Even with one foot out the door, Karen Brooks Hopkins can’t help keeping her eye on the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s bottom line. Ms. Hopkins, the institution’s president, helped turn her farewell gala into a windfall for the academy’s endowment. The April event, which celebrated her 36 years at the organization, raised more than $2 million.
“It’s important not to let a retirement go untouched,” says Ms. Hopkins, 62, who retires this month from the organization known as BAM. “It’s so hard to raise money for an endowment. You’re always distracted by the short-term operating costs.”
Not much has distracted Ms. Hopkins from her central role in helping transform BAM from a cultural outpost of New York to one of its red-hot centers.
She was hired by Harvey Lichtenstein, BAM’s visionary impresario, to help find the money to bankroll his grand plan to spruce up the nonprofit’s historic building in a dilapidated section of Brooklyn and present productions that featured avant-garde and cutting-edge performers.
“Harvey said, ‘I need someone who can work like hell,’” recalls Ms. Hopkins. “I said, ‘You found her.’ He said, ‘You’re hired.’ "
Work like hell she did. Since Ms. Hopkins arrived in 1979, BAM’s budget has increased by 10-fold, to $54 million; its endowment now exceeds $100 million.
Despite having scant fundraising experience when she joined BAM, Ms. Hopkins helped raise money to bring 26 horses from France for a series of performances; stage the John Adams opera “Nixon in China”; and produce an annual home-grown festival, Next Wave.
She also led the charge to raise money to renovate and significantly expand the organization’s network of buildings, which now include a movie-theater complex and several new performance spaces.
Along the way, she rose from fund-raising assistant to president in 1999, when Mr. Lichtenstein retired. Ms. Hopkins leads BAM jointly with Joseph Melillo, the group’s executive producer; she’ll hand over the role to Katy Clark, who is giving up the presidency of New York’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s to come aboard.
Behind the Scenes
When she was a girl growing up in Baltimore, Ms. Hopkins got bitten by the theater bug and was sweet on the idea of becoming an actress. But she came to value working behind the scenes to make art happen.
“If you are an actor, you are always waiting to get cast,” she says. “A director is always waiting to be hired. But if you could find the resources to make creative work happen, you could do anything, you could shape an institution. This is where the real power is, in a certain way.”
Among the secrets of her success is not wasting a lot of time on rejection.
She recalls one situation in which a prospective funder turned her down because the project at BAM met only four out of five of the foundation’s criteria. “You suck it up and move on,” says Ms. Hopkins. “And hope that next time you figure out how to align with all five. “
Lo and behold, she says, a few years later BAM had a different production that appealed to the funder. A member of BAM’s board of trustees asked for a grant and the foundation eventually contributed $400,000. “The right project came along and the right person approached them,” says Ms. Hopkins.
Adam Max, vice chair of the academy’s board, says Ms. Hopkins will go to extraordinary lengths and heights — including traveling to Siberia and, at one point, scaling BAM’s opera-house scaffolding — to convince donors of the worthiness of the organization’s projects. That doggedness, coupled with her gift for gratitude, has propelled Ms. Hopkins’ success in supporting BAM’s mission.
“One of her gifts is, everything is personal,” says Mr. Max, a managing partner at the Jordan Company, a private-equity firm. “In my 13 years of being generous to BAM, Karen has thanked me, and each time she has done it, she has made me feel I have gotten more out of BAM than I have given.”
BAM’s large and active 60-member board is among the top reasons Ms. Hopkins has been successful at building the organization, she says. During her tenure, the size of the board doubled. The board was behind the push, started in 1992, to create an endowment to end the group’s hand-to-mouth existence, says Ms. Hopkins.
“It’s easier now to get board members to BAM,” she says. “Brooklyn has changed and BAM’s reputation has grown.”
BAM’s neighborhood, Fort Greene, continues to evolve from sketchy to a cultural district. A few blocks away sits the new Barclays Center, home to sporting events, rock concerts, and more, drawing patrons to what has become a bustling borough with growing affluence. The Mark Morris Dance Center opened nearby in 2001 and two smaller theaters have also taken root. The changing neighborhood, coupled with an increasing volume of cultural offerings, attracted 750,000 people through BAM’s doors last year.
When Ms. Hopkins hands her aisle seats to Ms. Clark, her successor will lead a different BAM than the one Ms. Hopkins joined nearly four decades ago. “We’re not the scrappy start-up,” says Ms. Hopkins.
Still, there is room for growth. One project she expects Ms. Clark to tackle is planned giving, which BAM has not traditionally focused on.
In her retirement, Ms. Hopkins plans to write a book about the BAM story. And she won’t stay away from its theaters for long.
“I’m looking forward to enjoying productions at BAM,” she says, “and not thinking about how to pay for them.”
