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.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker announced recently a new relief program to provide financial assistance to the city’s creative scene and cultural organizations impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, The Chicago Sun Times reported.
Read More...In Denver, a fund at the city’s public funding agency - IMAGINE 2020 Artist Assistance Fund – was modified for a state-wide partnership to offer relief for artists across the state of Colorado, and, in the process, nearly tripled in amount available to individual artists, according to a press release.
Read More...The "literally overnight evaporation of gigs, commissions and sales": that is what the coronavirus crisis, as Next City puts it, has meant for many of America’s nearly 5 million cultural workers.
Read More...The Personal Emergency Relief Fund, a program of Springboard for the Arts, an economic and community development organization for artists and by artists based in Fergus Falls and Saint Paul, Minnesota, has added language to specifically address COVID19-related cancellations.
Read More...Congress gave final approval on Friday, March 27, to a $2 trillion measure that will deliver "direct payments and jobless benefits for individuals, money for states, and a huge bailout fund for businesses" battered by coronavirus crisis, as The New York Times reported.
Read More...London N. Breed, San Francisco mayor, announced an Arts Relief Program to invest in working artists and arts and cultural organizations financially impacted by COVID-19.
Read More...Lisa Pilar Cowan, vice president of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, shared recently how the foundation has started to take action in light of the ongoing impact of the coronavirus "to reflect where we are – off a cliff."
Read More...COVID-19 is hitting investment portfolios with "a series of plunges in asset values not seen since the market meltdown of 2008," Debra Moniz, director of administration and finance at the Cedar Tree Foundation, writes in Exponent Philanthropy.
Read More...Both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate passed the “Families First Coronavirus Response Act” a bill that "has strong implications for the artist residency network," as the Alliance of Artists Communities noted recently.
Read More...In moments when the COVID-19 virus is part of our daily conversations, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, in partnership with the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), launched recently a new program for emergency medical grants, artnet reported.
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