By: Ronan O’Comartun
The Baltimore School for the Arts is an anomaly as a public Baltimore City school that functions alongside a nonprofit organization.
The Baltimore School for the Arts Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that acts as a separate entity from BSA and the Baltimore City Public School System. Its mission is to raise money for the arts at BSA (part-time art teachers, supplies, field trips, etc) through Expressions and the Annual Fund.
For the 2023-24 school year, the BSA Foundation is budgeted to raise just over $2.9 million, which represents 38 percent of the total operating budget of BSA for both the high school program and TWIGS. In comparison, in 2019-2020, the Foundation raised $2,235,580 for the school.
The Foundation has five employees in its advancement and fundraising team, not including the over 20 members of the Board of Trustees who oversee and help out with all decisions for the institution. By this spring, the Foundation will have lost two employees from that advancement team.
Former Head of Advancements Kellen Newby-Matthews’s last day was January 19 of this year, while Director of the Foundation Deanna Gamber, who started September 6 of 2023, is set to leave the Foundation in April.
“My reason to leave was a personal decision,” Gamber said. Newby-Matthews did not comment on reasons for her own departure.
When asked about the contributing factors to Gamber’s departure, Samantha Buker, Parent and Alumni Liaison for the Foundation, said “She came from a very different background having been at another school [Garrison Forest] for 27 years. And so I think that adjustment is tricky for anyone. And of course, we had had a bit of a lull just finding our next person. So I think some things were less organized as she came into our institution than they could have been.”
Buker elaborated, “I can tell you that I’ve really enjoyed working with her.”
In the last few years employee turnover has been high in the Foundation.
“There were at least three in my position in the last three years which makes sense,” says Montcreal Huggins, Advancement Associate for the Foundation.
“I loved Kellen especially. I really am sad we lost her, to be honest,” said Buker. “I thought everything she was saying and doing in sort of that side of the meetings and stuff was like so relevant to the work that we’ve been doing as faculty and admins and students in… diversity and inclusion.”
All things considered, the Foundation is not unusual—high turnover rates are not uncommon in the field of nonprofit fundraising.
“The industry is notorious,” said Buker. “I almost worked, for example, at Peabody… I’ve had the ability to see how many people have cycled through since I was last interviewing for said position and almost every place that I’ve almost worked at. They have at least two people who filled that position since the last time… but usually even more to be honest.”
Gamber explains, “Advancement, in general, is a transient field, you’ll see a lot of turnover because if you want to advance… you might hit what I call the glass ceiling, there’s no opportunity for growth.”
In 2020 Carter Polakoff, who had been the Foundation & Development Director since 1999, left the position. Since Polakoff’s departure, the Foundation has had more frequent turnover, with no single director’s stay lasting more than three years.
Following Carter was Brigid Zuknick, an internal hire from the Foundation’s staff, who took over for Polakoff as Chief Advancement Officer in 2021 and left in 2023. After Zuknick, Gamber was hired as Foundation Director. Kellen Newby-Mathhews started working at the Foundation in 2020 as Director of Advancement and by 2024, she left.
It is unclear what the difference between “Director of the Foundation” and “Director of Advancement” really is because they both fundamentally mean the same thing. While Polakoff was at BSA she worked under the title of “Foundation & Development Director”; Zuknick held the title of “Chief Advancement Officer.” The job titles in the Foundation frequently evolve and it can be hard to pin down what each position does, even for the employees.
“I was hired with the assumption of serving as a board liaison and development kind of assisting our director with day-to-day things that we do, whether that’s gifting and processing donor acknowledgements, setting up campaigns, anything in our database… but since I’ve been here I’ve been kind of spread thin in different places so I’m not sure exactly what my role is,” Huggins said.
Huggins elaborated on what she does on a day-to-day basis: “I receive checks from Nancy [the Foundation’s chief financial officer] and my financial director and I put them in our database.”
“They call it nonprofit CFO or accounting but it’s nothing like that. I’m just putting money in allocated funds making sure information is correct so I can send our donors acknowledgement letters or any correspondence they may need for tax purposes,” Huggins elaborated.
Another explanation for the turnover is that working in nonprofit organizations does not cover the costs of the stress it inflicts. When asked about the work/life balance, Buker explained “It’s pretty bad this year, to be honest, but again I know we’re navigating a lot of changes.”
One of the changes mentioned was the organization of the Foundation’s database. A rather elusive system, many different narratives were told about the database. The Muse was not permitted to access the database itself.
When Gamber started, she made moves to reorganize the database. Huggins shed light on the system in response to a question about how the Foundation had been trending compared to other years. “Since Deanna has been here, she’s been working very hard to locate things that are missing in our database, money, so I don’t know what the comparisons are—we’re getting different numbers-different reports, now they have someone to clean up the database so we’re actually seeing what we are missing,” Huggins explained.
When asked about the state of the database before Gamber arrived, Huggins replied “I wouldn’t know but if I had to guess I wouldn’t say that they were very organized or maintained or kept up with. Policies have changed, different SOPs and just not keeping up with maintenance. I wouldn’t say it’s all over the place, it has the potential to be great but it would definitely be a job now that would take a lot of time.”
The most recent Foundation budget shown to the Muse by Nancy Steiner, chief financial officer, was for the 2019-2020 school year.
Gamber noted that “Nancy, who’s been here 27 years knows the finances of the school inside and out.” She elaborated, “Because we are a nonprofit we are audited every year by a financial firm, they go through our records with a fine tooth comb.”
Because it is a 501(c)(3) organization, the Foundation is audited every year so the organization of files, documents, and records is imperative.
Although these audits are available annually on the BSA website, the most recent data currently posted is for the 2021-2022 school year.
Despite the impression of organizational confusion in the Foundation, Gamber said “BSA was in great financial shape.” She continued, “To the board’s credit when they said ‘Are you interested in continuing?’ I said ‘Yes but I want to see audited financials, I want to understand the budget,’… so I asked them for a lot of documentation which they provided.”
This interaction between Gamber and the Board would have taken place in early 2023 while she was going through the hiring process.
“The president of the board and the vice president of the board… met with me and were very open and transparent so they very easily accessed all that financial data—Nancy keeps such a good handle on it,” she continued. “In terms of that, that was all up and running and accessible because it has to be, we could be asked at any minute by a funder. A lot of times a funder will say ‘We want your operating budget.’ They want our audited financials because they’re not going to give money to us if we don’t seem solid.”
To compensate for Gamber and Newby-Matthews’ departures, for Expressions this year BSA will be working with Bloom Arts Strategy, an art fundraising and consulting company based in New York, Boston, and Baltimore. Bloom Arts Strategy will stay on after Expressions to help find new hires and see that the transition of employees goes smoothly.
The Foundation raises around 40 percent of the operating budget to support the school and has been successful consistently. “We look like we’re on track to raise what we raised last year,” Gamber said.
Despite the current challenges and uncertainties within the Foundation, it is important to recognize that ultimately the Foundation does good work, and the arts side of BSA would be unable to function without it.
To contact this writer, email Muse Newspaper at musebsa@bsfa.org.
Featured photo captured by Asad Ali for the BSA Muse.
