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Roadmap to an Imagined Future - Creatives Rebuild New York

Roadmap to an Imagined Future

June 1, 2025
Sarah Calderón

CRNY began as a reaction. A response to COVID, to unemployment, to industry collapse, to threatened communities, and to the urgent need for financial support during unprecedented, uncertain times.

Our team—in collaboration with the artists, scholars, and administrators who came together to help us co-create this work—realized that we were not meant to react but, instead, to move toward something, to proactively work for something new, something better—a system where artists were at the center, and where the creative workforce that drives our communities and makes them stronger, could thrive.

Over the last three years, our artists and culture bearers have done what they do best: helped us imagine a new future. And in this imagined future, we: 

  • Acknowledge that artists are workers;
  • Recognize that artists are the drivers of our creative economy, for it does not exist without them;
  • Recognize both the intrinsic and instrumental value of the work of artists and the expansive ways in which artists work; and
  • Legislate and fund with a commitment to artists as workers who are deserving of dignity and protections.

Over the last three years, CRNY, alongside researchers, organizers, administrators, and artists across New York City, New York State, and the country, have worked hard to gather data and learnings from the field to understand how we might attain this imagined future. Here, in short, is our roadmap, a set of principles grounded in the work and research we have done—and the work that the field still must do:

  • Bolster arts education as a key component of our pipeline for creative workers.
  • Design workforce development policies and programs that include artists and job creation for creative workers.
  • Research to better understand how artists—and all people—work in this changing world of AI, gig economies, and new media. 
  • Collect and distribute timely and actionable data about artists and creative workers for advocates, researchers, and policymakers. 
  • Design and advocate for policies that improve the working protections and conditions of artists and arts workers at local, regional, and national levels.  
  • Implement cash policies and social safety nets that support all workers and their families efficiently and acknowledge their deservingness.
  • Ensure that our communities are affordable—and offer housing, food, and accessible access to care.
  • Support artists’ labor directly and do not work under the assumption that arts and culture organizations provide this support.  
  • Champion the unions, cooperatives, and other infrastructure that support artists’ labor and well-being.
  • Uncover new legal structures, technologies, financial tools, and ways to support the creative workforce.
  • Include artists in cross-sector decision making—in local, city, state, and federal government.
  • Grow the creative economy and understand how to expansively map, plan for, and measure its impact. 

All of this is outlined in CRNY’s Policy Playbook that we developed in partnership with the field and HR&A. I encourage you to take a look.

And finally, we consider ways to change the narrative about artists’ labor. Artists are our community members. They are Will, Jasmine, Leslie, Emma, Betty, and Edward whom you saw in our Art Takes Work campaign. They are CRNY program artists who spent two tireless years working in communities and building their lives as artists: living and dreaming and caring for their loved ones.

 Artists are community builders. They contribute to our health and wellbeing, make our communities safer, promote social cohesion, bring us hope and joy, provide us with tools for empathy, and propel us in our work for justice. We need to shout from the rooftops about their contributions as our neighbors. We must likewise acknowledge g that artists’ intrinsic value is detached from their productivity—and that their worth and value as people are not just predicated on their contributions to society, but that they, like all of us, are deserving of support, care, and access to resources. 

 

OUR IMPACT 

We promised we would be accountable to the $125M we were granted —accountable to the field broadly, to colleagues who co-designed the work, to artists we supported, and to our philanthropic partners. We know that the demand for these funds was great and the need greater. 22,000 artists applied for our Guaranteed Income program. 2,700 artist and organization collaborations applied for AEP. And while this need far outweighed our programs’ offerings, we hope you’ll recognize that  our funding was used to both directly support artists and to attempt to embed our work sustainably toward research, policy, storytelling, and advocacy efforts. We look toward a future when investments like this one emerge not only when there is an emergency, but as a sustained commitment to and acknowledgement of artists’ livelihoods. 

Here is an overview of our impact:

Guaranteed Income

  • Guaranteed income enabled artists to spend more time on their artistic practice: Participating artists spent 19% more hours on their arts-related labor
  • Guaranteed income allowed artists to spend more time with their families: 75% of caregiving artists in the program reported improved work-life balance
  • Artists, like others who receive guaranteed income, used the payments to address basic needs: GI participants experienced a 19% reduction in food insecurity
  • Artists significantly improved their physical and mental health: GI participants reported a 29% reduction in severe anxiety and depression
  • The relationship between unrestricted cash transfers and public benefits systems often fail to serve guaranteed income participants, and more attention must be paid to this interaction.

Artist Employment

  • The Artist Employment Program helped organizations further their missions, foster healthier work environments, strengthen the organizations’ relationships with the communities they serve, and expand into new communities.
  • The Artist Employment Program helped communities by fostering social cohesion, cultural preservation, community healing, and addressing critical community issues such as immigration rights, workers rights, and economic development.
  • The Artist Employment Program helped artists achieve financial stability and improved access to employment-sponsored health care, which in turn provided the artists with the time, tools, and confidence to expand their practices, validate their identities, and improve their lives.
  • Research with AEP artists showed how work doesn’t work the same way for everyone and how accessibility is essential for all artists to experience the stability that can come from employment.

 

EMBEDDING THE WORK

As a time-bound initiative we were led by our need to embed the work so that when we sunset, we leave behind as much infrastructure and seeds—tools, stories, data, evaluations—for continued growth as possible.

These tools, driven by a variety of inputs from the field, support policy and advocacy work and replication of programs that can be used for organizing, power-building and education, and advocacy:

These tools support game-changing shifts in how collaborations take shape and how art is made. showed us that caring about accessibility makes a lot of things better for everyone.

We worked in coalition to create infrastructure in New York State with the belief that a group of dedicated advocates working together can further this work in the future.

We believed that more stories need to be told about working class artists and artists’ labor so that our neighbors can appreciate not only artists’ products, but the artists themselves. 

 

OUR INVESTMENTS 

We did not take the decisions on how to spend our funding lightly, and working with our majority-artist Think Tank and Leadership Council as key guides in this decision-making proved invaluable. We were driven by our theory of change, mission, vision, and values. We convened folks across the field who were doing similar work (link to Working Groups) and we had continuous feedback loops from artists and organizations in our programs to inform investments. We prioritized funding artists throughout our advocacy, research, storytelling, and policy work. We sought to embed our work for sustainability. For a deeper dive into how we made funding decisions, read our investment narrative. 

Of CRNY’s $125 million:

  • 51.3% of funds supported the Artist Employment Program
  • 37.3% of funds supported the Guaranteed Income for Artists Program. 
  • CRNY’s small but mighty administration team and other administration costs accounted for 4.5% of our budget. It’s important to note that as a fully-funded initiative there were no fundraising costs. 
  • 2.9% of CRNY’s funds were spent on research 
  • 1.5% of funds were spent on communications to understand the impact of our work and tell the stories of our work and the work that artists are doing to contribute to their communities across NY State. 
  • 2.5% of CRNY’s funds were spent on our policy and advocacy work as we sought to embed what we have learned and our recommendations for the future into the work that philanthropy and government are supporting. 
  • And, finally, CRNY’s commitment to access cost .2% of the budget allowing us to support all of our convenings, webinars, and meetings with appropriate access facilitators and translate our documents into multiple languages.

 

TAKING ACTION 

We have provided answers and next steps. We have provided evidence. We know what worked well, had the greatest impacts, and what could be improved. We know how we did what we did and why. Whereas CRNY was a response to COVID, we once again find ourselves in a collective state of uncertainty wherein many of our communities are under threat—and artists face unparalleled disenfranchisement. Now we just need our public elected officials and our private foundations to listen—and to take action).

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