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After a botched 2024 grant cycle, the Metro Arts Commission, Nashville artists and other Metro departments hashed out a conciliation agreement aimed at improving the process for future years. But according to emails and letters obtained by the Nashville Banner, new Metro Arts leadership is failing to meet the requirements of the agreement, and as a result, the next funding cycle hangs in the balance.
As a part of the agreement, Metro Arts was tasked with creating new grant guidelines and formulas and filing a plan with the Metro Council for approval by Jan. 6. But according to Metro Human Relations Commission officials, when Metro Arts staff sent the MHRC and Metro Legal the grant guidelines and formula drafts for approval one business day before the deadline, they were in disarray.
Typos, Grammar and Missing Policy
In emails between Metro departments, officials from the MHRC allege that their department and the Metro Legal Department were forced to pick up the slack after Metro Arts was slow to turn in sloppy drafts of a new funding plan.
“At minimum, responsibilities that are being inappropriately handled now need to be delegated to someone who can ensure basic requirements are met,” MHRC executive director Davie Tucker wrote in a Jan. 6 letter to Metro Legal director Wally Dietz and Metro Human Resources director Shannon Hall. “The work that Metro Arts is finalizing right now could have and should have been completed months ago. We do not have confidence that personnel will do this.”
In a Jan. 8 email to the arts commission, to which Tucker’s letter was attached, he said that the MHRC planned to sign onto the grants and formula legislation in an attempt to build good faith. But his staff did not receive the draft materials until 3 p.m. on Jan. 3 — a Friday — giving the MHRC and Metro Legal little time for review.
Those drafts were riddled with errors, according to MHRC officials.
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“I am not in your department so I do not see the details of everything that might be going on, however, it seems like having quality, accurate, ready-to-go materials for the legislation should be a top department priority,” Ashley Bachelder, MHRC director of policy and research, said in a Jan. 4 email to Metro Arts interim executive director Paulette Coleman. “In the attachments I have several dozen comments and suggested edits in both the Thrive and General Operating guidelines. Some of them are corrections to typos, sentences that are hard to understand, and suggestions for overall readability. Other comments point out policy decisions made by the Commission that are not reflected in the proposals.”
Bachelder said she spent eight hours reviewing and making edits to the Thrive and General Operating guideline drafts.
In the drafts, multiple dates are listed incorrectly. Additionally, the documents are missing policies approved for inclusion at a Dec. 5 Metro Arts Commission meeting, while other policies in the drafts reflect a different position than that taken by the commission at the meeting last month.
“It is greatly concerning that employees of other departments had to step in at the very last minute to do work to create legislation that guides the distribution of millions of public tax dollars,” Tucker wrote to the commission.
In a statement to the Banner, Dietz expresses a commitment to the conciliation agreement.
“The Law Department has received Director Tucker’s letter,” Dietz said. “We are focusing our efforts on implementing all the provisions of the conciliation agreement. We expect the agreement to be honored in full.”
MHRC and Metro Legal staff spent much of last weekend leading up to the Jan. 6 deadline editing the guidelines and formulas so that Metro Arts staff could finalize and submit them to the Metro Council on time. But even then, the legislation was not perfect, and a meeting of the Metro Arts Grants and Funding Committee has been scheduled for Jan. 15, with “potential edits” to both the Thrive and Operating grant guidelines on the agenda.
Artists in Limbo
As the arts commission and other Metro departments continue to work on guidelines for a new round of delayed grants, some Nashville artists remain in limbo.
Glass artist Martha Morales received $10,000 from Metro Arts last year through Thrive, the Metro Arts program dedicated to funding artists and small arts organizations with grants for specific projects. That funding made it possible for her to offer glass art classes at Our Place Nashville, a nonprofit that provides affordable housing to adults with disabilities.
“It’s been a great opportunity to share what I do with the people from Our Place,” Morales tells the Banner. “They learn how to do mosaic; they learn how to do fused glass. [For] the next project, they’re going to start designing their own stained-glass windows. I love how they have learned to express themselves in different art forms and disciplines that are not often taught anywhere.”
Putting on these classes was a highlight of Morales’ year, but she’s unsure if she will be able to do it again this year without more city funding. She said she initially considered paying for the program out of pocket, but it was too costly.
In a typical funding cycle, grants would have been sent out in October 2024 for the 2025 fiscal year. But after a bungled fiscal year 2024 grant cycle, which led to many artists and arts organizations not receiving their grants until summer, grant distribution formulas for FY25 must go to the Metro Council before the process can begin.
District 24 Councilmember Brenda Gadd chairs the Metro Council’s Arts, Parks, Libraries, and Entertainment Committee. She tells the Banner she understands the diverse needs of Nashville’s arts community, from independent artists to large organizations, and will ensure that the legislation filed by Metro Arts meets the needs of the community.
“I don’t know that we’re receiving a package that’s all tied up tidy with a bow and that meets everyone’s very legitimate concerns and needs,” Gadd says. “I’ll be reviewing that in detail, as well as making sure that our committee — as well as any other councilmembers that want to attend our committee — has space to truly get in there and ask questions, so we’re aware of what we’re being presented.”
Molly Breen is another Nashville artist caught in the middle of the delay. She is the co-founder and co-director of Tennessee Playwright Studio, a theater production company that produces plays from Tennessee-based playwrights and creators. The organization also has a development lab where fellows are selected to work on scripts. In a normal year, those fellows would put on staged readings of their scripts at the end of the year. But with the delay in funding, Breen isn’t sure when or if that will happen.
“I’ve just had to tell the playwrights, 'This is on hold until I hear from Metro if we’re getting any money, what money we’re getting, and when we’re getting it,'” Breen says.
A New Funding Formula
In November, Metro Arts held three community engagement sessions to invite public feedback for grant policies and procedures. The sessions were a requirement of the conciliation agreement, preceded by independent artists filing Title VI complaints regarding the events of the past two years.
According to Metro Arts’ documentation from those meetings, artists asked for more clarity on nearly every step of the grants process. They also expressed how detrimental the delay in FY24’s grants process was to their ability to do art, and emphasized the importance of public funding for the arts.
But in a letter sent the morning of the arts commission’s Dec. 5 meeting, the MHRC said it is unclear how Metro Arts staff incorporated any of the community feedback into its draft proposal.
“[The staff proposal] uses an all or nothing approach that will leave many organizations without funding (potentially 44 of your 109 pending applicants),” the letter reads. “MHRC attended every community engagement session, and several community members expressed concern about this proposal and their preference for the alternative proposal that would provide returning applicants 50% of their award from last year. We have not been provided a clear reason or justification for how community feedback informed this recommendation, or other reasons for the staff recommendation. Absent that, we believe this does not adhere to the spirit of the conciliation Agreement and the requirement to consider community feedback.”
The MHRC’s letter also expresses concerns about the staff’s proposal for the Thrive grant formula, which placed additional restrictions on who could receive Thrive funding and would have set a cap of $5,000 per recipient. It warned against setting a maximum grant award for Thrive artists below $10,000, the cap from last year.
The commission ultimately turned down the staff proposal for operating grants, instead going with a proposal brought by board member Heather Lefkowitz — the “alternative proposal” referenced in the MHRC’s letter, which was lauded for garnering approval from arts organizations of all sizes.
The formula in that proposal was first developed from community engagement sessions in December 2022, with the goal of moving away from giving the lion’s share of funding to larger nonprofits such as the Tennessee Performing Arts Center and Cheekwood Estate & Gardens, while ensuring that small and midsize organizations that had come to depend on Metro Arts funding did not have the rug pulled from under them.
For Thrive, the arts commission approved a framework that will distribute $10,000 to artists whose applications are scored 70 or higher from a community-led panel, prioritizing artists from seven Metro Council districts that have not historically received funding. Additionally, the arts commission approved a 60-40 split of funding between operating grants and Thrive grants, which means $1.3 million will go to Thrive as opposed to the $900,000 that was originally slated for Thrive.
Time Will Tell
Many of the arts commission requests never made it into the drafts sent to the MHRC and Metro Legal — turmoil reminiscent of past issues at Metro Arts.
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After months of issues and the May 2024 departure of Metro Arts Director Daniel Singh — who was paid $200,000 to resign as a part of a settlement agreement with Metro — all of the artists who were promised funding in the original formula were eventually paid, along with the arts organizations that were promised funding in the later formula. Coleman was named interim executive director in April.
At the time, Hall said that the search for a permanent executive director would take up to six months once it began.
But these events left some members of the arts community concerned about whether Thrive grants would be discontinued after Metro Finance and Metro Legal declared that aspects of how Thrive was distributed in the past did not comply with state law and local rules.
Breen — forced to redo her budget, change event dates and reduce production costs due to the problems with last year’s grants — is already steeling herself for another year of disappointment.
“Since applying [for Thrive] this year, we never got any updates or anything,” she says. “We barely hear from Metro. It’s just weird. So basically, things are up in the air, and I have low expectations. We’ll see if it ends up happening and how much I end up having to self-fund it.”
A Metro Arts Commission Executive Committee meeting is scheduled to follow the Grants and Funding Committee meeting on Jan. 15. A full Metro Arts Commission Meeting is scheduled for Jan. 16. The Metro Council will take up the legislation to approve the guidelines and formulas for first reading on Jan. 21.
