CRNY Releases Snapshot of Portable Benefits for Artists & Creative Workers 2025

September 1, 2025

Creatives Rebuild New York, Artists at Work, and Bramble & Bird have released a Snapshot of Portable Benefits for Artists & Creative Workers 2025.

Artists and creative workers across the country are living with precarity and face unstable financial security. They are increasingly forced to choose between their cultural and artistic practice and necessities like healthcare and housing, undermining their well-being and threatening the diversity of our cultural landscape. Without intervention, we risk losing countless voices and perspectives that make the US culture and arts landscape vibrant and meaningful.

In the spring of 2025, the teams from Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) and Artists At Work (AAW), a national workforce resilience program designed to support artists and their communities through artistic civic engagement, collaborated to explore and advocate for portable benefits and other worker protection solutions tailored to the unique needs of artists and creative workers. We also contracted with Ann Boger of Bramble & Bird to provide additional capacity and deep expertise in health insurance and portable benefits. We are pleased to share our findings and recommendations in this Snapshot.  

This Snapshot is exploratory and meant to inspire state and local government, philanthropy, researchers, and policymakers to further investigate the possibility of portable benefits for artists. These benefits need to consider artists’ needs and artists’ ways of working, while aligning with current labor movements. They must balance a need for independence with worker protections. 

Snapshot of Portable Benefits for Artists & Creative Workers 2025