Conduit, Portland’s 13-year-old non-profit contemporary dance center, needs $15,000 by August 31, or it may go out of business. They've just finished a weekend of benefit performances featuring stalwart Portland dancers and dancemakers, including guest soloists from the recently bailed out Oregon Ballet Theater.

My take? The center, like many small to midsize arts non-profits here, needs to put away the cheerleading pom-poms and grow up organizationally if it wants to be taken seriously by the community it serves.

Conduit should engage in conversation with better-positioned arts groups about how to collaborate and move forward; it should radically question its own mission and vision; and it should prove itself worthy of community support not by eleventh-hour fundraising galas (“save us or we will close!”), but by the consistent excellence of its services and programming, administrative competence, and unique position in Portland. Until it does that, my pocketbook is closed.

I'm the first person to stand up for modern dance as an intractable piece of Portland's cultural life, right alongside our resident symphony, art museum, theatre, ballet and opera companies. Each of those major institutions are also limping along in the current economy (though Portland Opera ended the most recent fiscal year in the best financial shape).

No question: times are tough. “We’re trying to keep our doors open but being challenged by the economic environment,” says Conduit co-founder Mary Oslund (pictured above), a longtime doyenne of the Portland dance scene. And so Conduit is seeking your cash so that they can continue doing their thing: hosting modern dance workshops, classes and performances at their downtown Pythian Building digs, sometimes in collaboration with bigger-name arts groups like PICA and White Bird Dance.

But the question is this: does Conduit, a small Portland arts non-profit with a narrow mission and an annual budget of $45,000, deserve a $15,000 bailout in public support to continue on their current path? I'm not convinced they do.

In an interview just before opening their weekend-long fundraising shows, Oslund openly admitted the organization, founded in 1995, has been doing little to nothing to grow or improve itself over the past several years. “We’ve slacked off on approaching foundations” for funding, she said. She added the center “hasn’t developed” organizationally in several seasons; the non-profit currently has three board members, all of them involved as dancemakers with the center. Earned income from rentals and classes is down, and Oslund called their contributed income (ie, donations) “very low.” This does not exactly inspire confidence in Conduit.

In spite of this, Oslund is “pretty encouraged” by response to the center's plea for support, and says she's feeling hopeful about the organization making the $15,000 it needs in the next 28 days. She feels Conduit's unique mission as a service organization for the Portland modern dance community sets it apart and makes it worthy of support from cash-strapped Portlanders, who are being tapped and tapped again by arts groups straining to survive. “We support artists from White Bird and PICA and various colleges and universities,” she says. “Our mission is very broad.”

If that's the case, then why not merge? Oslund says it's been considered previously; she mentions White Bird Dance as a friendly partner with the organization. “White Bird has tried to find a dance space for years,” she says, adding regretfully that “it would be difficult to make their schedule work with ours. We tried to make it work out and I think we had some kind of plan, but the economy has made that difficult.” And what about partnering with globe-trotting dance theater troupe, BodyVox, which just opened their own new modern dance center? “BodyVox is about itself,” Oslund says bluntly.

If Conduit wants to truly position itself as the hub for modern dance in Portland, it still has plenty of room to grow. Many burgeoning dance troupes skip Conduit altogether when considering Portland performance or rehearsal spaces. Rumpus Room Dance’s recent show, RESA, was staged at Disjecta art center in North Portland. Northwest Dance Project performs at Portland Center for Performing Arts. BodyVox recently moved into their own impressive new Pearl District digs. In an interview this past spring Jen Hackworth, of Key Turn Project, admitted her fledgling dance collective was forced to rehearse in a tiny Southeast warehouse in advance of their spring show, because they couldn't afford Conduit's rehearsal rates.

This whole saga of an ambitious contemporary arts org on the rocks might sound vaguely familiar to Portlanders. Just a few years ago, a scrappy young arts administrator named Gavin Shettler founded a cutting-edge contemporary arts space: the Portland Art Center. The PAC eventually landed in prime Chinatown real estate, 10,000 feet of space dedicated to showcasing Portland and Northwest visual artists, and to providing services for those artists. Soon the organization hit a major roadblock: fundraising lagged behind ambition; artists with no nonprofit governing experience tried (in vain) to steer the ship; pride trampled reality. The PAC faced imminent closure.

In an interview in mid-January of that year, Shettler said he remained committed to keeping the PAC's doors open. The organization was flooded with donations and support. One week later, Shettler shuttered the center. The visual arts community recovered from the setback, and found other venues and ventures to sustain and develop their work. And maybe they grew up a little in the process.