A Winter’s Tale: A Fundraiser Recalls an Exceptionally Chilly Reception from a Potential Donor
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Karen Brooks Hopkins and Kirsten Munro with Illstyle in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. Courtesy Karen Brooks Hopkins
Editor’s note: This is the fifth annual holiday post from Karen Brooks Hopkins, in which the president emerita of Brooklyn Academy of Music shares some end-of-the-year reflections from her career in fundraising. You can read Karen’s previous posts here.
As we stand on the brink of another holiday season, there is no denying that winter is here. This morning I really bundled up for the first time with thick gloves, heavy coat, warm hat, and woolen scarf. As I piled the layers on, it got me thinking about a past visit to a far-off location with some really severe weather. So as I shivered outside this morning—figuring we could all use a bit of levity right now—I decided that this year’s blog post would recount my strange and unexpected trip to… Siberia. Yep, that’s right, Siberia.
The visit was naturally connected to fundraising for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and any development professional worth their salt will travel great lengths to land that elusive gift. But honestly, even the most dedicated fundraiser has to question their own sanity when preparing to fly from Brooklyn to Siberia to further the cause! Here is how it all went down:
The fact is, when you work for a place like BAM, you never know where you might end up. Bruce Ratner, our former chairman, during his long battle to get the Barclays Center built on a large parcel of land very near to BAM, needed additional investment dollars, and somehow, this journey ended up taking him all the way to Moscow and Siberia, via the participation of Russian billionaire—and enormous basketball fan—Mikhail Prokhorov. Of course, when I learned that a billionaire was “moving in” next door to BAM, I made it a personal quest to get him involved.
It turned out that his sister, Irina Prokhorova, was not only an accomplished publisher, but she was also running his foundation and wielded approval over all of his philanthropic giving. Mikhail was a famous bachelor who had made his fortune in Siberian nickel mines. There were financial transactions he was involved in related to this business that he had successfully engineered, resulting in his massive wealth and inclusion in the group of Russian billionaires informally known worldwide as “the oligarchs.” Because of the origin of his fortune, his philanthropic foundation was incorporated in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. I, therefore, proposed an exchange project to Irina, and that was how Transcultural Express was launched.
Irina, to put it bluntly, was not an easy partner to work with. She had, despite her deep intellectual capacity, a suspicious nature and a rather cold demeanor. My American/Brooklyn humor and informality wasn’t exactly scoring points with her as I tried to negotiate this three-year endeavor. First, she wanted to ground the project in artistic events that would take place in both Krasnoyarsk and Brooklyn, and while we know that Brooklyn is, in fact, teeming with artists, I had no idea what we’d find in Siberia. We ended up with a very good film and visual arts plan for the first year, but it proved to be a struggle every step of the way.
Since the project was complicated, it required a disproportionately large amount of staff time for what turned out to be a decent and generous, but not transformative, amount of money. I insisted that we allocate a percentage of the grant to cover administrative costs, a common practice in fundraising. Irina was adamantly opposed to any administrative or management costs coming out of her grant and our discussions became more heated as time passed.
Irina suggested that I visit Moscow with Kirsten Monroe, a member of the BAM development staff who was leading the project, and to meet with her panel of experts to decide how best to handle the problem. Following that meeting, we would all travel to Krasnoyarsk to take a look at the events connected to the first year’s exchange. The so-called “experts” were all desperate to curry favor with Irina and the foundation, which felt like a trip down memory lane to the old Soviet Union. Predictably, on every major decision, the “experts” sided with Irina. Finally, after much debate, they agreed that each side (BAM and the foundation) would take a portion of the grant to cover their costs. This seemed bizarre to me since they, the billionaire funders, actually provided the cash to the foundation, but the process of working with them was so exhausting and bureaucratic that I finally agreed.
A few days later, we departed for Siberia. One stroke of luck in the whole series of events was that BAM had a parallel project with the State Department, Dance Motion USA, which was running at the same time as Transcultural Express. Dance Motion sent dance companies from all over the United States to participate in international residencies based in the developing world. During the time we were in Siberia, the fabulous Philadelphia-based hip-hop company Illstyle & Peace Productions was scheduled to perform as part of Dance Motion USA in Moscow, Ukraine and Siberia, so we merged them into our Prokhorov project.
When we arrived in Krasnoyarsk, I was stunned by the landscape. Somehow, I had expected Siberia to be straight out of Solzhenitsyn—giant, empty, desolate patches of land covered by snow, ice and gulags. Instead, to my surprise, it looked like Albany. I had served as Brooklyn regent on the New York State Board of Regents for the state’s education department from 2005 to 2010, which required a monthly visit to Albany, so when I say Krasnoyarsk definitely resembled Albany, I know what I’m talking about. Our hotel was sparse and depressing, and the weather was gray and very, very chilly. The environment, coupled with the cool reception from our hosts, had me questioning what, exactly, I was doing here, and whether this would all be worth it. After all, Irina and I had finally reached some common ground on the grant agreement, but there wasn’t exactly a lovefest between us, despite my effort to keep the fundraising relationship going—no matter how much frostbite I had to endure.
And yet, things began to thaw ever so slightly. Being in Siberia and feasting on the delicacies of the region (cold fish and cold borscht) put Irina in a much better mood. I think the lack of pretension in Krasnoyarsk and the massive gratitude of the local population for the foundation’s generosity to their city really cheered her up. When Illstyle—the remarkable high-spirited, athletic, hip-hop dance phenomenon—hit the stage, and the Siberian teenagers went crazy and responded to them like rock stars, I actually saw Irina smile. Once again, the power of the arts had triumphed. Perestroika via hip-hop cracked the Siberian ice.
Hmm… was now the right time for me to ask for the next contribution??
Happy Holidays, everyone—stay warm!
Karen Brooks Hopkins is president emerita of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Her new memoir, “BAM…And Then It Hit Me,” is available here.
