As part of an effort to increase the impact of its giving, the Ford Foundation is to announce a plan on Monday to dedicate $100 million to the development of arts spaces nationwide over the next decade. The plan is by far the largest commitment the foundation has ever made to the construction, maintenance and enhancement of arts facilities.
 

Luis A. Ubiñas took over as president of the Ford Foundation in 2008

The plan, called the Supporting Diverse Art Spaces Initiative, is one of several large financing projects that have resulted from a strategic overhaul of the foundation’s operations since its president, Luis A. Ubiñas, took over in 2008. He has moved the foundation in the direction of bundling its hundreds of millions of dollars in grants — which have traditionally varied widely in their focus — into large programs oriented toward specific issues. Other recent commitments include $80 million to bolster public programs for the unemployed and underpaid, $100 million for secondary education in seven cities and $50 million to help cities buy foreclosed properties.

In addition to helping arts groups build new spaces and renovate and expand old ones, the latest initiative aims to encourage the construction of affordable housing for artists in or around some of these spaces and to spur economic development in their surrounding areas. Mr. Ubiñas said that during his travels around the country he had been astonished when he would visit an arts organization and find that “all around it have developed whole neighborhoods — of artists and their families, of businesses that cater to them, of diverse people who want to live in a thriving community.”

He offered the example of the Boston Center for the Arts, organized in 1970 to provide artists with affordable studios while injecting life into the run-down South End neighborhood. “Then the Boston Ballet was added,” Mr. Ubiñas, “and performance space for other kinds of arts organizations, and what was a struggling neighborhood characterized by housing projects is a bustling community.”

This notion of the economic benefits of the arts has become increasingly popular lately among arts financers and administrators, who are keenly aware that in times of economic paucity spending on the arts is sometimes seen as frivolous. Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has been on the road frequently in recent months for a project that involves collecting information and anecdotes to help make the case to Congress and the public that the arts pay. (“Art Works” is the official slogan of the endowment’s project.)

“From the foot traffic of people coming to studios and rehearsals to the influx of people looking for a place to eat or drink after an art opening or before a show,” Mr. Landesman said in an e-mail message, “these buildings attract new people and often expendable income to neighborhoods.”

Even before its announcement the Ford Foundation had awarded a first grant under the initiative to a Minneapolis nonprofit group that builds mixed-use developments centered on moderately priced housing for artists. That group, Artspace Projects, has received more than $1 million toward, among other things, transforming an abandoned public school in East Harlem into such a development, in partnership with El Barrio’s Operation Fightback, a New York community organization.

The project is to include 72 units of housing for artists and their families and a large space that can be used for art exhibitions, cultural events, conferences and gatherings of community groups.

The initiative is also intended to help arts organizations improve or develop the management skills needed to maintain their spaces and, ideally, to turn them into revenue generators. Some of the money has been allocated for a series of seminars on marketing, planning, fund-raising and other topics related to sustaining arts centers. The seminars will be presented over two years by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

“Physical structure is not sufficient to keep an arts organization alive,” said Michael M. Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center and an expert on turning around troubled arts institutions. Mr. Kaiser has been on a 50-state tour of the United States, offering free seminars on financial management to arts groups coping with the economic crisis.

“Many organizations put up buildings without thinking about how they will pay for all those not-very-glamorous costs like lighting and air-conditioning,” he said.

Grant applications seeking money to explore and plan for construction and development will be solicited in a request-for-proposal process to be managed by Leveraging Investments in Creativity, known as LINC, an organization that works to find living and work spaces for artists, among other things, and that keeps a database of arts centers. Members of the Ford Foundation’s staff will vet proposals along with a panel of experts in economic development and urban design and planning, and award grants of up to $100,000.

Judilee Reed, executive director of LINC, said the foundation’s initiative is particularly well timed.

“I think people are beginning to understand that spaces for artists and art are more than just buildings, structures,” she said. “The way these spaces animate their communities and the relationships they have to their communities is ripe for development.”