IFCC Rallies the Troops
Adrienne Flagg has been through this before.
Every year around this time, it’s the same circus. The city of Portland releases its draft budget. Tongues wag. Heads roll. The political jockeying for a piece of the budget pie begins. And for several years running now, the sad story’s been the same: the city threatens to cut a much-needed funding stream to the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center.
The 26 year old multicultural arts center — an old former firehouse founded by former City Commissioner Charles Jordan, sitting pretty on a highly trafficked block of Interstate Avenue in North Portland — is used to having its neck on the chopping block. Flagg, the center’s creative director, says she’s “grown exhausted” by rallying the IFCC-supportive troops each year to press their case to City Council.
They usually win back their funding. But this time, it’s not looking nearly as certain.
As the city considers how to plug a $8.8 million-dollar deficit and works to brace itself for a continuing shaky economy, one of the top items up for debate is the city’s usually generous spending of one-time budget appropriations: special projects, programs and one-time requests, many of them vital city services, not included in the regular city budget. The city’s one-time requests budget has been slashed by 90 percent, from $24.9 million to $2.5 million.
This isn’t good news for any arts group in Portland – the IFCC among them. That one-time budget appropriation has, for the past four years, helped sustain and grow the IFCC, according to Flagg. Although city funds were not used to hire Flagg as the center’s new creative director in 2005, at least $80,000 annually — sometimes more — has been pumped into the center each year since, a figure that the center must also match with their own fundraising. Though barely breathing as an organization when Flagg took the reins in 2005, the IFCC now has two full and one part time staff members, plus a part-time janitor, and runs multicultural art exhibitions, theatre performances and classes in their facility year-round.
For Flagg, making sure that the IFCC lives to see another year is not just her job as a staff member there. It’s personal. Read more at Mercury Blog post by Stephen Marc Beaudoin . . . and share your comments.