Steel Yard eyes funding balance

ALONG FOR THE RIDE: Tim Ferland works on bicycle racks for Johnson & Wales University. Ferland is the part-production manager at the Steel Yard, which is seeking new revenue sources to sustain its expansion. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
ALONG FOR THE RIDE: Tim Ferland works on bicycle racks for Johnson & Wales University. Ferland is the part-production manager at the Steel Yard, which is seeking new revenue sources to sustain its expansion. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

In the 11 years since the Steel Yard opened its doors on a Providence brownfield as a community-based, metal-works training ground, the nonprofit has developed into a more broadly based organization featuring a wide array of educational offerings, and public projects and events.
Heavily grant dependent in the beginning, the Steel Yard’s growth has been at least partly built on new revenue sources that are helping to sustain the expansion, the organization’s leaders say.
The Steel Yard’s annual financial reports, filed with the Internal Revenue Service from 2010 through 2012, suggest declining revenue from grants and contributions, but it is only part of the story – and a distorted one at that.
Apart from diminished giving associated with the recession, which most nonprofits have experienced, Executive Director Howie Sneider says a precipitous drop-off in grants and contributions between 2009 and 2010 – from more than $2 million to just under $476,000 – actually reflects a decline in grant funding connected with environmental remediation for the Sims Avenue property that was completed in 2010.
Nonetheless, according to those 990 forms filed with the IRS, overall, grants and contributions have declined slightly since to $382,700 in 2011 and $323,453 in 2012, the last calendar year figures were available. Partly by necessity, and partly because of healthy growth, earned income from diverse programming is projected in 2014 at about $360,000, growing to an estimated 60 percent of all revenue, Sneider said.
The nonprofit’s current budget is between $500,000 and $600,000, Board Treasurer Frank Previti said.
“It’s hard to find nonprofits that do as much as we do with regard to earned income,” said Peter Gill Case, chairman of the nonprofit’s board of directors.
Previti added that the figures in the 990s associated with contributions reflect “a shift in balancing our revenue, more than a drop-off of one particular category.
“After 10 years, any organization changes,” Previti said. “And what we’ve done is start to morph into a pretty balanced revenue model. Our goal as a board and one of the things we bring into our strategic plan is to be a well-balanced organization, which we’ve done a very good job of.” Sneider estimates that the Steel Yard serves as many as 5,000 people a year through everything from educational open-enrollment programming, public projects and public events like a Halloween iron pour that draws 800 people, to fees for service that include weddings, short-term renting of studio space and residencies for iron-casting metal fabricators and ceramics makers.
“Part of the reason for diversifying an income stream is so that you’re flexible within changing markets,” Sneider said. “Our earned-income programs are mission driven. We’re not selling T-shirts [just] to raise money; we’re fulfilling our mission while raising money. So, [the revenue stream] is subsidized with private fundraising and corporate support and grants, but it has really grown out of the mission and its needs.”
Founded in 2001 by Nick Bauta and Clay Rockefeller, who are no longer property owners nor on the board of directors, but remain involved, the Steel Yard describes its role in the community as a “catalyst,” a role Sneider says is very much alive and reflected in the earned-income revenue sources that have come to help support the nonprofit.
The Steel Yard incorporated in 2002 as the Woonasquatucket Valley Community Build Inc., and began programming the following year. The operators purchased the Sims Avenue site in 2007, when they also received a significant federal grant to help complete environmental cleanup work on the property that was the longtime home of the Providence Steel and Iron Co. Then they began renting office space to four other tenants, Sneider said.
Open-enrollment courses began with 30 enrollments in 2004 and have served about 2,000 students, including repeat participants, to date, Sneider said.
“We also engage students in community projects in the shop,” he added. “While they’re here, they’re [in] on-the-job training with real-world projects giving back to the community – decorative fences, affordable-housing projects, bike racks.”
The Steel Yard has a long list of national and local funding partners and supporters that range from the National Endowment for the Arts to Bank Rhode Island, Textron and the Providence Rotary. Another of these includes the R.I. State Council on the Arts, which Executive Director Randall Rosenbaum says has supported the Steel Yard consistently since fiscal 2005 with various project grants. With the availability since 2013 of a new tool called the Cultural Data Project, however, the Steel Yard and other nonprofits can build-out data and generate reports that help inform decision-making – and use this tool to apply for operating support through RISCA, Rosenbaum said.
This year is the first time the Steel Yard is applying for money from a proposed state funding pool of $590,000, and the organization will find out in July if it is getting anything for the upcoming 2014-15 fiscal year, Sneider and Rosenbaum said.
“Since 2013, we have made a move to expand our operating-support program so that organizations like the Steel Yard can be part of that,” said Rosenbaum, “because operating support is both the hardest money an organization can get and the most valuable money they can get. It’s easier to get money for projects and harder to get money to keep the lights on.”
Sneider said his predecessor, Helen Lang, who left after a short tenure last year, helped incorporate Steel Yard data into the Cultural Data Project. Sneider said Lang left “for personal reasons.” Neither she, nor her predecessor, Drake Patten, could be immediately reached for comment.
The Pew Charitable Trust has set up the Cultural Data Project database in 14 states, making uniform information available so public funders like the state of Rhode Island can “understand the cultural infrastructure,” Rosenbaum said, “how the arts are doing financially, how they’re contributing to the local economy, how they’re serving young people.”
While making the awards is months away, Rosenbaum said the Steel Yard, which is competing with more than 60 other organizations for money, has been “very positively reviewed.”
The Steel Yard’s mission – to foster the industrial arts and “cultivate an environment of experimentation and a community strengthened by creative networks” – is perhaps no more clearly evident that in a project it is working on to place decorative but functional trash cans in Jenks Park in Central Falls. Fully funded on Dec. 8 with $10,044 through Citizinvestor, a municipal version of Kickstarter, the city and the Steel Yard are coordinating installation for this spring, said Theresa Agonia, business outreach and public relations coordinator for Central Falls.
“They’ve been great,” said Agonia. “This whole project was something very new for the city and they were very helpful in gathering our residents [through public meetings] and encouraging them to take pride in our city, providing information and making this a very easy process. We’re certainly going to consider them [for projects] in the future because we would love to have projects like this where the residents provide input as to what they’d like to see in the city.”
Public projects probably represent about 40 percent of the Steel Yard’s activity, Sneider said, representing about $200,000 in the 2012 budget, he said.
“We plan on growing public-projects investment in opportunities, and we’re always looking for new partnerships,” he said.
The Steel Yard’s Weld to Work program has trained about 100 people in metal working since its inception in 2008, said Sneider. The Rhode Island chapter of the Local Initiative Support Corporation, a national nonprofit that organizes funding around community building, is a relatively new partner that in 2013 helped fund $7,500 for the program focused on Providence’s Olneyville neighborhood, said Nancy Howard, a LISC senior program officer.
“They’re an incredible organization,” said Howard. “When they started the Weld to Work program, it was a great job-creating and economic-development program that we wanted to support. We … definitely want to partner with them in the future.”
Case said the next decade will be an opportunity to continue to grow earned-income resources while staying true to the nonprofit’s mission.
“In the past 10 years,” Case said, “we’ve realized we can remain healthy while relieving some of the pressure on the development side through earned income. I think we would like to continue to balance and improve our chances for growth in earned-income areas while still remaining a mission-driven organization that can extend its reach in terms of the number of people we serve.” •

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