Cultivating Philanthropy Along With Culture

COSTA MESA â€”  Tell me how you amuse yourself, and I will tell you what you are.

--Edith Hamilton, paraphrasing Victorian critic John Ruskin

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The impact of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, which observes its 10th anniversary with a benefit concert and dinner on Sunday, reaches beyond the arts to the county’s sense of itself as a suburban metropolis.

The county’s most prominent arts institution, built and operated with private funds, reflects community aspirations for glamour and sophistication, a recognition that the community can offer something more than Southern California surfing and freeway car culture.

The lavish, $73-million building stands as a monumental symbol of the county’s taste for the spectacular and the utilitarian. Its modernist facade, dominated by a giant Roman arch and exotic “Fire Bird� sculpture, pays tribute not so much to the classical arts presented within but to outward grandeur and virile strength--and, not incidentally, to plutocratic wealth.

The maintenance of an expensive arts institution with an annual operating budget of more than $20 million has come to depend on a small group of major philanthropists. Although 6 million patrons have paid more than $175 million to see 2,900 performances at the center in its first decade, the nonprofit center would not have been built and could not have continued to operate without the largess of a relatively few donors.

“There are probably 100,000 or more potential major donors in the county,� Robert B. Sharp, a widely known professional fund-raising consultant, said during a recent telephone interview. “But if you look at the giving patterns, there are only 150 to 200 who are carrying the torch for the rest of the county.�

Sharp defined a major donor as anyone--including foundations and corporations--capable of making charitable contributions of $10,000 or more per year.

Several dozen old guard donors signaled their willingness to shoulder an enormous responsibility by raising $143.3 million in a five-year campaign that led up to the center’s opening in 1986.

Contributions included almost $74 million in cash, which paid for the building lock, stock and barrel, and more than $69 million in estate-planned gifts to set up an endowment fund.

The value of the estate-planned gifts, which are promises of bequests after the donor’s death, has been discounted considerably over the years: Some were revocable; others lost their worth. But the center now has $11.3 million in its endowment fund and hopes to have $15 million within 18 months.

“The center started as a dream 20 years ago,� said acting executive director Judith O’Dea Morr. “I think it’s remarkable that this community was able to build a facility with private funds and to keep it operating with private funds. The community should be so proud of itself.�

Indeed, no other nonprofit performing arts center in the nation can make that claim (see accompanying story). Orange County’s is the only one entirely paid for and supported without government funds, according to various experts--and therefore is a point of pride in a community as politically conservative as this one.

It was early in 1979 when arts advocate Elaine Redfield first asked Henry T. Segerstrom, the multimillionaire landowner and developer, to donate a plot of land from his vast domain as a site for a performance center.

While they gazed out his office window at one of his bean fields, she recalled, he turned to her with an expansive grin and said: “Well, you’ve come to the right place.�

Redfield was one of the founders of the Orange County Philharmonic Society, the oldest local music organization, which then was bringing top orchestras from around the world to the 1,500-seat Santa Ana High School auditorium.

Redfield, who would serve as both president and chairman of the center’s board of trustees from 1979 to 1981, went to Segerstrom armed with a bank account of $600,000 that she and other arts activists from around the county had raised.

“If I hadn’t come there with information about existing groups [who wanted a center]--and if they hadn’t had a bank account to back up my statements--I don’t think Henry would have given me 10 minutes,� Redfield said in a recent interview. “But the fact that there was this groundswell movement impressed him.�

The Segerstrom family donated five acres worth about $5 million--�the very field that we had seen through Henry’s office window,� Redfield recounted--and soon thereafter $6 million in cash. Among other early gifts were $2 million pledged by Mr. and Mrs. D. James Bentley and $1 million pledged by the Harry and Grace Steele Foundation.

Thousands of less conspicuous donors in and out of the center’s various support groups have contributed $11 million for center operations, education programs and community outreach. Yet the county at large is notorious for low philanthropic giving.

“It has been giving at a rate about 10 times lower than the rest of the nation,� Sharp said.

During the late 1980s, Orange County people on average gave at the annual rate of 0.25% of pretax income per person, he notes. That compares to a rate of 2.1-2.3% of pretax income nationally.

“I think you’ll find that the county’s rate hasn’t increased significantly since then,� said Sharp, whose firm wrote a 1991 strategic report, the Orange County Volunteer Leadership Assessment Study on the county’s major donors.

Experts point out that Orange County doesn’t have a long tradition of philanthropy. Even though nonprofit institutional development has benefited countywide from the center’s energy, influence and experience, the county has only reached adolescence in terms of charitable giving.

For that matter, most of Southern California has barely reached that stage. Los Angeles County has a longer philanthropic history, but the rate of giving is only “in the range of one to 1.5%� of pretax income, said Nick Goldsborough, chief operating officer of Music Center Inc., the fund-raising arm of the huge Los Angeles Music Center.

The L.A. center--which includes the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (with the L.A. Philharmonic and the L.A. Music Center Opera) and the Center Theatre Group (with the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson)--receives public as well as private contributions and maintains a Unified Fund to provide help to its resident companies.

“In the ‘90s alone,� Goldsborough said, “we received 85,000 private gifts totaling $90 million. But I don’t want to paint a rosy picture. We’ve had many challenges during this decade.�

In fact, Unified Fund allocations to the resident companies at the Chandler, the Taper and the Ahmanson have been declining, and each group has been asked to do more of its own fund-raising.

The resident arts groups at the Orange County center have always done their own fund-raising without financial help from the center. And, lately, each has had to raise more money than ever to cover the usual gap between box-office revenue and the high cost of presenting their programs at the center in the first place.

But that is no fault of the center, Morr points out. Its rental fee--10% of an event’s gross ticket sale against a minimum guarantee of $2,500, whichever is greater--falls well within the industry norm.

“You also have a particular problem in Orange County,� Goldsborough said. “You have so many people who have moved recently from so many places, or retirees who still have very strong allegiances to the places they came from. When they think of giving, it’s to institutions back in Minneapolis or Chicago or somewhere.�

Louis Spisto, executive director of the Pacific Symphony, said, “I believe the building of the center and the funding for it gave the community its first taste of major arts support. It began to teach this community about philanthropy, period. I can point to specific successes that we’ve had because the center has raised the standard.�

Spisto said he was told by publicity-shy philanthropist William J. Gillespie, who gave $6.6 million to the arts in May 1995, that those gifts would not have been made if the center had not been a major force and focus.

“We still have far to go,� Spisto continued. “But the community has started to understand that not only do you have to build buildings, but you have to support programs once the building is up.

“We still do not have the financial capacity to do a great deal of testing and probing. We’d like to take risks and lead the audience’s taste. But we’ve gained a better understanding about how to follow community preferences, which is necessary too.�

Similarly, the county’s philanthropic movers and shakers need to learn how to broaden their leadership base, Sharp suggests.

In his assessment study of the volunteer leadership, he wrote that “current leaders [will have to] admit that the ‘clique’ that has formed, although comfortable and familiar, must ultimately be changed.�

They must recruit new philanthropic leaders from the ranks of up-and-coming entrepreneurs and from “culturally diverse sectors,� Sharp said. He points to the county’s continuing shift in demographics “from largely white, middle- and upper-income families to Latino and Asian and African American minorities.�

There are no statistics on the ethnic breakdown of the center’s patrons. About 55% of the center’s subscribers and 45% of its single-ticket buyers have annual household incomes of $75,000 or more, according to a detailed market survey conducted for the center in 1995. That compares with 22% of the market population. More than 70% of subscribers and about 65% of single-ticket buyers have college degrees or better, compared with roughly 50% of the market population.

If the center does show the county a way to become the proverbial shining city on a hill, it will take at least another decade, in Spisto’s view. Coming of age as an organic suburban metropolis requires a long, devoted process of education, he notes. Ersatz development is no substitute.