Dance/USA has no regranting money left. Michele Kumi (久美) Baer, who became the organization's executive director in April, delivered that blunt assessment in an exclusive interview with Dance Magazine, laying out why the national service organization for dance must rebuild its business model from the ground up.

The immediate trigger for the conversation came last month, when Dance/USA announced the end of its Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists (DFA) program. The news disappointed and confused many in the field, arriving at a moment when funding programs across the arts are contracting or disappearing. But DFA was funded solely by a grant from the Doris Duke Foundation, and when that grant ended, Dance/USA had nothing left to give.

It was exactly the kind of precariousness Baer wants to eliminate.

"Dance/USA needs to reimagine and rebuild its business model," she said. "Our existing organizational strategy and structure are not sustainable. I took this job knowing that that was the case."

The numbers explain her urgency. Dance/USA operates with four and a half employees, including Baer herself, plus a roster of consultants, on an annual operating budget of about $1.6 million — far below the $5 to $8 million budgets of some other national arts service organizations. Membership revenue has dropped roughly 50 percent since 2018, partly because the organization cut rates to keep membership affordable. Next year, Baer projects about $150,000 in membership income, down from well over $300,000 in earlier years.

Several core programs, she noted, relied on time-bound, project-based grants from a single source — a structure that collapses when a funder's priorities shift. "That creates a very precarious scenario if priorities change," she said.

Baer also addressed a lingering perception that Dance/USA primarily serves large-budget companies. "There was definitely truth to this in the past, but today, most of our programs intentionally serve individual artists and smaller-budget companies as a part of the larger dance ecosystem," she said.

Her strategic answer is what she calls a "field catalyst model," built on three pillars. The first is capacity-building: supporting leaders to make institutional change, including giving members "the incubation space to sit with alternative models" — exploring, for example, what it would look like to share back offices across institutions. The second is field-serving work, tending to persistent and emerging needs. The third is field-building: advocacy, government affairs and coalition work aimed at larger structural change.

On the question of regranting, Baer was direct. "As a fundraising organization that's been a regranter, we're only able to distribute what we've raised," she said. "I can't promise that we'll be a regranter anytime soon. It's a big loss."

She frames the contraction as a platform for growth rather than permanent austerity. "There's hope for growth, for sure. But we need capital to do that," she said. "There's a desire to transform and contract into a model that goes in this direction, and then to grow from there."

The fundraising campaign for that pivot is already underway. "This is an ambition," Baer said. "It has grounding, but we need the resources to make it happen."