Funding Culture | Alpina Vision

To provide a sustainable funding infrastructure through grants and arts housing support for the arts community to achieve a vision to diverse and distinctive arts that inspire people and connect communities.

Financial Crisis: Effects on Private and Public Arts Funding

Alpina believes in a mixed funding model for museums, which also includes earned income, grants philanthropic and charitable giving.

Public investment is important because it underpins the public benefit that museums provide in three key areas:

enabling museums to work with their local communities through learning, education, outreach and partnership programmes;
supporting the long-term care, interpretation and access to public collections;
supporting local economies through local supply chains, high quality jobs and tourism.

Cultural institutions depend almost entirely on private support.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the migration of cultural activities to cyberspace, calling into question the future of the arts.

One of the key functions of museums, in addition to preserving and exhibiting art, is art education.

The pandemic undermined the foundations of this business model.Museums must expand and diversify their role in community culture. Museums can’t survive without the support of civil society. The primary way in which museums serve the people is by displaying fine works of art for them to see. But museum education is also important. Museums can serve as a community venue for lectures, symposiums, and concerts. Furthermore, museum space can function as an information medium in its own right, opening up all kinds of creative possibilities.

Museums will doubtless continue to mobilize digital and remote technology even after the COVID-19 crisis has subsided. But the pandemic may also reawaken people’s appreciation of the kind of direct, live experience that only a museum can offer. It’s possible that virtual exhibitions will end up boosting demand for the real thing.

Cultural institutions around the world are facing an existential crisis as they grapple with changing modes of cultural interaction.

Capital Investment Programme

Historic preservation

Alpina offers grants to nonprofit organizations and public agencies for projects that contribute to the preservation of a historic place or that “recapture an authentic sense of place”. Projects include structural repairs as well as educational programs for the general public.

Fund new museum

Save Treasures

Awarding grants to federal, state, local and tribal agencies for the preservation and conservation of national historically significant properties, such as homes or buildings

Capital has become a scarce resource for many arts organisations, having tied up most of their capital in fixed assets such as buildings and properties, art collections, etc.

A number of financial innovations, such as borrowing against an arts organisation’s art collection, are emerging.

Alpina provides funding to museums and other arts institutions that are in the position to put up works of art as collateral.

Structured finance, such as the securitisation of future box-office income, and lease buy-back schemes on properties owned by arts organisations are other possible means of releasing cash for operations.