Jonathan Stone departs Creative Flagstaff as discussions about its future begin | Local News

Creative Flagstaff is also looking to evolve its flagship arts and ideas festival, ARTx, due to a lack of funding and an increasingly competitive grant market.

“He’s done so much to improve the offerings that we provide, the opportunities that we have,” said James Hasapis, who chairs the Creative Flagstaff Executive Board.

Hasapis that added he was sorry to see Stone depart.

Stone told the Arizona Daily Sun he could not yet speak to his own future, but that he trusted the Creative Flagstaff team to continue the organization’s work after his departure.

“My next chapter is working with downtowns and cultural business districts across the country,” Stone wrote in his resignation letter. “I have truly come to love Flagstaff’s vibrancy, creativity and authenticity.”

On March 1, the Creative Flagstaff Board announced that Julie Comnick, the Coconino Center for the Arts exhibitions and programs director, would take over as interim executive director after Stone officially departs on March 23.

“I am thankful to be trusted to serve in this interim role during this important period,” Comnick said in a statement. “I am confident that the team that Jonathan built will continue to deliver the vibrant programming and services that Creative Flagstaff is known for.”

Hasapis said the board does not yet have a timeline for the search for a permanent replacement.

Stone’s departure also comes as Creative Flagstaff enters the final year of its service contract with the City of Flagstaff, with both parties gearing up to discuss the terms and future of their partnership.

As part of the contract, Creative Flagstaff distributes grants to nonprofits and artists, all funded by the city’s Bed, Board and Beverage (BBB) tax funds. But as discussions about the future begin, the organization, according to Hasapis, and its relationship with government partners might need to evolve.

In 2021, Creative Flagstaff’s Board of Directors adopted a new strategic plan with the goal of, among other objectives, investing in “catalytic initiatives that support creative sector entrepreneurship and nonprofit excellence.”

ARTx was one of those initiatives.

“We were like, we know we want to do a festival or the idea of something like a festival, and we want to be catalytic and we want to make sure that it reinforces and builds upon this idea of interdisciplinary group collaboration,” Stone said.

Stone said ARTx allowed Creative Flagstaff to engage different parts of the community and foster involvement among people who might not typically apply for a traditional art festival.

The 2024 ARTx festival is likely to continue in that tradition.

But ARTx 2025 might not hold with that trend, instead significantly evolving and potentially becoming smaller in scale. That is in large part due to a set of financial constraints that have revealed themselves.

Before the pilot year of 2023, Creative Flagstaff received grants totaling $50,000 from the Arizona Community Foundation of Flagstaff plus $50,000 from the city. That money helped with both the concept development and delivery of the two-day festival.

This year’s ARTx is funded by a $112,000 grant from the Arizona Office of Tourism and the city’s annual $50,000 commitment plus some extra — which was tacked on in an effort to grant more of the BBB funds directly to artists.

The 2024 festival is much bigger than the pilot year, with more than 30 experiences and events offered over the course of 10 days. In many cases, that type of growth would indicate momentum in the right direction. But so far, according to Stone, this year, the city’s annual contribution is all that has been brought to the table for ARTx 2025.

With this in mind, and after discussions with the Creative Flagstaff Board, Stone said he initiated conversations with the organizing committee about restructuring the basic framework of ARTx.

“What we’re finding with ARTx is that the scale and scope really just depends on the available resources,” he said.

At the moment, there is still a lot of uncertainty about what ARTx 2025 might look like. Stone says one idea is a shift from the traditional festival format to one that embraces multiple, smaller experiences throughout the year.

Stone said changing the festival in that way might also create new opportunities to better fund ARTx, by picking certain themes to focus events around and then seeking grants or sponsors that match a particular theme.

ARTx in its current form lacks thematic specificity, which would better help in the effort to attract grant dollars.

Even so, the organizing committee is still having discussions about the future of ARTx, and no decisions have been made.

And Hasapis said that should new funding be identified quickly, ARTx 2025 could retain the form it has taken so far.

But without the large grants it has depended on so far, scaling back may be the only path forward.

The need for change coincides with similar conversations being had amongst the Creative Flagstaff Board and its city partners about its future and the challenges the arts agency is also facing in its operation of not only ARTx but also Coconino Center for the Arts and itself.

For more than 20 years, Creative Flagstaff has been contracted to manage BBB grant funds and manage programming at the Coconino Center for the Arts. For those services, the government pays a fee that can be allocated among grants and operating expenses.

But that fee, even as it has increased gradually over the years, only covers so much, making external funding an important part of the organization’s financial sustainability.

However, in recent years, Creative Flagstaff has struggled to acquire that money either through grants or other sources to help overcome rising inflation and the residual impacts of the pandemic.

“The funding landscape has changed dramatically over the course of the pandemic and past the pandemic,” Stone said. “Grants have become a lot more competitive.”

And they’ve become a lot more competitive, he said, because they are going up against more regional and statewide programs that lost out on earned revenues during the pandemic due to the closures of performing arts venues.

Nonprofit arts and culture organizations are shifting their priorities to recovery, and as a result, more and more hands are dipping into the pot.

Hasapis added that, in his opinion, companies aren’t as open with their sponsorships, and as a result, budgets are tightening.

He also pointed to a projected drop in state grant money for arts from the Arizona Commission on the Arts as a significant challenge.

Last month Jackie Alling, the interim executive director of that commission, penned a letter to Arizona arts organizations warning that the money available during the 2025 fiscal year is projected to be “significantly lower than the awards we were able to fund last year.”

In the letter, Alling explained that the state budget shortfall has proved to be a significant barrier to awarding as much grant money as they had in previous years.

The Arizona Commission on the Arts has been working with far more money than it projects for the upcoming fiscal year in large part due to emergency COVID funding from the state Legislature during the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years and to the $5 million one-time allocation from the Legislature during the previous two years.

So far in the post-pandemic economy, Creative Flagstaff is seeing an impact in attendance at Coconino Center for the Arts. According to Stone, it is seeing an increase in audience numbers but not to the same degree that they had seen before the pandemic, and for that venue, audience size means everything.

“In terms of how many shows are more than half the house and roughly speaking, you know, we see half the house is breakeven,” Stone said. “So, if you’re just breaking even on shows, then, you know, we still have to keep the lights on and all of that.”

In an effort to make the space more appealing to artists and other nonprofit groups, Stone modernized the Center for the Arts during his tenure, upgrading program and function spaces, installing the theater’s first A/V system and more.

“There have been so many improvements made to the facility so that we can better provide a venue for the arts,” Hasapis said. “The gallery lighting is so much better now, the carpet is out of there [so we have the] concrete floors. Everything is more suitable to a gallery environment.”

It’s a slow build back to normal, but until then and as Creative Flagstaff’s contract approaches the end of its three-year extension, leadership is brainstorming more sustainable paths forward, including one that would involve entering into a more formal relationship with the City of Flagstaff.

“What we have been saying all along is that there’s strength in partnership,” Stone said. “What we’re asking for is everyone to come to the table and talk about what it means to more formally collaborate, you know, so where are the shared interests of everyone that we work with? And how can we come up with a collaborative plan?”

He added that in order for the 2025 strategic plan to be fully realized there is going to need to be greater support from government partners.

What would this new relationship look like?

Stone, Flagstaff City Councilmembers Lori Matthews and Khara House, and community investment director David McIntire attended Canal Convergence in November and met with art, science and culture leaders from Scottsdale, Phoenix, Chandler and Arizona Citizens for the Arts to learn more about how different cities around the state support the arts through governmental partnerships.

Stone said the weeklong tour was foundational to the ongoing conversations that they are having about the future.

“What we’re looking at is a possible intergovernmental agency or a relationship or agreement. So we’re looking at other government-nonprofit relationships, how are they working, what is most effective,” Hasapis said.

Hasapis said one possibility could be moving Creative Flagstaff into a role similar to that of Metro Plan or the Northern Arizona Intergovernmental Transit Authority, which operates the Mountain Line public bus system.

Both of those are intergovernmental organizations, which, at times, even share staff with the city and county.

Still, Hasapis cautioned that they are not looking to make Creative Flagstaff an official department of the city or county.

At this time, no decisions have been made.

However, the city is opening the discussion up to the public on March 20 and 21. The input provided during those sessions will help inform decision making.