Support Doesn’t Always Mean Cash : Leadership: The Orange County Business Committee for the Arts has given money to some groups, but that tends to be the exception rather than the rule.

Last September, when the Grove Shakespeare Festival was hanging by a financial thread--frantically looking for $22,000 to keep it from going under--some in the local arts community wondered whether help might arrive from the county’s most prestigious support group, the Orange County Business Committee for the Arts.

But when the smoke cleared, the Grove had been saved by an anonymous middle-class donor, a group of firefighters, a local hotel and many small contributors. The committee’s major contribution was a phone call by executive director Betty Moss to the Grove’s executive vice president, Barbara G. Hammerman, asking whether she was interested in moving the festival from Garden Grove.

The call, Hammerman said, was followed by a luncheon, during which Moss explained that one of the committee’s roles is placing business and corporate leaders on the boards of various arts organizations.

That was just the kind of assistance that the committee was set up to provide in 1981, when it was founded by Fluor Corp. Chairman David Tappan. Typically, the committee places 30 to 40 business people on boards each year. And though it may not sound like much, this sort of support may be of more value in the long run to some arts organizations than writing a check.

“Direct funding is important,” Hammerman said, “but involvement of these people is invaluable. Board-building is an important service that the Business Committee offers.”

There have been, over the years, some concrete contributions facilitated by the committee, which operates in Costa Mesa on a budget of $173,076 ($95,940 of which goes to pay Moss and her secretary). Moss pointed to a $55,000 grant from the New York-based Daniel Guggenheim Foundation to the St. Joseph Ballet Company, $10,000 from Betty Hutton Williams for a new dance floor for the same troupe and space for a satellite art museum in a local shopping mall.

But she acknowledged that these are exceptions rather than the rule.

“We are what we are, we’re a service organization,” she said. “We’re not out there to be a fund-raiser. When we see a need or get a request, we put business people together. . . . We’re a matchmaker. . . . We put little deals together.”

In most cases, Moss said, businesses and board members provide arts organizations with in-kind services, such as legal aid and accounting.

“We’re always asking for something,” she said. “Normally, we don’t ask for money.”

The committee’s 130 members will gather Sunday at Pacific Mutual in Newport Beach to present a dozen awards--specially designed Baccarat crystal obelisks on Tiffany stands--to businesses for their contributions to the arts. Over the years, many of the winners have been members of the committee, including C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, the Irvine Co., Mission Viejo Co., Fluor Corp. and Pacific Mutual.

A local arts group will receive $1,500 in cash for “developing innovative partnerships with business in support of the arts.” (In 1987, in a celebrated gaffe, then-chairman Henry T. Segerstrom announced the arts award to the Stop-Gap drama therapy group as $100,000 instead of the actual amount, $1,000.)

As in years past, the ceremony will be followed by a gala dinner at the Ritz restaurant in Newport Beach, complete with favors donated by Cartier. Moss declined to estimate what percentage of the organization’s time and resources are devoted to the awards and the dinner.

According to documents submitted to the Internal Revenue Service, the nonprofit committee spent $136,279 last year. In addition to the $95,940 in salaries, $24,762 went for “underwriting”--which Moss said means “parties” and other social activities--and $15,577 went for operating expenses and travel.

No direct grants were made to artists or arts organizations, according to the documents.

Of the committee’s $173,000 in revenues, $90,000 came from dues from corporate members, $53,075 from proceeds from the awards ceremony and dinner and the remainder from corporate grants. The committee operates out of a small glass office and a secretarial alcove donated by the Deloitte & Touche accounting firm in Costa Mesa.