Starting an organization to promote the arts during a recession would not be considered a formula for success.

"It’s not without its challenges," said T. Lulani Arquette, president and CEO of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. The Vancouver, Wash.-based organization was established five years ago to provide support for artists of Native Indian, Alaskan and Hawaiian ancestry.

But in that time the organization has built an enviable track record, providing grants of $10,000 to $20,000 each to 85 performers, writers and visual artists throughout the country, as well as grants of up to $40,000 to arts organizations. More than $300,000 has been awarded to 15 Hawaiian artists and arts organizations, including musicians Cyril Pahinui and Raiatea Helm and the Pai Foundation, sponsor of Maoli Arts Month and other activities.

The vast majority of individual grant recipients have used it to promote specific projects in music, dance, literature, film, visual arts and traditional arts, said Arquette, who grew up in Hawaii and Oregon. Funds have also been used to sponsor community-based art projects.

"It may be a festival of arts. It may be a gathering where artists are coming together to better their practice learning from one another, either in their own discipline or across disciplines," said Arquette last week during one of her networking visits to Honolulu.

Now the foundation has a new initiative, one with a greater purpose, she said, which is to promote native artists as "carriers or agents of social change."

"We’re going to be supporting artists to do what we call ‘community inspiration projects,’" she said, adding that "community" would be construed as a broad term that describes everything from a geographic area to an artists organization or similar grouping.

"It will be some community that you would define," she said, "and then you would identify an issue that is important to all of you, and through the process of art making you’d address that issue in some way."

The NACF is unique in awarding sizable grants to a cross section of indigenous arts groups, whose fundraising tends to substantially lag mainstream arts organizations. Arquette said that only 4 percent of philanthropic giving goes to the arts, and of that, less than 3 percent goes to native artists and native organizations. Funded initially by the Ford Foundation, NACF now raises money on its own and serves as an intermediary for other organizations seeking to award arts grants.

NACF grants have gone to visual artists such as Kapulani Landgraf, a multidisciplinary artist who’s done things like mapping sacred sites on Maui, and Los Angeles-based filmmaker Christen Marquez, director of the documentary "E Haku Inoa: To Weave a Name." Butit is Hawaii’s musicians and dancers who have really impressed the foundation, Arquette said.

"I tell you, Hawaii is at the top in performing arts nationally among indigenous (people)," she said.

Arquette remembers sitting on a grant review panel with members who had never heard Pahinui before. After hearing a recording, one of the panelists said, "I have never heard a voice like this. It’s just like butter," Arquette said. Pahinui has used the grant to create workbooks and CDs on slack-key guitar.

HELM, whose voice was equally impressive to the panel, used her $20,000 grant awarded in 2012 to bring her "leo kiekie" style of Hawaiian singing into schools through her Raiatea Helm Foundation. "She’d go into middle schools and early high school, and it just broke her heart because nobody, nobody, knew Hawaiian music," Arquette said. "So she goes around to schools and does workshops."

"They’re creating new music, they’re giving back to their communities and they’re doing something that they have a passion about," Arquette said.

One of this year’s recipients is slack-key artist Keola Beamer, who plans to take his latest album, "Malama Ko Aloha," on tour and begin work on a new album. He appeals to Arquette as someone who has an "old-school" presentation, "spreading that deep sense of what aloha means," yet composes music that is innovative and fresh.

"That’s the question we always get: Are you supporting traditional artists, or do you support contemporary artists?" she said. "And we say they’re one and the same.

"A younger person who is growing up is not going to have the same experiences in the culture and the traditions as perhaps a parent or a grandparent or somebody else did. So they’re going to innovate and they’re going to bring in experiences they have, and so it’s constantly evolving and changing. The basic thing is that it’s grounded."

Arquette grew up in an artistic family. She studied theater at the University of Hawaii at Manoa at a time when little theater exploring Native Hawaiian themes was being performed. She was also interested in political science and leadership development.

In the 1990s she created an organization called the Hawaiian Leadership Center, drawing on local experts to develop a curriculum on leadership that reflected Hawaiian, Western and Asian values. She later headed Alu Like, a nonprofit that works for the benefit of Hawaiians, and headed the Native Hawaiian Hospitality Association before assuming her current post.

Arquette found out about the NACF post through friends. She was initially reluctant about the job, thinking the top post would likely go to a member of the 566 recognized Native American tribes rather than a Native Hawaiian. Friends and family persuaded her to apply, taking over as its first president and CEO in 2009, and now she believes she provides a moderating influence in the organization.

"There’s a lot of infighting among tribes unlike Hawaii, we don’t have any of that,"she said with a laugh. "Ithink that, in a way, that fit I into what they wanted."

On the Net:

» nativeartsandcultures.org