In a radical move, Tate has launched an endowment fund to help secure its long-term future, inspired in part by a model pioneered by US museums. More than £43m has already been raised for the endowment known as the Tate Future Fund: “the real goal and the real legacy for [Tate chair] Roland Rudd and for myself would be to get the fund to £150m by 2030,” says Tate director Maria Balshaw.
The new fund was announced yesterday evening at a fundraising gala held in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London, which was attended by artists such as Steve McQueen and Tracey Emin. The gala, which also marked the 25th anniversary of Tate Modern, raised more than £1m.
Balshaw says that Tate has worked on the new funding project for the past three years. “We have been quietly scoping out whether it would be possible and talking to trustees about embracing this as a strategy because it is a significant shift—an addition to the portfolio of funding that we have.”
The artist Grayson Perry, Tate’s director Maria Balshaw and the actor Reese Witherspoon and the UK arts minister Chris Bryant at the fundraising gala to celebrate Tate Modern’s 25th anniversary
Photo: © Verity Quirk
Balshaw outlines that Tate has a “three-pronged stool of support”; grant-in-aid provided by the UK government makes up roughly a third; earned income through tickets, membership and shops is another third; “fundraised income and all the other ways in which we generate money [corporate and philanthropic donations which can include works of art] is the final third ,” she says.
Tate received £50.8m grant-in-aid from 2023-24 (£54.2m in 2022-23). According to its annual accounts (2023-24), Tate’s self-generated income from trading, admissions and fundraising amounted to £119.2m for the same year (£92m in 2022-23).
“[Tate Future Fund] will add a strand on top of that, which will always be dedicated to the artistic creativity of the organisation and the public benefit. [This includes] making the kind of groundbreaking exhibitions that Tate has always done which is expensive and challenging. We have to be bold, and so it will support that and continue to build the collection… we want to be able to do that long term.”
Research and scholarship must be protected, she stresses. “One of the endowment gifts comes from the Mountain Foundation who have been supporting Tate for nearly 50 years; their latest gift endows a curatorial post for historic British art. That’s the kind of thing we want to protect.” A number of endowment supporters also want to protect public benefit activities including learning work with schools and family programmes for children and young people, Balshaw adds.
Asked whether the new fund was a way of navigating Tate’s difficult financial situation—7% of its workforce was recently slashed to reduce costs while the museum group has operated on a deficit budget from 2024-25—Balshaw said: “We are through that now. The nature of endowment support is that it's for the long term; it isn't about meeting a need today or even just for next year. It is about creating a sustained source of income that will be protected, whether economic times are good or difficult.
“It's absolutely separate from the hard work that we've done over the last five months to get ourselves to a sustainable position. If we were not in a sustainable position now, I think people wouldn't want to give to an endowment.
The endowment will not go towards the institution’s reserves, says Balshaw. “It will sit as a separately managed fund overseen by [the registered charity] Tate Foundation. The principle of an endowment is that you create a capital sum which is protected and that you only draw on the interest that is made each year. Ideally, you don't draw down all the interest. So we shall set a level that we draw down that is less than the fund is generating so it'll grow.”
A US-style model
The UK department for culture, media and sport (DCMS) has approved the project. “We've kept them very close through the whole development; they don't just approve but they're [also] really interested to see how you could stimulate this kind of giving because it is very familiar to American supporters,” Balshaw adds.
She says that the US model has set a precedent. “Every one of Tate's peer museums in the US has a significant endowment from the very largest funds that support the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to smaller museums like the Studio Museum in Harlem. We looked and learned from that model.”
In another move echoing the dynamics of the US museum sector, some of the Tate’s trustees have contributed to the £43m already pledged. “I'm really proud that those trustees on our board who can give have done so [to the endowment]; like all UK museums, we have a mixed board with a range of specialisms. Not everyone's there for fundraising purposes, but those who are fortunate enough to have the wealth are supporting the Tate Future Fund.”
Trustees contributing to the new fund include Roland Rudd (board chair); Nick Clarry, managing partner at the private equity firm CVC Capital Partners, and Jack Kirkland, the founder of the grant-giving charity the Ampersand Foundation. The former trustee and hedge funder Mala Gaonkar has also contributed. Other donors include Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Miami collectors Jorge and Darlene Pérez. “The fund will now move into active campaign mode, with donors being solicited from Tate’s extensive global supporter network,” a Tate statement says.
Crucially the new fund could prove revolutionary for UK museums which have increasingly relied on a mix of public and private funding, looking especially in recent years to corporate sponsorship and philanthropic donations to shore up finances. But museum professionals gave mixed reactions.
“I think it's the obvious way forward,” said Charles Saumarez Smith, the former director of London’s National Gallery who discussed the benefit of endowments in a 2001 article entitled The Nation’s Museums: Politics and Policies. “It was obvious then that government funding was likely to shrink and would need to be replaced by private funding.”
But an anonymous London-based fundraising consultant raises concerns about the ethical aspect of the new fund, saying that “not only will donors need to be tracked but how Tate invests in an endowment will [need to] be too. This investment should be socially responsible and not linked to index funds that also support fossil fuel companies, for instance.”
Balshaw says that “all donations to Tate, whether they are tiny or large, go through our ethics committee”. She adds: “We have long had an investment policy that is in line with our broader environmental commitments, and this is monitored by our investment committee as well as our ethics committee.”
