Cave Canem’s Lisa Willis on sustaining Black literary arts organizations

Earlier this year, the nonprofit literary arts organization Cave Canem released “Magnitude and Bond: A Field Study on Black Literary Arts Organizations,” the first-ever study of its kind, focused on culturally specific organizations in the literary arts sector. 

“The idea to create the study first came to me in 2021 because first and foremost, there has never been a study on Black literary arts organizations,” said Cave Canem Executive Director Lisa Willis. “I felt it was not only urgent for us to be the commissioner of a report, but to be a research partner so that we could have a voice in terms of the questions and the way that the data is collected.”

Working with the research group Ithaka S+R, Cave Canem designed a field study to better understand the history and practices of five Black literary organizations — Cave Canem, Furious Flower Poetry Center, The Hurston/Wright Foundation, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora and The Watering Hole. Researchers also conducted interviews with 25 individuals in the Black literary arts community, including subject matter experts, organizational founders, and staff, board and audience members, and dug into secondary sources to explore broader issues like Black literary history, community engagement and financial sustainability. 

The end result explores the rise of Black literary arts organizations after the Civil War and takes readers through the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement before zeroing in on the strategies employed by groups that have maintained thriving artistic communities despite receiving relatively little in the way of sustained philanthropic support. The report’s takeaways also have an unfortunate and timely resonance — four days before I spoke with Willis, Cave Canem was informed that its NEA grant had been terminated. 

Our discussion focused on the report’s key findings, how organizations are responding to NEA cuts, Cave Canem’s plans to create a Resiliency Fund to support the Black literary arts field, and more. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I’d like to start with the big takeaway: What are the strategies that have allowed Black literary arts organizations to succeed despite persistently challenging financial conditions?

Black literary organizations are dynamic spaces, and I think that’s what the report surfaced — that these are not just organizations that are providing a class or a reading. They are service organizations that address the holistic aspect of what it means to be a writer on the page and in life. 

The report also surfaced that these organizations operate with a high level of tension with the status quo, and as a result of that history, we are positioned to be flexible, responsive and adaptive in a way that isn’t common elsewhere. Adaptive strategies also include being able to community-build, have safe space-making and advancing justice. 

One of the most surprising takeaways is institutional funders’ relative lack of support for Black literary organizations.

It’s a finding that seems to get a gasp when people read it. We collected qualitative data from the five organizations for the period covering 2018-2022 and found that the two most common funding sources were federal grants, at 17%, and individual donors, also at 17%. 

Institutional funders weren’t included on the chart because the funding wasn’t enough to register as its own category, even when collecting it in the aggregate for those five organizations that have almost 140 years of collective service to the field. There are some exceptions, but the reality is that there are very few organizations of color — and certainly Black literary organizations — that are receiving institutional funding.

You can probably guess where I’m going next. Has federal funding dried up for Black literary organizations in recent weeks?

Yes, it has. On May 2, Cave Canem was notified via email that our NEA award was terminated effective May 31, 2025.

I know that groups that lost funding in other fields have taken the administration to court to reinstate the funding. Is anything like that happening in the literary arts field?

We received an email from LitNet that said to let them know if anyone had their NEA funding canceled. Mary Gannon, who is LitNet’s executive director, is creating a list of all the affected organizations so they can track the impact this will have on the field and come up with an advocacy plan. I spoke with her yesterday [May 15] and she is actively summarizing those details. 

I would add the caveat that the literary arts field is the least-funded of all the arts disciplines, with the entire field being able to fit into the budget of a single major art museum in the United States, so it’s underresourced when it comes to paid administrative and strategic support. You have a lot of people working part time or not being paid competitive salaries, and when you say to them, “OK, and now we’re turning into an advocacy powerhouse,” it’s difficult to generate the same momentum as other fields.

Obviously, the loss of federal funding underscores the need to galvanize support from individual donors, and especially new ones.

The biggest challenge around the Black literary arts field is the fact that people are not aware that it exists. When society has gotten used to something always being here, there’s a desensitization that happens in terms of people thinking that because we’ve been able to adapt, we will always be here. But you can’t take that for granted. 

Getting back to the report, did any of the findings surprise you?

Yes, and it was that the majority of the positions for the five organizations were being supported with either volunteers or part-time workers, and that 40% of leadership positions were fulfilled through volunteer arrangements.

The prevalence of volunteerism and unpaid positions is unfortunately not that uncommon. However, it is exceptional here in that this heavy reliance on unpaid labor is indicative of a more systemic challenge, meaning that Black literary organizations continue to be driven by a disturbing, centuries-long pattern of unpaid labor. 

Of particular concern is that many of the historic Black literary organizations had their founding in and shortly after the Black Arts Movement, which means that they are founder led, and the leader is in their 70s or 80s. When we talk about this need for succession planning, there becomes a greater urgency, because how many people are going to sign up to work for free to lead a major institution? It doesn’t bode well in terms of creating an attractive executive compensation package, even if the organization is a cultural treasure, as so many of them are. 

Earlier, you mentioned that one of the big takeaways from the report is that Black literary organizations operate like service organizations. Can you elaborate on that point?

I’m thinking about an organization here in New York that serves the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, called Power in the Pen. 

Their budget in 2024 was approximately $25,061, and they’re running off of volunteer labor, yet they offer a writing workshop every weekend free to the community. It’s open to adults, but they are also starting to step into programming for kids. They also address some of the food insecurities in the community by providing meals around the holidays and other programs.

A general operating grant of $10,000 per year for two years, or a grant of $5,000, would be life-changing for an organization like this. This community is so small in some ways that it wouldn’t take a lot to take it out of this state of extreme deprivation as it relates to material resources.

It reminds me of the “chicken or the egg” problem we see in philanthropy — a funder is reluctant to give an organization a large, unrestricted grant because it’s too immature. But if you actually give them the money, then the organization won’t be immature.

Exactly. And that means having an openness to understanding nontraditional organizations or business structures, and not immediately invalidating them. Every organization has its own way of going about its work. The important thing is that the field recognizes that this is a healthy thing, and we don’t exclude organizations because they do not look the way we think an organization needs to look.

To this point, you’re making the case for a Resiliency Fund that would provide new investments into the field. Can you talk about the fund?

Cave Canem would act as the fiscal administrator for the fund, and we are hoping to raise between $500,000 and $1 million to address some of the needs that were identified in the study. It would represent the largest single field-wide investment in the Black literary arts ecosystem to date.

The fund would provide multi-year general operating grants to the five organizations in the report. The report also mentioned the need for unrestricted grants to the smaller and nontraditional organizations that largely make up our community, so the fund would also disburse smaller grants of two to three years to those organizations. The grants would support basic operational needs, staffing compensation and programming expenses. 

What are some specific areas of operational need for Black literary organizations?

The idea with the fund is that it would provide resources so the five organizations at the center of the study could have access to things like leadership coaching and strategic planning. As for smaller organizations, some of the more urgent issues include providing access to legal and communications consultants to help them preempt or navigate crises, HR consultation, conflict mediation and program costs.

Another goal is to provide funding for consultation support so Cave Canem can think strategically about succession planning. Succession planning was one of the key recommendations of the report, and none of the profiled organizations had a formal succession plan. With this support, we’d be able to scale our approach and share strategic learnings with other organizations and the field.

What’s the timeline look like for the fund?

Between Juneteenth and July 4, 2025, we hope to bring some awareness and advocacy around the fund. We would raise the funds until the end of the year and begin disbursing funding in 2026. 

Juneteenth is coming up, and I hope when people think about it, they will consider giving back in whatever way they can to the Black literary community, which has had such a big impact on social movement organizations, and all of that history stems from these spaces. I encourage people not to take us for granted, and to help uplift the message of our importance.