of the reins and empower leaders serving vulnerable communities to allocate funding as they see fit.

“The only reason this relief fund became possible was because there were enough funders that provided us with general operating support,” Gomez told me. “If everything was program support, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything.” 

“Everyone is Getting Paid”

TONYC instituted a work-from-home policy beginning March 10, shortly before the city-wide pause was enacted. On March 20, it closed its office.

It was around this time that Gomez received her first email from a regional funder in response to the crisis. The New York City-based North Star Fund announced it would approve the renewal of all grants in progress and add $5,000 in relief funding. “The fact that North Star was very quick to react without knowing the ramifications of the pandemic was huge,” Gomez said. Soon after, the New York Community Trust and the Brooklyn Community Foundation (BCF) announced relief funds of their own.

Gomez and her team quickly realized that TONYC’s actor community would be most affected by the crisis. “These are people who’ve experienced homelessness and serious health issues,” Gomez said. “We knew they were going to be the hardest hit. If we couldn’t support them, then we shouldn’t be doing our work.” She sent a message to its community saying, “‘as long as we have money in our bank account, everyone is getting paid.’ Money is one thing, but people are impossible to replace.”

The money followed. Many of TONYC’s funders stepped up and converted program support into general operating support. Suddenly, the organization had a financial cushion, and TONYC’s relief fund was born.

Adventures in Crisis Grant Writing

With converted general operating support as seed money, Gomez turned her attention to supplementing the fund through additional grants. “This was a huge leap of faith,” she said. She didn’t know how much TONYC would be able to give away, or if other funders would buy into the idea in the first place.

But first, Gomez and her team needed a break. She instructed her team to take the week off—with pay. “It was important that we weren’t pushing ourselves to work harder,” Gomez said. “One of the lessons learned is that it’s necessary to take time for care instead of abusing ourselves for the sake of a deadline.”

After a week-long break, Gomez and Philip Santos Schaffer, TONYC’s development manager, began applying for grants. The exercise had its share of ups and downs. TONYC didn’t receive a relief grant from the New York Women’s Foundation or funding through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. That said, Gomez found the overall process bearable since she and Schaffer could easily repurpose its narrative for different applications.

TONYC received a Paycheck Protection Program loan, earmarking the funding for staff healthcare costs and covering salaries for time lost. Most critically, TONYC received emergency support from the New York Community Trust and the BCF, which it used to augment its actor community relief fund.

“We Didn’t Ask a Single Donor for Money”

All the while, the show, as they say, went on. In late June and early July, TONYC presented its performances of plays created and performed entirely over Zoom, including “3 on 1,” which explored the new world of attempting to access vital city services entirely online or over the phone. Gomez cited program director Sulu LeoNimm, community resource coordinator Liz Morgan and troupe coordinator Omari Soulfinger as “the architects of our shift to online programming.”

During this time, Gomez called TONYC’s funders, telling them how the troupe was responding, laying out its plans for the summer and beyond, and pitching the relief fund.

Gomez operated under the principle that she would create a budget with the expectation that her staff would get paid, and that the funding would eventually follow. “One of the things that was inspiring to our funders was that I prioritized taking care of our staff,” Gomez told me. “This gave our funders confidence that this was a thing that could happen. It gave them the opportunity to step up and support these values.”

In the early days of the pandemic, fundraising experts debated the wisdom and propriety of hitting up individual donors for support. Some said it was permissible; others disagreed. TONYC’s Gomez falls squarely within the latter camp.

“We didn’t ask a single donor for money,” she said. TONYC’s donors give $10-20 a month, and Gomez didn’t want to “ask for things at a time when everyone needs to be careful how they use their resources. That’s not part of our model.” (Gomez told me that TONYC hasn’t seen a drop-off in its monthly donations.)

COVID-19 forced TONYC to cancel its two main fundraisers this year—its 10-day Represent campaign in the late spring, and an in-person fundraiser in October. Gomez considered moving ahead with the events but quickly talked herself out of it. “I realized that one of the things that would make me insane is if I tried to plan these things while also realizing we had no idea what was going on.” Instead, she went to her board and asked members to dedicate some time to making individual asks in their circles.

TONYC will make a big ask at the end of the year, but won’t attach it to a specific fundraising goal. The message will simply be, “‘Here’s what we did, and if you’re compelled to give, please give,’” Gomez said.

Details, Obstacles, and More Funds

Gomez and her team also had to sketch out the fund’s details. How large should it be? How many people should receive it? Who would be eligible? Leadership chose the $50,000 figure because it seemed like a manageable amount. It was also “a nice round number,” Gomez said.

She and her team decided that funding would be open to any actor who worked with TONYC in the last three years and received a stipend or pay, families of actors who have passed away in the past three years, and actors who haven’t participated in a troupe in the past three years but were involved in another capacity, like volunteering or attending an advisory meeting.

Leadership initially envisioned a $50,000 fund with 100 gifts of $500. But under the proposed eligibility framework, approximately 250 actors would qualify for funding. Some actors would be left out, and the only fair solution, Gomez concluded, would be to implement a lottery system.

Gomez ran the plan by her actor community. Members uniformly agreed that anyone who applies should get funding, and the funding should be split equally. Gomez signed off on the plan, and the application went live the first week of August. When I spoke with Gomez, TONYC had 50 applications in hand; she expected that number to exceed 100.

The biggest stumbling block throughout this process was determining the best way for TONYC to pay recipients. “We normally pay our actors by check, but going to a physical place during a pandemic isn’t a great idea,” Gomez said. Gift cards are problematic, too, for the simple reason that “you can’t use one to pay your rent.” TONYC’s application asks applicants to list the best method of payment given their circumstances. Gomez told me that operations director Holly Sansom “has gone above and beyond to research other payment methods” while managing the execution application process.

Gomez said that the lessons learned from this first round will inform the composition of the second fund, which will likely go live in early 2021.

TONYC also created two separate funds for actors and staff who will work remotely until at least January 2021. The first is a $22,000 technology fund to provide 85 tablets to its actors. The second is a $17,000 fund that will give hourly staff $150 stipends for electricity, internet and cell phone charges so they can stay connected to the organization.

“The Work Would Be So Much More Impactful”

For years, organizations like TONYC implored funders to dial back onerous application and reporting requirements, expand general operating support, and commit to organizations on a multi-year basis.

Many didn’t, and in the process, they perpetuated a grantmaking model that “rewards people who can fundraise, not people who are doing good work,” Gomez said. Large organizations raise more money and secure large grants commensurate with their ever-growing operating budget, while funders “dock organizations that haven’t grown enough or shown enough fundraising chops. It doesn’t help anyone.”

To be clear, foundations were interested in advancing equity before the pandemic. “The words ‘equity, diversity, and inclusion’ were everywhere,” Gomez said. Rather, the problem was that funders would give grants to “big, predominantly white institutions for diversity initiatives that ultimately wouldn’t lead to anything.” Meanwhile, Black, Indigenous, and people of color-led organizations that were already serving diverse audiences at scale were getting crumbs. “If you gave a small nonprofit like this $100,000, the work would be so much more impactful” than that of their affluent counterparts, Gomez told me.

This pre-pandemic model, replete with red tape and skewed incentives, created “barriers in the fundraising process that reinforces white supremacy,” Gomez said. The data backs up her assertion—a 2017 study from Helicon Collaborative found that 4% of funding flowed to groups serving communities of color.

Then the coronavirus hit. It turns out the foundations could do many of the things diverse organizations were asking for after all. All it took was a global pandemic to light the fire.

“In the last four of five months,” Gomez said, “I have seen foundations saying, ‘Let’s get the money out of the door.’ It showed me they could release more money, and faster, if they had less restrictions on how the money is spent and on the arduous and long application process.”