Friends were encouraging Quang Do to apply for the president and CEO role with Create Birmingham when he coincidentally found the first check he had ever received for performing spoken-word poetry, as a 19-year-old. It was from Create Birmingham.
“I remember seeing that check and being like, ‘Oh, this is weird, all the pieces coming into play,’” Do said. “I really have been preparing myself for an opportunity I didn’t know was Create (Birmingham).”
He knew he eventually wanted to lead an organization that supports artists and storytellers. “So, when this opportunity came up, it was almost like, ‘Oh, you can’t not apply,’” he said.
Do, who has been on the job for two months, previously led a revitalization of Central Six AlabamaWorks!, a workforce-development organization. He also served as a program officer at the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham, advocacy and policy director for Growing Kings, a nonprofit focused on underserved male youth, and philanthropic partnerships director at Resilia Inc., a tech company with a platform that assists nonprofits and their funders.
Do said he set out to learn how the nonprofit world works, from a financial standpoint, when he was 25. At the time, he was working at UAB, but arts organizations were also paying him to travel and perform his poetry.
“All their money was coming from different funders,” Do said. “I wanted more artists to come from Birmingham. I wanted more artists to not only survive but thrive in Birmingham.”
Through his subsequent jobs in the nonprofit sector, Do said, he learned about local, regional and national avenues for fundraising, which is a big part of his role at Create Birmingham.
What Does Create Birmingham Do?
Create Birmingham’s mission is to invest in economic development in the nonprofit and commercial creative sectors, including the performing arts, visual arts and crafts, culture and heritage, media and film, design and culinary arts. It does this by distributing grant money and through programming and events that support and promote artists and the creative industry.
Do said the mission is always evolving because a nonprofit’s responsibility is to the community and its changing needs.
Right now, with the creative community reeling from the loss of federal funding and bracing for more cuts, “the key idea is for us to truly position Birmingham’s creative economy and industry as a powerful driver of economic growth that drives investment, that empowers entrepreneurship and creates a sustainable ecosystem,” he said.
To increase the creative economy’s contribution to Birmingham’s gross domestic product, Create Birmingham is focusing on recruiting, retaining and developing artists and storytellers; helping launch and develop creative businesses; and supporting initiatives that increase community engagement with the creative sector.
Create Birmingham plans to build a coalition of stakeholders to tell the story of why a thriving creative economy is a necessity, Do said. “The core work is happening,” he said. “We’re going to continue to expand and build on that work but evolve beyond these separate industries that we’ve been involved in, into advocating for and figuring out solutions for the broader creative economy.”
Create Birmingham Works to Unify Arts Community
Pockets of the creative sector are thriving in Birmingham, Do said, but the community and those who engage with it are segregated in terms of funding streams and of artistic spaces and events drawing homogenous crowds.
He said Birmingham’s Dia de los Muertos festival is a notable exception, with diverse participation. Create Birmingham is striving to facilitate events like that weekly, Do said.
“The community is at a pivotal intersection, and that intersection is: Do we remain the same way we have always been, or can we be unified?” he said.
Recent federal funding cuts that pose an existential threat to some creative-sector organizations in Birmingham and statewide have hastened this conversation, Do said. Budget reductions decimated the National Endowment for the Humanities, causing the Alabama Humanities Alliance to cease grantmaking, and similar cuts and state-level ramifications are anticipated at the National Endowment for the Arts. Do said at least half a dozen organizations in Birmingham have reduced staff or programming as a result.
“Because of what’s happening up there, it’s forcing us to have this conversation a lot sooner than maybe we’d like to – and maybe we should have had this conversation five, 10 or 15 years ago,” Do said. “But I think what’s wonderful is that this conversation is now happening everywhere in the city.”
The city of Brimingham, the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham and K-12 schools are among those having conversations about what it means to support the creative industries, he said.
The loss of funding from the federal government makes the nonprofit creative sector more reliant on its local funding, and a long-term obstacle is that the typical funding structure forces organizations to compete with one another, Do said.
“Birmingham does have a truly thriving philanthropic sector, but we’re all pulling from the same pool,” he said, adding that Create Birmingham is making tremendous progress in opening channels and being a vehicle for regional and national funders to inject money into the ecosystem.
Funds Create Birmingham receives go into the artistic economy, Do said. “We’re always focused on, how can we get any dollar that we have back into the community, whether it is supporting other nonprofits and partnering on things where we can support them financially or giving our dollars directly to artists and storytellers or to local businesses.”
For example, Create Birmingham exhibited Birmingham artist Joe Minter’s work last year and partnered with the Mellon Foundation to preserve the exhibit, Do said. “And so those dollars that we’re receiving from the Mellon Foundation are dollars from outside of our community that are now inside and going straight to artists,” he said.
Do said arts programs that prioritize equity and serve historically marginalized communities often face the greatest funding challenges, as do smaller, emerging and growing arts organizations that typically rely on government grants for a larger percentage of their budgets.
An example he pointed to is the Jefferson County Memorial Quilt Project, which seeks to reckon with central Alabama’s history of racial violence by creating a memorial quilt honoring the 34 African-Americans lynched in Jefferson County from the mid-19th century through the mid-20th century.
“This project is currently facing funding uncertainties, and we are actively seeking alternative sources to ensure its completion,” Do said.
Individual artists often depend on grants, he continued, and cuts to their funding can ripple throughout the creative sector.
While the Sidewalk Film Festival is doing well, Do said Sidewalk Cinema, a nonprofit, independent movie theater, is facing serious challenges. He said Create Birmingham has collaborated with Sidewalk in the past and plans to move forward with a closer partnership.
By the end of the year, Create Birmingham plans to begin holding a regular creative-industry round table with nonprofit leaders, artists and storytellers to gather information it can share with local, state and national funders.
“So we can create something comprehensive that says, ‘Hey, here’s the current struggles that we have, and here’s what the community can do to support all of us,” Do said.
Areas of the creative economy that are doing particularly well are those that succeed in community engagement and cross-sector collaboration and clearly align with Birmingham’s overall development goals, he said.
Examples include an upcoming celebration honoring Sun Ra, a Birmingham jazz composer, musician and poet, and Film Birmingham, a Create Birmingham initiative that serves as the film commission for the Greater Birmingham region and acts as the primary liaison between film productions and city agencies.
“This isn’t just about attracting film productions,” Do said. “It’s about the tangible economic benefits that ripple through the city. Film activity generates jobs for local crew, supports hospitality businesses and showcases Birmingham as a dynamic place to live and work.”
Developing Arts Workforce a Chicken-or-Egg Dilemma
Generating jobs is important because, in addition to funding challenges, the creative sector faces workforce-development hurdles, Do said.
In many cases, those impediments take the form of a chicken-or-egg dilemma. Do uses the film industry as an example. The Birmingham area has a lot of talented young people who have relevant skill sets or are interested in learning them. If production companies don’t come here and hire them, they’ll move to other cities to find work. On the other hand, if production companies come to Birmingham and can’t find enough people with the necessary skills, they’ll bring in workers from other places.
“So we have to train up the folks that we have in town to where, when a big production comes into town, we can say, ‘Hey, we have 50 production assistants, 25 lighting folks and sound editors who are ready to support you,’” Do said. “‘You don’t have to fly out 20, 30, 40 folks from L.A.’ But it’s difficult because you can’t train 100 people unless you have jobs. But then for us to have jobs, we have to recruit productions at the same time.”
Creativity Essential at Community, Business and Individual Levels
Do said there needs to be a regional understanding that a thriving creative sector is more than just nice to have.
“It’s a necessity,” he said. “There’s not a thriving community without a thriving creative sector. It truly is the artists and the storytellers and builders and makers who contribute to a what a thriving city is.”
The arts give a community its identity, and that identity makes people feel connected to the community and each other, he explained. Telling the story of Birmingham and its people to the rest of the world is important as well, Do said, and the creative industries do that.
He maintains that since the COVID-19 pandemic, creativity has become essential to almost every business because the pandemic accelerated a radical digital transformation that made narrative storytelling critical to success. People check out businesses and their stories online before patronizing them.
“We’re no longer in a place where you can walk by a restaurant, think, ‘Oh, that looks interesting,’ and you’re going to walk in,” Do said.
On an individual level, all people are artists and storytellers, he continued.
“It is a core part of the human existence,” he said. “Some people are visual artists, some people dance, some people are singers and so on. But we do live in a society that almost minimizes the importance of individual artistic expression.”
How Art Shaped Do’s Life
Do knows firsthand how artistic expression can enrich an individual’s life and build community. Born in Vietnam, he grew up in California until his family moved to Alabama when he was 13.
A high school assignment to find or write a poem and perform it for the class prompted Do to write his first poem. The teacher was impressed.
“So, I got into spoken word, and I was writing and performing,” he said. “I was on this poetry slam team, and we were traveling, competing in these regional and national competitions.”
He continued that during college, including a year he took off to live in Decatur, Georgia, among a community of supportive poets. After college, while he was working as an adviser for UAB’s National Pan-Hellenic Council and Black Student Union, Do said his art helped him connect with the students he mentored.
“They were like, ‘Who the hell are you?’” he recalled. “Part of my ability to build trust with these students was to share my story, and how I did that was through a Black art form, which was spoken word. And so I started really believing in this power of art to develop community and trust amongst folks.”
Do said his attention to his own creative endeavors waned after he set his sights and career on figuring out the business side of nonprofit success, but joining Create Birmingham rekindled his artistic spirit. He said he’s written more in the last couple of months than he had in the previous five or six years.
“I think in the back of my mind there was this thought of, there’s so much stuff going on, you can’t justify spending an hour or two writing poetry,” he said. “Being at Create has reminded me of the importance for all of us to do some form of expression. And so I’m writing. I haven’t been performing as much as I used to, but that is an intentional goal that I do have.”
