Emergency Readiness, Response, and Recovery
While artists and arts organizations often play an active role in the healing process after disasters, the frequency of 21st century emergencies has also demonstrated that the arts and culture sector itself is highly vulnerable. Time and time again, creative careers and creative economies have suffered great loss and devastation, which has often included severe damage of unique cultural artifacts and venues. Cultural workers and arts organizations are generally underprepared for emergencies, and underserved when disasters strike.
National Coalition for Arts’ Preparedness and Emergency Response
The Coalition is a cross-disciplinary, voluntary task force involving over 20 arts organizations (artist/art-focused organizations, arts agencies and arts funders) and individual artists, co-chaired by CERF+ (Craft Emergency Relief Fund + Artists’ Emergency Resources) and South Arts. Coalition participants are committed to a combined strategy of resource development, educational empowerment, and public policy advocacy designed to ensure that there is an organized, nationwide safety net for artists and the arts organizations that serve them before, during and after disasters. Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) members active with the Coalition have been meeting at GIA’s annual conference to guide and educate foundations, arts agencies, art service organizations and corporate grantmakers interested in becoming more emergency ready and effective in their emergency relief efforts and grantmaking. Click here for the executive summary of the Coalition’s 2014-2020 plan.
Recommended Resources & Publications
If you are currently working in an area affected by an emergency, the Coalition’s Essential Guidelines for Arts Responders is your first step.
Earlier this month, Candid and the Center for Disaster Philanthropy (CDP) released the eighth edition of its annual Measuring the State of Disaster Philanthropy report. In it, they examined available 2019 data on global disaster-related philanthropy, analyzing funding from foundations, bilateral and multilateral donors, the U.S. federal government, corporations, and donations through donor-advised funds (DAFs) and online platforms.
Read More...The Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) announced recently that it received $3 million from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for APAP ArtsForward, a new program to support the performing arts field’s safe, vibrant, and equitable reopening and recovery.
Read More...Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust awarded recently more than $2 million to 26 performing arts organizations to "help strengthen performing arts organizations’ re-emergence following severe disruption caused by the pandemic and provide vitally important access," according to the press release.
Read More...Philadelphia's arts and cultural organizations response to the pandemic and what's next is at the center of a recent article at The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Read More...For the Mellon Foundation's 2020 annual report, the foundation's president Elizabeth Alexander reflects on how Mellon moved through the past year's challenges due "to the institutional analysis in which we already had been engaged, examining and reframing our mission and values within a new strategic direction and rigorously clarifying which problems we were trying to solve with our grantmaking."
Read More...The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation just announced Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY), a three-year, $125 million initiative to reactivate New York State’s creative economy and secure the future of its artists, according to the press release.
Read More...New York City has established a new $25 million program, the City Artist Corps, to provide funding to artists, musicians, and other performers "to create works across the city, whether through public art, performances, pop-up shows, murals or other community arts projects," The New York Times reported.
Read More...On Tuesday, March 23, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will present a webinar centered on how arts organizations can reopen their venues in 2021 with special guest Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health.
Read More...In "Keeping in Touch, Building Trust - A Funders Report from the Virtual Front Lines," Jennifer Negron, program officer at The Pinkerton Foundation, shares the importance of building relationships with the people and organizations they help fund and how the organization approached virtual “site visits” in the midst of the pandemic.
Read More...Throughout this month, South Arts will be running a series of articles penned by their program participants and grant recipients exploring how their work has changed in response to the pandemic.
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