The Things We’re Not Saying: When Resourcefulness Starts Hiding the Resources We Need
Raise your hand if you have:
Managed to feed a family on a wing and a prayer.
Developed an exciting sense of style through thrifting because you needed to make your clothing budget go further.
Put together a dynamic festival with a staff of three.
There is a particular kind of magic that happens when we make something out of seemingly nothing. On "Abbott Elementary", Janine and the rest of the staff figure out how to make something fly that, by all reasonable standards, should not even get off the ground.
If you have spent any amount of time in a small arts organization, you know this kind of magic intimately. We know how to stretch a dollar, turn three people into an entire department, find the workaround, call in the favor, rearrange the calendar, and somehow open the doors on time. We have built a lot of skill around making limited resources go further, and there is something genuinely worth honoring in that ingenuity.
And there are some things we need to start saying out loud about what it costs us.
This piece is the first in a three-part series I’m calling The Things We’re Not Saying, a conversation about some of the realities small arts organizations have learned to accommodate so well that we do not always stop to question them anymore. I want to spend some time with the challenge underneath the work, particularly the ones that cannot be solved by asking already stretched people to stretch a little further.
We’re starting here, with resourcefulness and the uncomfortable possibility that our ability to survive chronic under-resourcing has sometimes helped make that under-resourcing look acceptable.
Next, we’ll talk about “When Everyone Is Tired of Asking for Money”, because fundraising becomes a very different conversation when staff, boards, donors, and communities are all feeling some version of financial fatigue. Then we’ll ask, “Is This a Rough Season, or Has Something Actually Changed?”, because at some point we have to decide whether we are waiting for conditions to return to “normal” or whether the conditions themselves are telling us that our assumptions about how arts organizations operate need to change.
I do not expect these conversations to produce three tidy answers. I do hope they help us name what we are seeing more clearly, because there is a difference between responding creatively to a difficult moment and quietly building an entire operating model around scarcity.
This discussion is important right now because the current numbers make this conversation difficult to avoid
We Have Gotten Very Good At Making It Work
The current numbers make this conversation difficult to avoid.
2026 found that 46% of nonprofit CEOs said their own burnout was "very much" a concern, compared with just under 30% in 2025. Nearly three-quarters reported increased demand for services. Leaders described teams that are overworked while financial conditions prevent them from adding staff. The arts data tells a related story.
SMU DataArts' National Trends 2025, drawing from more than 6,500 arts
and cultural organizations, found that average expenses declined 23% from 2023 to 2024, including a 23% drop in personnel expenses. Staff counts fell to their lowest point in six years. At the same time, average paid attendance increased 13% and free attendance increased 22%. Forty-four percent of organizations ran deficits in 2024, compared with 36% in 2019.
Read those numbers together for a minute.
Fewer resources. Fewer staff. More people being served.
From the outside, that can look like efficiency.
From inside the organization, it may feel very different.
It may look like the executive director doing work that used to belong to three people, or the marketing manager answering patron emails while scheduling social posts and preparing a grant report because everybody's job description now includes "and other duties as assigned" in 72-point font. 🚩 It may even look like delaying maintenance, postponing a hire, reducing professional development, cutting planning time, or quietly deciding which good idea the organization simply cannot afford to pursue.
The work continues, which is worth celebrating.
And the cost of continuing deserves to be visible too.
Ingenuity Can Hide The Bill
Tim Gunn, famed Project Runway mentor, made the phrase “Make it work” iconic. I live by this phrase, and I do not want us to lose it.
I do, however, want us to stop allowing it to function as proof that we are adequately resourced. Being resourceful should never become evidence that an organization does not need resources. Every workaround has a cost, even when that cost never appears as a line item in the budget.
Sometimes staff absorb it through additional hours. Sometimes audiences absorb it through a diminished experience. Perhaps the artists absorb it, or maybe the organization borrows against its future by postponing strategy, evaluation, maintenance, or staff development.
Eventually, there is nowhere else to borrow from.
IVAR's 2025 Doing More With Less briefing captured this challenge through conversations with 41 charity leaders. Leaders described demand rising while resources declined and overhead costs increased. One described an expectation for "more with less money." Another described what happens after redundancies with painful clarity: "Redundancies will make us smaller, but expectations for delivery are the same, if not greater." That expectation is where resourcefulness can become dangerous. Because once an organization proves it can deliver the season with five people instead of seven, the five-person version can quietly become the new baseline.
Efficiency Has A Ceiling
Small organizations absolutely need to make thoughtful choices about resources. We should examine programs, expenses, staffing structures, audience strategy, pricing, and the work we continue doing mostly because we have always done it.
There are times when doing less is the responsible choice.
There is also a point where there is simply no juice left to squeeze.
CEP's 2026 research includes nonprofit leaders describing exactly that point. One said, "We've already cut expenses to the bone." Another described "doing all sorts of magic tricks to stay above water."
I keep coming back to the phrase "magic tricks."
Because that is often what this sector rewards.
We applaud the leader who somehow keeps the organization running, celebrate the team that pulls off the impossible season, and praise the staff member who stepped into the gap. Those people deserve recognition.
And maybe the deeper form of recognition is asking why the gap was there in the first place.
Survival Can Look Deceptively Healthy
"Abbott Elementary" gives us this joke over and over again. Ava will find a way to get something the school needs, pull off an event, secure a resource, or somehow turn a ridiculous situation into a win. Sometimes you have to question the method, but you cannot argue with the result. Abbott needed something, and somehow, Ava made it happen.
But the miracle does not erase the conditions that made a miracle necessary.
The teachers are still spending their own money. Somebody is still giving more time than the job should require. Something else still gets pushed aside. The school gets what it needs in that moment because someone inside Abbott absorbs the gap between what was provided and what the work actually required.
Small arts organizations know that gap well.
An organization meeting its commitments does not automatically mean those commitments are appropriately resourced. A sold-out performance does not tell you how many people worked late to make it happen. A successful education program does not show you the administrative work postponed to deliver it. A balanced budget does not tell you whether salaries are competitive, whether people can take time off, whether technology needs replacing, or whether leadership has enough space to think beyond the next payroll.
And this is where success can become misleading.
When the performance opens, the students are served, the grant report gets submitted, and the budget somehow balances, the people looking at the organization from the outside see the outcome. They may never see what the staff traded to produce it.
The visible outcome tells us what happened. It does not tell us what it took to make it happen. That distinction matters because when boards and funders repeatedly see organizations deliver under impossible conditions, resourcefulness can quietly become part of the expectation. Yesterday’s miracle becomes today’s operating assumption, and the next budget gets built around the belief that somehow, once again, the rabbit will come out of the hat.
The “Miracle” Is The Baseline
I think small arts organizations have to become more comfortable showing the seams.
That may mean telling a board that another initiative requires another person, another $20,000, or the removal of something already on the calendar. It may mean showing funders what adequate delivery actually costs instead of presenting the leanest possible budget because we think leanness makes us more fundable. It may mean resisting the temptation to protect everyone else from the operational reality because we are proud of being the people who can figure things out.
And yes, it may mean saying no to good work. That can feel uncomfortable in a field built around mission. Still, sustainability requires an honest relationship between what we promise and what we have the capacity to deliver.
The question I want boards, funders, and arts leaders asking is less about how much further an organization can stretch. I want us asking what the work actually requires: Enough.
Enough people, time, money, and enough margin to respond when something unexpected happens without requiring somebody to become the emergency infrastructure.
Because small arts organizations will keep being creative. We’ll continue finding solutions and will keep making something beautiful with what is available. That ingenuity is part of what makes this field extraordinary.
And perhaps one of the most responsible things we can do with that ingenuity now is to stop using it to make chronic scarcity look sustainable.
So as you look at your organization this week, consider the places where everything appears to be working.
Then ask one more question:
Where have we become so good at compensating for scarcity that other people can no longer see the scarcity?
Comments