Creatives Rebuild New York’s Investment Narrative

CRNY was created to steward a $125M investment and supported by a group of artists, creative workers, economic justice advocates, and many others. Our investments were driven by our mission, vision, values, theory of change, and our original funding proposal to Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Stavros Niarchos Foundation. As we considered partners for our work, we used this CRNY Organizational Prime for Racial Equity and Alignment with CRNY Values to support our decision making. 

Launched in the spring of 2021, CRNY was designed as a “direct response to the challenge faced by artists and a response to systemic challenges that have long plagued the arts and culture field, a field that benefited from gig economy labor and has prolonged deep inequities in access to resources.” From the outset, we were charged with developing a “two-part workforce initiative” to “catalyze a national movement of broad-based employment programs to put artists back to work and to help communities understand the many ways that artists contribute—as workers, culture-bearers, changemakers, and teachers.” CRNY’s north star is “systemic change through focusing on the needs of individual artists.” (Creatives Rebuild New York, A Sponsored Project of Tides Proposed Activities and Rationale, 6.23.2021)

For the duration of this initiative, our team faced decisions about how to address immediate needs while also prioritizing long-term systemic change. This is not a new dilemma for philanthropic decision making. Artists, culture bearers, and their support organizations have been calling for policy and advocacy support for years. When we gathered our Think Tank to help co-design our work, we worked within parameters (from our grant proposals) about the numbers of artists, the allocation of resources for each program, and a commitment to research and evaluation, storytelling and narrative change, and policy and advocacy goals.  

Within these parameters, we made decisions about how to invest funds based upon inputs from research, gatherings, and evaluations—and feedback from program participants and movement partners. These included:

Understanding the work accomplished before CRNY:

• Research on the history of Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) and Works Progress Administration (WPA)
• Interviews with organizations running artist employment programs
• Interviews with guaranteed income pilots
• Research on the history of guaranteed income

Gatherings of field-wide experts and advocates:

• CRNY’s Think Tank 
• CRNY’s Leadership Council
• Guaranteed Income Working Group
• Artist Employment Program Working Group
• Membership in the Guaranteed Income Community of Practice and other GI movement related work

New York State Policy Playbook gatherings

• Voices for Creative New York gatherings

Movement building participants and partners:

• Advocacy Grant partners
• NY State Cash Alliance partners
• The Artist and Cultural Worker Bill of Rights working group
• Artist Power Building School fellows
• Partnerships with Linguistic Justice, Deaf Services Unlimited, and Untangled Resolutions

Direct feedback from Artist Employment Program and Guaranteed Income Program participants. We prioritized connecting with artists to ensure that our offerings matched their needs:

• Guaranteed Income and Artist Employment Program gatherings across New York State
• Artist Employment Program biannual check-ins with collaborations
• GI Artist virtual hangouts
• GI Artist help hotline
• The Space, a virtual community for participating artists

Process evaluations that included paid artist focus groups to support an assessment of the implementation of our Guaranteed Income and Artist Employment Programs:

• Guaranteed Income Process Evaluation
• Artist Employment Program Process Evaluation

Our impact evaluations that involved artists in key ways:

• Guaranteed Income Preliminary Findings and Research Briefs, which involved an artist advisory group that provided input on the research design, a comprehensive quantitative survey, analysis of spending data, qualitative interviews and focus groups, collaboration with interview participants to transform their narratives into research poetry, and an invitation for artists to contribute a “creative expression”—any form of art that reflected their personal experiences with the guaranteed income program
• Artist Employment Program Participatory Action Research, including participatory action research wherein the approach, methods, and questions were co-designed with an Action Research Team of fifteen dedicated AEP participants whose insights and experiences shaped the work
• Comparative Assessment of Employment Models, including a paid leadership council of artists who refined research questions, informed the methodology and key takeaways 
• Deaf and Disabled Artist Employment: Research on Work, including paying artists for interviews and a review of this report before publication

Finally, we took into consideration the feedback from our participation in panels and conferences, and formal and informal discussions. 

As an example input, we can look to our Guaranteed Income and Artist Employment Working Groups. These groups were gatherings of a community of peers (who led and continue to lead similar programs around the world), convened to reflect on challenges, opportunities, and best practices—and to align around opportunities to move forward. Their discussions identified areas where strategically aligned action among the guaranteed income, artist employment, and arts sectors can help advance common goals. CRNY pursued these recommendations in the following ways:

With this as context for how we decided on investments, we will provide a snapshot of our expenditures as we get closer to closing our books. Stay tuned!