South Charlotte Today

Since June, the City of Charlotte's Arts and Culture Advisory Board, in partnership with Foundation For The Carolinas and private donors, has awarded roughly $11.5 million to local arts and culture organizations. This money from Infusion Fund is stabilizing local arts and culture — the sector has suffered funding setbacks in recent years, including the COVID-19 pandemic and decreased workplace giving — as the city plans a more sustainable future for the sector.  

We sat down with David Fisk, president and CEO of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, to learn about how the Infusion Fund is helping one of Charlotte's most storied organizations.   

Answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.   Q: Tell us about the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra.   David Fisk: We are the largest employer of musicians in the region, and we are viewed as one of two major symphony orchestras in the state. We focus heavily on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg area and the surrounding counties. We're trying to go as deep as we can, to engage as much of the community as we may through not only cocerts, but also an extensive array of education and community engagement programming.  

We always had quality even from the very beginning. The musicians were serious musicians, but they were not "professional" in the same way that we are professional now. It was more of a community-led beginning. Born of the people, if you like, founded by a Spanish refugee. That's one of the things I think that's important about the DNA of Charlotte Symphony, and we want to remain connected to community in everything we do.   Q: How does the symphony use the support it receives through the Infusion Fund? DF: We are getting two kinds of funding this year from the Infusion Fund. The largest of the two is a general operating grant, previously from the Arts & Science Council, and now from the Infusion Fund. We are one of those historically funded organizations that was deemed to have been sufficiently important, I think, to the culture of the city, that we needed to be able to rely on an annual operating grant. We have 65 musicians who are on salary. The orchestra is unionized and it's very important to our stability — which is one of the purposes of the Infusion Fund — that we know we can live up to a multiyear union agreement.  

The other grant we got was a recent decision by the advisory board to enable us to build a partnership with Johnson C. Smith University. We're very excited to have a significant relationship with the university that supports their mission and helps us serve that academic community, but also that physical community that surrounds J.C. Smith. The performance that has been funded will take place in March at the university, but it's for the community. We're hoping very much we're going to see a lot of folks attend the event, drawn both from the campus but also from the surrounding neighborhoods.   Q: The Arts and Culture Advisory Board and the Infusion Fund were established to solve a problem. What conditions are you grappling with, in terms of funding and other factors that affect how you operate and bring art to the community?

DF: We have been here for 90 years. When you have an institution of that maturity, you expect it to have grown, to adapt each decade, each crisis, each opportunity, to change with the times. We've been able to manage that over the last 90 years.  

What are we dealing with now? It's a combination of factors. Of course, there's COVID, which we thankfully can say we got through with a lot of federal support. The critical question now is are the audiences coming back? Thankfully, the answer is yes. They're not coming back in exactly the same way; we're seeing more single-ticket buyers than subscribers. That has implications for how we market our programs. It's also leading us to think about what we are going to do differently after COVID. Are there changes to the way people are now behaving in their free time that we need to think about and respond to?  

The big question for us as an employer that plans over many years is: What's going to be the outcome of the cultural plan? We are very much paying attention to the next steps of the publication of the State of Culture Report in the new year, and the final recommendations of the advisory board, because we need stability. If we have security, we can plan and we can take some risks. We can respond to external demands and take our music to meet people where they are, to reach new communities, as well as focus on our major relationships that enable us to do a lot of great work Uptown.  

What the Charlotte Symphony doesn't have, as opposed to other cities around the country, is a very large endowment. It's normal for a symphony to be made stable by a combination of earned revenue, contributed annual revenue, and the security of an endowment from which you draw 4% or 5% a year that may represent 10% of your annual operating budget. Ultimately, we have to be able to build that.   Q: What do you hope for the future of arts and culture in Charlotte and for the symphony specifically?   DF: I really appreciate the work that's being done on the part of the city to come up with this coherent and compelling, long-range plan that's going to provide stability for the organizations that have been historically funded, but also provide opportunity for new organizations and individual artists to have a chance to get support. I think it needs to be the "both/and." It's crazy to pick one over the other because it will diminish Charlotte if we do that.  

We want to provide opportunities for Charlotte's creatives to be supported by their city and by the private sector, to the extent the private sector continues to be a partner with the city in this endeavor.  

I'm hoping that the conversations that are ongoing will enable some coherent approach to be taken regionwide. And of course, I'm hoping the symphony emerges as one of those organizations thought of as sufficiently important to get the security of consistent annual funding at a level that makes sense.  Q: Any final thoughts you want people to know about the symphony?  DF: Just to say thank you. We are very grateful to be a recipient of the Infusion Fund support. We know we need to live up to it and demonstrate the value of what we're doing, and I think we can do that.  

Learn more about how the City of Charlotte is supporting arts and culture.  

Original source can be found here.