With a healthy chunk of funding thus assured, there is less need for mammoth board development. The duty of members of such U.S. arts boards is arduous. Asking people for money is always a strain. And the demand to produce significant contributed income is omnipresent. Fundraising and fundraising activities dominate meeting discussions.
Most boards have minimum membership requirements.
Locally, a twelve-person board would be derided by the arts funding community as lacking sufficient prestige to ensure organizational credibility and a broad base of support. Burnout rates are high on these boards. Concomitantly, there appears to be a distinct lag between recognizing the reality of declining state support and acting effectively on the need to ramp up individual and corporate support for these organizations. Numbers of individual contributors are small by U.S. standards and the amounts contributed are also comparatively small. Rather, my purpose in this discussion is to elicit cross-cultural commentary on the role and function of governing boards in arts organizations, and how they might be made more effective.