Art of Fund-Raising Will Be Tested in Cultural Building Boom

Brother, can you spare a billion dollars? That’s the tab, conservatively calculated, if you add up fund-raising campaigns among cultural institutions seeking bigger and better buildings in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

It’s enough money to build the Getty Center all over again. But instead of relying on the bequest of a single oil magnate, these drives will be seeking dollars a harder way: one rich donor at a time.

The region’s pockets are deep enough, say veteran philanthropists and arts officials. But several also said they don’t expect every campaign to meet its targets--because when the stakes are this high, will and skill among the fund-raisers matter almost as much as wealth among donors.

The underlying challenge here “isn’t about money. It’s about leadership,” said Jack Shakely, president of the California Community Foundation, one of the state’s leading philanthropic organizations.

Even if all major campaigns do reach their goals, some arts leaders add, they fear a struggle that could squeeze smaller institutions out as donors ally themselves with the largest, sexiest buildings. And yet another peril could arise after the big buildings are finished, when organizations confront higher day-to-day operating expenses.

But the larger picture is positive, arts leaders and fund-raisers say. They suggest that Southern California has become so wealthy and culturally rich that the current menu of projects is a reasonable response to the resources and demand at hand. In fact, the most optimistic observers say the rising ambitions of so many institutions may signal a moment of arrival for the region.

“It is staggering when you add it all up. But there’s a kind of a cumulative energy that comes from people feeling good about the city maturing and advancing. It’s kind of contagious,” said Claire Peeps, executive director of the Santa Monica-based Durfee Foundation and a veteran administrator of arts organizations.

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The last time the region had so many high-profile cultural projects in the works was probably four decades ago, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Music Center of Los Angeles County and the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) went up between 1964 and 1968, each on land provided by a government agency. The combined private fund-raising for those projects, corrected for inflation, comes to roughly $300 million--less than a third of the target in the scramble for cash that’s about to begin.

LACMA and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles in Exposition Park are the largest players, each preparing to seek $200 million to $300 million. In LACMA’s case, some of the money will go to its endowment.

The Orange County Performing Arts Center’s push for a new concert hall is not quite halfway to its goal of $200 million. The Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and the Children’s Museum of Los Angeles will be seeking more than $100 million each, and projects at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood, the Petersen Automotive Museum across Wilshire Boulevard from LACMA, the Skirball Cultural Center in Brentwood and the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach add up to another $100 million.

Downtown L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, meanwhile, remains $20 million to $25 million short of its $275-million target. And finally, several other campaigns with targets under $25 million are running or soon to start. All this comes on the heels of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles having raised millions for the new downtown cathedral and various area universities regularly raising capital funds.

Though some of these efforts have been public for months or longer, most are still in the silent phase--that spell, often as long as a year, when fund-raisers quietly tap board members and longtime boosters. Thus, under the fund-raisers’ traditional rule of thumb--never kick off a public campaign until you’ve privately raised half the money--officials at those institutions aren’t talking about what they’ve secured so far.

At LACMA and the Museum of Natural History, officials say they may not make their campaigns public for another year or more. The public phases each will probably last several years, running parallel with construction work.

Government grants, which help most nonprofit cultural groups meet operating costs, aren’t expected to play a big part in the campaigns now unfolding, because government agencies don’t typically contribute cash to the bricks-and-mortar expansions of cultural agencies. However, LACMA and the Museum of Natural History, both affiliated with the county of Los Angeles, have used county money in assembling their plans for renovation.

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To build a museum or a concert hall, said the California Community Foundation’s Shakely, a close observer of the state’s philanthropical landscape for more than two decades, “you get about half of your money from about 5% of the people. Old money. People who are so wealthy, they’re sort of writing their moral biographies.”

The wealth here, all sides agree, extends far beyond such usual suspects as real estate mogul Eli Broad, who has hinted that he’ll kick in at least $25 million to LACMA’s reconstruction; entertainment executive David Geffen, who in May gave $200 million to UCLA’s medical school and whose past gifts include $5 million each to the Museum of Contemporary Art’s facility in Little Tokyo and the former Westwood Playhouse (both of which now carry Geffen’s name); and Costa Mesa shopping mall magnate Henry T. Segerstrom, who has given $40 million to the OCPAC campaign.

Other more recently arrived names include high-tech executive Paul Folino, who joined South Coast Repertory’s board in 1996, gave $10 million to its largely complete $50-million campaign for new facilities and in April agreed to take over as chairman of OCPAC’s board.

In fact, California harbors 92 of the most recent Forbes 400. In its annual issue on the wealthiest Angelenos, the Los Angeles Business Journal estimated that L.A. County was home to 25 billionaires in 2001, up from eight in 1997.

Foundations, which nationwide donate about $1 for every $7 donated by wealthy individuals and families, are ripe as well. A recent study by USC’s Center of Philanthropy and Public Policy found that, between 1978 and 1998, the assets of California-based foundations grew from $2.8 billion to nearly $53 billion. Corporations are a third, smaller component of these campaigns, and fund-raisers say their share will be smaller still in the wake of the stock market’s troubles in the last two years.

As the economy has slowed over the last two years, said James Ferris, director of the USC center, charitable giving may have lost the momentum it had in the 1990s, but it nevertheless increased.

Ferris also argues--in contradiction to conventional wisdom--that competition for donor dollars won’t be ferocious. Many fund-raisers quietly worried that the nation’s $2 billion in contributions to post-Sept. 11 recovery campaigns amounts could skew charity efforts--but that amount, Ferris noted, amounts to just 1% of what Americans give in a typical year.

Moreover, Ferris said, this region’s cultural groups don’t have much overlap among their supporters. Laura Zucker, executive director of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, makes the same argument, and points to the Big List.

The list was a research project undertaken in 2000 by Arts for L.A., a coalition of county arts leaders who persuaded 100 arts organizations of various sizes to merge and compare their mailing lists. When researchers looked at the resulting master list--about 850,000 households, once duplications were purged--they were startled. About 70% of the households had been named on just one list.

“That was mind-boggling,” Zucker said. “It just flew in the face of conventional wisdom, that there are just a few people who go to everything.”

The same is true, Zucker said, when it comes to those few patrons who sit on boards and make big donations. Together, for instance, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have more than 100 board members, and just two in common. In short, Zucker said, “we’re less in competition with each other than we think.”

That’s not to say, however, that asking for money is an easy job. Turnover is often high among development directors, who play a crucial role in capital campaigns. LACMA’s top staff fund-raiser, vice president for development Katharine DeShaw, resigned in May after three years on the job. The Children’s Museum’s top volunteer fund-raiser, Doug Ring, recently stepped back from his position as well. Both museums say they’re reevaluating their structure before making a next move.

So what makes a rich man or woman write a big check? Former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan, who partnered with Broad to lead fund-raising for Walt Disney Concert Hall in the mid-1990s--and contributed $5 million of his own--offers this counsel to anybody courting a big donor: Ask for advice and money, and then listen, and parlay that into deeper involvement. Then ask for more money.

“Why did I give $5 million? The more responsibility you feel for making something happen, the more money you give,” Riordan said. “And the person who’s most likely to give you money today is the person who gave you money yesterday.”

But it’s not enough just to extract money from those donors. It needs to be extracted and announced according to a strict timetable. When courting big donors, “the worst thing that can happen is you ask too early,” said Dyan Sublett of the Natural History Museum. “The more information you can put on the table, the more solid the project feels, the more you can excite someone. You don’t get a second chance.”

The seesaw history of the Disney Hall campaign, now in its 15th year, “has made our high-level donors more cautious. They don’t want a project out there in the public eye and then have it stall,” Sublett said.

In fact, Disney Hall stands as the region’s most visible cultural construction project--and perhaps its most cautionary tale, as well. It began 15 years ago with a $50-million gift from Lillian Disney. Architect Frank Gehry was soon retained. As time passed, the budget began its upward creep, and at groundbreaking in 1992, the estimated cost was $110 million.

By 1995, cost estimates had escalated further, design disputes had broken out, and fund-raising had dried up. The project was revived in the late 1990s, as California’s economy again raced forward, the stock market hit historic highs, and Riordan joined Broad in pushing local moguls for big gifts.

Now the construction and the fund-raising appear to be in their home stretches. The Music Center’s top executive, Andrea Van de Kamp, estimates that the campaign has raised $252 million in all.

After pausing for several months following Sept. 11, Van de Kamp said, fund-raisers are hoping to finish their work about the time the building’s construction crews finish theirs, in fall 2003.

Given all the other campaigns in the offing, Van de Kamp said, “I’m glad I’m almost done. But there is never a good time to raise money.”

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Capital Arts Campaigns

Among the largest projects in the works:

* Trustees of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art expect to start a campaign in 2002 or 2003 for roughly $300 million toward construction of a new complex.

* The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County plans to renovate and expand at an estimated cost of $200 million to $300 million.

* The Art Center College of Design in Pasadena plans additions to its site and an expansion onto a former power plant site. Costs are estimated at well beyond $100 million.

* The Children’s Museum of Los Angeles says it will soon announce a capital campaign to raise $102 million for two buildings and $10 million in endowment funds. The city of Los Angeles has advanced $1 million.

* The Orange County Performing Arts Center is about halfway to its goal of raising $200 million for a new symphony hall and a multipurpose theater. Officials expect to open the symphony hall in fall 2005.

* South Coast Repertory launched a campaign in 1998 that recently reached its original goal of $40 million, more than a year ahead of schedule. Theater leaders decided to set a higher goal of $50 million by the end of 2003. A new theater is under construction, along with the renovation of two stages.

* The UCLA Hammer Museum began a $25-million drive two years ago for renovation and expansion. Fund-raising has passed the halfway mark.

* The Petersen Automotive Museum expects to open a campaign of $25 million to $30 million later this year for a redesign and expansion that will add a banquet hall and a restaurant.

* The Skirball Cultural Center is in the middle of a $35-million campaign to add an amphitheater and exhibition space, including several children’s facilities.

* The Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach has kicked off a $15-million campaign to renovate and expand its space, including a $5-million addition to its endowment.

* The Walt Disney Concert Hall, being built at the Music Center in Los Angeles, aims for completion in September 2003. Executives say the campaign has raised $252 million, with $20 million to $25 million to go.

Compiled by Times staff writers Christopher Reynolds and Mike Boehm.