The cultural sector spends a lot of time talking about how to finance arts organizations. There are operating grants, capital grants, endowments, tax credits, CDFIs, tax-exempt bonds, and public investment. Philanthropy has expanded to include both program related investments (which directly advance their charitable missions and are expected to be repaid, allowing the capital to be recycled and redeployed for future philanthropic efforts) and mission related investments (which generate a positive social or environmental impact alongside a competitive market-rate financial return).

Artists, on the other hand, are funded without regard to their labor and the costs that go into making their product possible. Funding rarely covers their research, travel, space, marketing, childcare, or anything else that makes the work happen. We need new capital infrastructure to fill that gap.

What financial infrastructure could be built for individual artists?

As many readers of this Substack know, an artist may have a grant one month, a commission the next, a teaching contract three months later, and a royalty payment six months after that. They may have intellectual property but little conventional collateral. They may have significant future income but very little current liquidity. They may have decades of professional experience and a strong track record, yet still struggle to get a mortgage, a line of credit, or a business loan. This is not because artists are poor financial risks. It is because traditional finance does not understand the way artists earn money.

Yet we do have specialized cultural financing at the organizational level. A great example is entertainment banking. City National Bank has spent decades developing customized financial tools for the entertainment industry. It has unique lending for theater, film, and television production, working-capital lines, production financing, equipment financing, and other financial services designed around the industry’s particular cash flows.

Broadway is not a conventional investment. There is a capitalization period, investors, and production costs prior to revenue. There are contracts, royalties, ticket receipts, intellectual property, touring possibilities, and long periods where cash moves in unconventional ways. The finance industry has learned this industry’s business model because it has deemed it worth understanding.

It’s also true that Broadway’s model is consistent within its structure. Individual artists differ more, and may have very diverse capital needs. A short-term bridge loan for a guaranteed payment is very different from an investment in an artist business which is very different from borrowing against one’s future earnings. We need different models to account for this diversity of circumstances.

Artists As Economic Actors

We tend to forget that artists are workers, freelancers, small business owners, cooperative members, intellectual property owners, producers, contractors, employers, and property owners and often several of these at once. Their economic lives simply do not fit neatly into conventional models of employment or entrepreneurship. Income may be irregular and project-based; employment may be episodic; assets may be intangible; and compensation may arrive months after the work has been completed.

The problem is not that financial institutions fail to recognize artists as economic actors. In many cases, they evaluate artists as economic actors but those artists fail to qualify on conventional terms. The result is denial of credit or access to capital on unfavorable terms. Artists are not alone in this: many small businesses and entrepreneurs face the same structural barriers, and frequently turn instead to credit cards, personal savings, or crowd funding.

The opportunity, then, is to develop financial tools that better understand the economics of creative work. What would it look like to have an underwriter who knows how to evaluate a history of grants, commissions, touring, royalty streams, exhibition contracts, production advances, licensing income, and creative employment and can understand how that income behaves over time? What if a lender could see a six-month gap between a completed commission and payment not simply as a weakness in an applicant’s financial history, but as a predictable feature of the business?

It could mean moving beyond the model in which artists are treated primarily as perpetual grant applicants, toward one in which they are recognized as people building enterprises, intellectual property, assets, and long-term economic value.

This also requires rethinking philanthropy itself. Philanthropic capital does not have to function only as a grant that supports an artist’s next project. It can be structured as a form of catalytic capital that helps artists establish credit, absorb risk, build assets, secure space, or leverage additional public and private financing. Artists are clearly economic actors because they have to be. The question is whether our financial and philanthropic systems are sophisticated enough to recognize the way their economic lives actually work and to provide the right forms of capital at the right moments.

Artists aren’t inherently “unbankable.” They expose the limitations and the underlying assumptions of a financial system built around standardized employment, predictable cash flow, conventional collateral, and individual ownership. They reflect a model that places responsibility for economic risk on individuals, rooted in a history of racialized exclusion from wealth, property, and credit. The system treats the absence of conventional assets as evidence that someone is inherently “risky”, instead of the predictable outcome of structural exclusion.

The opportunity, then, is not simply to make artists more bankable. It is to develop financial tools that better understand the economics of creative work.

What Does an Artist Actually Need to Finance?

The answer is not one financial product. Artists have different capital needs at different moments. A short-term bridge loan for a guaranteed payment is very different from an investment in an artist business, which is different again from borrowing against future earnings or financing the purchase of a studio. The financial infrastructure should therefore begin by asking what actually needs to be financed.

Cash Flow and Working Capital

One of the biggest issues for artists is the mismatch between when expenses occur and when income arrives. Traditional banking can have difficulty with these situations. An artist may need to pay for materials, fabrication, studio costs, assistants, travel, or production well before receiving payment for a commission, performance, sale, or contract.

There are some small examples of what this can look like. In Indiana, CDFI Friendly Bloomington and Community Investment Fund of Indiana financed the upfront design and fabrication costs for a local artist’s public art commission. The $25,000 financing allowed the artist to cover costs before completing the commission and receiving payments. And in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, the county is partnering with Cleveland Rocks, a nonprofit to provide $2,000 loans to musicians.

There are also municipalities where the structure of public arts grants effectively requires artists to provide their own working capital. In 2026, the San Francisco Arts Commission proposed limiting grant advances to no more than 50% of an award and requiring grantees to cover subsequent expenses before seeking reimbursement. Artists and arts organizations pushed back, arguing that the policy would force some of the city’s lowest-paid cultural workers to finance public arts projects themselves.

Some examples of artist-specific products are out there. ArtCap is a loan program for artists run by AltCap which deploys capital for small businesses and community development projects. According to their website, “ARTcap Microloans help artists and creatives access small loans from $5,000 to $25,000 to launch, operate, or grow a business.” Small Business Administration has microloans designed to cover everyday financial needs of small businesses, especially those that are just starting out or expanding operations. These flexible loans up to $50,000 can be used for everything from equipment purchases to working capital to start up and expansion costs.

Another example, the SAGE Art Business Microloan Program is run by HDDC (Historic District Development Corporation) as part of the Sweet Auburn Green & Equitable District initiative in Atlanta, launched with Capital One’s support. It’s explicitly place-based and targets the historic Sweet Auburn neighborhood.

The microloan requires a mandatory workshop series: three two-hour sessions plus one four-hour session, ten hours total of group learning, covering financial literacy and business readiness and then offers five hours of one-on-one consulting, with the artist choosing the focus from legal, marketing, HR, finance, or business development. And, the repayment terms are explicitly built around “artists’ real-world income cycles” rather than a standard fixed monthly schedule. Participants culminate in a public Art Expo, where they show work to collectors, art professionals, and potential collaborators providing a market-access opportunity.

Working capital describes a particular financing need: the gap between when an artist incurs costs and when they receive income. The products that address that gap might include a line of credit, a short-term loan, a contract advance, or receivables financing.

Financing Against Creative Income

There are also income-based financing structures that recognize that an artist may have significant future income without current liquidity.

There are also income share agreements, or ISAs. These are financing structures where, instead of borrowing money and paying it back with interest on a fixed schedule, you agree to pay back a percentage of your future income for a set period of time. This model fits irregular income much better than a fixed loan payment. If an artist earns nothing in a given month, they pay nothing (or very little); if an artist has a great month, they pay more.

Music royalty advances from groups like BeatBread and Sound Royalties offer a related model. Instead of unknown future income, they recoup an already-existing income stream. Royalty Exchange runs auctions where investors bid to buy a portion of an artist’s royalty stream outright, with no recoupment obligation at all, closer to an equity sale of future income than a loan.

The broader opportunity is to develop underwriting that recognizes an artist’s demonstrated capacity to generate creative income. An artist with recurring commissions, licensing revenue, royalties, ticket sales, or contracted work may have meaningful economic capacity even when that capacity does not fit neatly into a conventional bank’s underwriting model.

Creative Production

Artists also need capital to actually make their work: equipment, fabrication, production, touring, materials, studio costs, and other expenses that may occur before revenue arrives.

This is where existing small-business and microloan models can be useful, but the opportunity is to adapt them to the economics of creative production. A production loan, equipment loan, or project-finance facility could be structured around the particular revenue and cost cycle of the work, rather than a standard employment model.

A short-term $25,000 production loan for a commissioned project requires a different financial product than a $150,000 loan to acquire a studio. The system should be capable of recognizing and accounting for those differences.

Creative Assets as Capital

Many artists hold intellectual property – a song catalog, a screenplay, a body of photographic work, or a design portfolio, for example. Traditional banking has difficulty valuing these assets, except potentially as collateral.

But turning intellectual property into collateral could make small loans more complicated and expensive. Instead, lenders should recognize the income-generating capacity of creative assets when assessing an artist’s ability to repay. Predictable creative revenue may provide meaningful evidence of future cash flow even when an artist lacks conventional collateral or employment history. This is already possible in specialized entertainment finance, where established royalty and licensing revenues can support financing.

Beyond making intellectual property more legible to lenders, the longer-term opportunity is to help artists own and build wealth from the creative assets they produce. Yancey Strickler’s Artist Corporation points toward one possible model. The A-Corp is a legal structure designed to allow individual artists and creative collectives to hold and protect their intellectual property, pool income, share equity, and potentially attract investment while retaining ownership and creative control. The A-Corp creates a structure that recognizes creative work as an economic asset while allowing artists to retain ownership and build wealth from it.

Community Development Financial Institutions

Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) and a growing landscape of alternative community-based loan funds may be one of the most important pieces of the puzzle.

CDFIs exist precisely because conventional financial institutions do not always serve borrowers whose risk profiles fall outside traditional banking. They can combine lending with technical assistance and develop specialized knowledge about communities and unconventional borrowers. A CDFI with a creative economy lending portfolio might be able to help artists the most. There are small examples of this happening. In Oklahoma, TEDC Creative Capital, a CDFI-related program, has provided nontraditional financing and education to creative entrepreneurs such as an artist expanding a store, museum, and immersive experience.

Other organizations, like Common Future, Seed Commons, Runway, and the Real People’s Fund, are trying to change the terms, underwriting logic, ownership structure, and power relationship around capital. They start from the “borrowers’ needs, community relationships, and long term ownership” instead of conventional creditworthiness. Common Future aims to shift power and increase access and affordability. Seed Commons is creating “non-extractive financial infrastructures that shifts economic power to workers” through a cooperative network. Runway focuses on closing the “friends and family” capital gap for entrepreneurs of color. And the Real People’s Fund is also building non-extractive capital. These organizations are building new systems of financial support rooted in entirely different value systems.

Not Everything Should Be Debt

Not every problem can or should be solved by a loan. Some artists need capital because their work generates reliable future revenue. Others need income stability because their work has substantial public value but little predictable commercial return. Access to credit is not inherently empowering; loans can become harmful when they shift too much financial risk onto borrowers whose income is irregular or uncertain. A strong reminder from Alexis Frasz emphasizes this idea: “capital - especially debt - is not a substitute for income, and is not the right approach to covering basic living expenses over time.”

This is where guaranteed income and other forms of direct support belong in the ecosystem. Springboard for the Arts’ Guaranteed Income for Artists program in Minnesota is an important example. Its long-running pilot provides recurring income to artists while also connecting participants to financial, housing, and student-loan counseling. Unrestricted grants to individual artists serve the same function, providing much needed income support to creative workers who often operate under conditions of extreme financial precarity.

Meeting the diverse needs of artists requires a broader portfolio of capital tools and supports. Not every problem requires the same financial instrument.

How might the pieces fit together?

Promising models of artist-centered capital exist, but they are fragmented and often small, regional, or single-city programs rather than anything resembling a system. In other sectors, small business and low income housing credits provide a steady, if imperfect, infrastructure for businesses and housing. What might equivalent infrastructure look like for artists?

Artists need a network of connected financial support. Perhaps philanthropic capital (both public and private) sits at the foundation, with grants, guarantees, first-loss reserves, program related investments, and capitalization of revolving funds. Above that sits public and mission-driven finance, including public banks, credit unions, CDFIs, and specialized cultural-finance intermediaries whose institutions provide the actual financial products. These products might include:

• Everyday finance, including bank accounts, credit, tax and financial planning, and income smoothing.

• Working capital, including lines of credit, contract advances, and receivables financing. Could there be a revolving artist loan fund?

• Creative production, including production loans, equipment financing, and project finance. What if we worked with CDFIs to leverage capital?

• Asset building, including mortgages, studio acquisition, cooperative ownership, and real estate finance. Could there be an artist space and ownership fund?

• Creative assets, including royalty-backed lending, licensing finance, and IP expertise.

• Community ownership, including community bonds, cooperative finance, and cultural land trusts. Could there be a community bond catalyst?

• Income security, including guaranteed income, emergency funds, savings, and retirement. Could there be an artist income and emergency fund?

While we didn’t discuss asset building and community ownership in detail here, they are important tools for building long-term financial security among artists – tools worthy of their own post!

The Role of Government

There is an important catalytic role for government as well. It could provide direct support by capitalizing revolving funds, providing loan guarantees, or first-loss capital (a designated tranche of capital absorbs the initial losses of a portfolio or fund before senior investor capital is touched). It could provide institutional support by creating public financial institutions, supporting CDFIs, or establishing underwriting standards and data systems. It could become a reliable customer through public procurement, create tax incentives for community investment, or support the research needed to understand the actual financial lives of artists.

A public bank could eventually sit behind the infrastructure. A state or regional public bank could provide the wholesale capital behind the system, establishing a Creative Economy Finance department that provides low-cost capital to participating CDFIs, credit unions, and other qualified lenders. It could also develop specialized underwriting expertise around creative income, intellectual property, contracts, royalties, and cultural real estate. That would allow the public bank to serve thousands of artists indirectly.

An Artist-Centered Financial Ecosystem

Ultimately, we need to build a resilient financial ecosystem that works for artists. A working-capital loan could come from a revolving fund. A CDFI could make the loan. A public bank could provide wholesale capital to the CDFI. A government guarantee could reduce the risk. A foundation could provide first-loss capital. A community bond could finance the purchase of a building. And guaranteed income could provide the income security that makes it possible for an artist to take productive risks without turning basic living expenses into debt.

Instead of millions of dollars in grants, what if government and philanthropy built financial systems that continue to deploy capital after the initial appropriation is gone?

Artist-centered financial infrastructure requires institutions that understand creative income, lenders that can underwrite irregular cash flow, capital that can be recycled, financing that can help artists acquire assets, and non-debt support when debt is the wrong tool.

The success of this should be measured not by how many loans are made, but by whether artists can move from income to assets, from projects to enterprises, and from producing value for others to owning a greater share of the value they create.

Special thanks to Alexis Frasz of Helicon Collaborative for her incredibly helpful feedback and suggestions for this post!

What We’re Reading and Watching

• New research from the National Low Income Housing Coalition shows the hourly wage you’d need to earn in every state in order to afford a two-bedroom rental. No surprise, it’s a good bit more than the minimum wage!

• Movement strategist Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson’s piece on what happens when we fail to invest in organizing and base-building outside battleground states.

• Center on Budget and Policy Priorities research showing more than 4.5 million people have lost their SNAP (food assistance) benefits since H.R.1 (the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) established new work and eligibility requirements.

• The case against Chuck Redd, the musician who canceled a free concert at the Kennedy Center, has been dismissed and he’s been awarded $250K in damages.

Advocacy and Policy Happenings

• May Day Strong is hosting a national organizing call on Thursday, August 13th at 8pm ET to plan for Labor Day Solidarity Schools.

• As new work requirements threaten to push many people off Medicaid rolls, some Republican states are making it harder for sick people to qualify for a work exemption, while Democratic Attorneys General just lost their bid to block implementation before the January 1st deadline. FamiliesUSA is organizing constituent advocacy to protect Medicaid.

• Before adjourning for their August recess, the Senate passed a Continuing Resolution to keep the government funded through December 11. The CR also delays implementation of the harmful proposed OMB rule that would give political appointees more authority over the federal grant making process.

• Folks worried about AI have lots of opportunities to get involved in this week’s Stop the Big Tech Takeover week of action.

Artists are losing their workspaces faster than cities can protect them. In Massachusetts alone, Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville lost more than 100,000 square feet of studio, rehearsal, and cultural production space over the past decade. Vancouver’s East Side arts district lost 400,000 square feet of studio space over a decade to redevelopment, nearly half of all the art spaces the study tracked.

Thriving creative communities need affordable space to make and share creative work. Yet development and gentrification pressures are putting such spaces out of reach for most working artists. Too often, creatives operate on short-term leases that put them at severe risk of displacement.

In the face of market failure, community institutions and governments are advancing a new (old) model to protect and preserve creative space – a Creative Land Trust.

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What’s a Creative Land Trust?

Though specific models vary, the basic purpose of a Creative Land Trust is to take private property off the speculative market and preserve it for creative and cultural use.

Creative land trusts evolved from the Community Land Trust model, which emerged during the Civil Rights era as a tool to support Black farmers in the South, and was later adapted as a tool to preserve affordable housing and combat gentrification in urban communities.

A Community Land Trust (CLT) is typically a nonprofit organization that purchases property and holds it permanently, taking it off the speculative market. CLTs are organized to advance the public good and are often democratically governed to enable community self-determination, particularly in the face of displacement.

Some CLTs steward properties in perpetuity for community benefit. For example, Mott Haven Port Morris Community Land Stewards is converting a 22,750 square foot building into a community-controlled HEARTS center in the South Bronx to provide a permanent home for local health, education, and arts nonprofits.

Other CLTs are organized to protect affordable housing. Under this model, homeowners own the structures built on the property, but lease the land itself from the Community Land Trust. When a homeowner sells, a resale formula caps how much appreciation they can keep, so the price stays within reach for the next buyer instead of rising to match the market.

Creative land trusts adapt the same core mechanics as community land trusts – permanent ownership, long-term leases, and affordable rents – to protect space for creative and cultural use.

Creative Land Trusts in the United States

Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST) launched in San Francisco in 2013 in direct response to the displacement crisis triggered by the Bay Area’s tech-driven real estate boom. As commercial rents spiked and long-standing arts nonprofits found themselves priced out, CAST adapted the community land trust model to the problem of disappearing nonprofit arts space.

Founded via a partnership between the Kenneth Rainin Foundation and Community Vision, CAST acquires buildings and helps arts and culture nonprofits obtain long-term space in them at below-market rates. In their lease-to-own model, CAST purchases the building, which the nonprofit pays off over a 7-10 year time horizon. As nonprofits repay their acquisition loans, that capital gets recycled into a revolving loan fund to buy more property. In other cases, CAST purchases and manages a building they make available to tenants via long-term, below-market leases.

While CAST operates as an independent nonprofit entity outside of government, public policy fuels its financing model, which relies on a combination of philanthropic funding and New Market Tax Credit financing. New Markets Tax Credits (NMTC) are a federal program that gives private investors a tax credit worth 39% of their investment, spread over seven years, in exchange for putting capital into certified community development projects in low-income census tracts. The credit is valuable enough that investors will accept below-market returns on the underlying deal, which effectively subsidizes financing costs for the project. According to CAST’s Joshua Simon, NMTC financing covers 15-20% of total project costs once the tax credit’s value is factored in.

On the other side of the country, Massachusetts’ Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston (A&BC) operates a Creative Land Trust that has secured over 500,000 square feet of affordable space across five buildings in Lowell, New Bedford, Worcester, and Somerville. Its flagship property in Lowell provides 250 studios and 50 units of live/work space, making it one of the largest nonprofit-owned artist communities in the country. Like CAST, A&BC owns and manages some properties where it offers below-market, long-term leases, and in other cases it transfers ownership and equity back to the cultural nonprofit once it’s ready to take over.

Public policy also supports A&BC’s model, albeit via state and federal Historic Tax Credit subsidies instead of New Market Tax Credits, and grant support from the state including its Cultural Facilities Fund, which is jointly administered by the state’s economic development arm (Mass Development) and state arts agency (Mass Cultural Council).

These models have inspired others internationally, including London’s Creative Land Trust in 2019. Through the World Cities Culture Forum’s efforts to promote the model, similar efforts are now underway in Austin, Sydney, Vancouver, Calgary, Melbourne, and Warsaw.

Public trusts as an alternative approach

Some Creative Land Trusts are owned or operated by governments themselves. For example, the city of Seattle chartered its Creative Space Agency as a Public Development Authority. The city owns and operates this Creative Land Trust, which worked with community-based partners to acquire properties like El Barrio, the 100-year old Columbia City Theater, and LaunchPoint, a permanently dedicated cultural space pop-up incubator. Creative Space Agency grew from a city-led effort to address threats to cultural space in the city, including the report, Structure for Stability, which explored potential models and recommended the Public Development Authority model.

The city of Helsinki also created its own Creative Land Trust, KAAPELI, which is a for-profit, private limited real-estate company that is wholly owned by the city. KAAPELI owns and manages roughly one million square feet of former industrial space that has been converted to cultural use. It is fully self-sustaining, receiving no public subsidy for its operations, though several of its buildings were donated to the organization by the city, including its first property, the Cable Factory.

The state of Massachusetts also attempted to establish the infrastructure for local communities to establish their own Creative Land Trusts. MASSCreative partnered with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) to develop and introduce The Creative Space Act, which would establish new “creative space” and “presentation space” land restrictions, making it easier to protect and develop new cultural spaces. It would also allow local municipalities to create their own Municipal Creative Space Trust Funds to acquire, purchase, maintain, and hold onto creative maker space assets.

The Massachusetts proposal builds on the state’s existing Affordable Housing Trust Fund infrastructure, but applies it to creative and cultural space. While it does not provide new funding for the model, it removes a major roadblock for local communities by establishing a common, state authorized vehicle to protect and preserve creative space, instead of requiring municipalities to apply for a special home rule petition if they want to create their own Creative Land Trust. Unfortunately, the Senate just opted not to include the Creative Space Act in its economic development bill, meaning advocates will need to keep fighting to make the proposal law.

Industry-specific Creative Land Trusts

The Music Venues Trust in the UK offers another promising model, rooted in a specific industry rather than location. The Music Venues Trust raises capital to purchase the buildings that house Grassroots Music Venues. Once they have acquired a building, they lease the space back to the venues via below-market, long-term leases that provide long-term stability to local music scenes.

Music Venue Trust is also unique in the source of its capital. It raises much of the money it uses to purchase buildings via Community Shares, a community ownership model that allows individuals to invest in the trust. To date, MVT has acquired ten properties, and they have more in the pipeline.

Of course, Creative Land Trusts aren’t the only model for preserving and protecting creative space. Many properties have benefited from the support of advocacy organizations like the Arts Stays Here Coalition in Boston, which helps artists at risk of displacement advocate to protect their space when threatened. IndieSpace in New York has done incredible work helping theaters at risk of displacement renegotiate their leases, find new space, and even purchase their building. Other groups, like ArtBuilt in Brooklyn, provide long-term, affordable studio space alongside the financial literacy and training creatives need to achieve long-term financial stability. And Artist Space Trust in the Bay Area is adapting the Community Land Trust model to affordable housing for artists.

How can local and state governments help?

Track creative space: The World Cities Forum published a Practical Guide for Creative Land Trusts, which recommends that communities start by mapping their existing spaces for creative production and presentation, so that they can track their growth or disappearance over time. The Metropolitan Area Planning Council did just that, and developed a prototype Creative Space Map that could be adapted for any municipality to track creative space in their community. The city of Sydney conducts a Floorspace Employment Survey every five years to understand how much real estate is dedicated to creative use.

Create plug-and-play legal structures: Right now, most municipalities that want to protect creative space via a Creative Land Trust have to build the legal vehicle from scratch. State policy like the Creative Space Act would replace case-by-case special legislation with a standing tool any municipality could use immediately to establish a Creative Land Trust in their community.

Capital and financing: Every Creative Land Trust stacks multiple forms of capital. Federal New Markets Tax Credits helped finance CAST’s founding pilot projects and have covered as much as 90% of costs on some of its later deals. Massachusetts’ Cultural Facilities Fund, jointly run by MassDevelopment and the Mass Cultural Council, provided a $200,000 capital grant toward Creative Hub Worcester, while state and federal Historic Tax Credits covered other costs on that same project. In 2018, New York City set aside capital to support its Affordable Real Estate for Artists (AREA) initiative to seed new affordable artist housing and workspaces in city-owned buildings, though progress has been slow.

Donate space: Sometimes the most valuable thing a government can contribute is the property it already owns. For example, Helsinki transferred ownership of the old Nokia cable factory to KAAPELI. Seattle’s Cultural Space Agency negotiated a 60-year, no-rent lease for space inside King Street Station, a city-owned historic train station, which now houses a youth-focused cultural hub. And in San Francisco, CAST partnered directly with the city’s Parks & Recreation department to bring the Geneva Car Barn & Powerhouse, a former municipal transit building, into cultural use.

Fund technical assistance: Successful Creative Land Trusts are upfront about the challenges of making the stars align to find the right property, tenants, financing, and property management to make the model work. Both CAST and Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston run Technical Assistance Programs to support this work. Municipalities that wish to support the development of local Creative Land Trusts should invest in the expertise they need to make these projects work.

Though the specific models and implementation differ, ultimately the purpose of a Creative Land Trust is simple – to remove property from the speculative market and dedicate it to long term, affordable, creative use.

That’s a public good that all governments, big and small, should get behind.

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What We’re Reading and Watching

• Tenants in Madrid are using art and community care to fight for their rights.

• Some colleges are preparing artists to use AI in their creative careers. Meanwhile, these studies reveal the costs of AI-assisted creativity.

• Learn more about freelancer benefits via this Q&A with Ann Boger, former COO of Freelancers Union and co-author of CRNY’s Snapshot of Portable Benefits for Artists and Creative Workers

• Publishers and authors just filed a new class action lawsuit against Google for copyright infringement in developing and training AI models, while Anthropic has to pay a copyright settlement for taking pirated copies of books to train Claude.

• New survey finds 3 in 4 voters say the cost of childcare is a major problem, fueling the affordability crisis

• Everything you ever wanted to know about sectoral bargaining

Advocacy and Policy Happenings

• Join the Protect Working Musicians act (PWMA) Coalition Webinar on August 6 to learn about the legislation that would allow independent creators to negotiate collectively with AI developers and streaming platforms for fair compensation and licensing terms.

• The public has 60 days (until September 4th) to submit comments on the DOJ settlement with Live Nation (which largely left their market power intact). More details from NIVA here.

• A bipartisan paid family leave bill is moving through the House. It wouldn’t provide comprehensive nationwide coverage, but would offer incentives for states to build out their own plans.

• The Senate Commerce Committee pushed its markup of AI and child online safety bills to next week as lawmakers struggle to find compromise on a slew of issues and OpenAI’s Sam Altman visits Washington to make his case in person.

• Senate Democrats introduced a bill that would allow all American children to enroll in Medicaid (dubbed Medikids).

It can often feel like the growth and proliferation of artificial intelligence is happening to us. For years, unaccountable companies trained their AI models on creative work without the knowledge or consent of the people who made it, all to build new tools capable of putting those same creators out of a job.

AI companies have worked hard to make it feel like their technologies and operating models are inevitable. But they’re not. Creative workers are organizing and demanding protections, while legislators are scrambling to write new rules. Now is the time to assert our own agency, and advance new policies to protect and preserve the creative labor that underpins our culture, our economy, and our very humanity.

The Issues

Copyright and Intellectual Property

Much of the current policy debate is focused on how existing copyright and intellectual property frameworks apply to the use of creative works in training models and how ownership is determined for the outputs produced by generative systems.

Dataset governance: Most training data is scraped from the open web without the consent of the people who made it. This can be addressed via an opt-out model, where creators must actively flag their work to be excluded, or an opt-in model, where inclusion requires affirmative permission. Unfortunately, the scraping process frequently strips metadata and attribution information from creative works as they’re ingested, so artists can’t be identified in the resulting dataset.

This is part of why dataset transparency, when companies disclose what a model was trained on, have become a bigger flashpoint than provenance standards alone. Provenance tells you where an output came from; transparency tells you what went into the model in the first place, and right now almost no major AI company discloses that willingly.

Finally, there is growing attention to provenance standards, which aim to establish verifiable records of a digital asset’s origin, modification history, and chain of custody. These systems can help document the creation and transformation of AI-generated choreography, video, and other media.

Beyond training data, additional legal and technical questions are emerging around the status of motion-capture and performance datasets used to model human movement, including choreography and dance. These raise unresolved issues regarding how such datasets are classified and governed within existing IP categories.

Style mimicry: A related but legally distinct problem occurs from “in the style of” generation systems, which let users produce new work mimicking the recognizable style of a living artist. For example, AI can use a specific illustrator’s line work, an animator’s character design, or a photographer’s color grading. Because style itself isn’t copyrightable under existing law, this appropriation falls into a legal gap: no infringement occurs in the traditional sense, yet the artist’s market can be substituted wholesale, with no compensation or legal claim available to the artist whose work made that style recognizable in the first place.

In response, some argue for a new kind of protection, closer to the right of publicity that already protects a performer’s voice or likeness, extended to cover an artist’s stylistic identity. Another area of focus is the treatment of digital replicas of performers’ bodies, voices, and movements generated through AI systems, particularly when they are derived from or modeled on existing creative performances.

These unresolved questions are now playing out in courtrooms across nearly every creative sector. The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI and Microsoft is the most visible case, but visual artists have brought image-dataset lawsuits against companies like Stability AI and Midjourney; music publishers and record labels are pursuing separate actions against AI music generators; authors and book publishers have sued over the use of pirated book datasets in training; and stock photography companies have filed their own claims over the use of licensed image libraries.

Job Loss

The World Economic Forum estimates that 26% of creative tasks are at high risk of elimination and in California alone, CVL Economics projects that generative AI could affect 63,000 entertainment jobs by 2026 through consolidation, replacement or elimination. And, according to Brookings, up to 30% of workers in cognitive and creative professions will see at least half of their daily tasks disrupted by AI.

Technical jobs are at risk as well. Philpa Childs, the head of the UK union for creative industries, argues that the technical work “that underpins creative production…must not be treated as expendable in the rush to adopt new technology.” Stagehands, sound engineers, lighting technicians, production assistants, archivists, and arts administrators often do essential creative work that is rarely protected by copyright or intellectual property law, and therefore falls outside mainstream policy debates about AI and creative labor.

This issue is compounded by the sector’s reliance on freelancers. Many artists subsidize their creative practice with technical and administrative work in creative industries. If those jobs are undercut or lost because of AI, the entire ecosystem of creative practice risks collapse.

And finally, generative AI has the potential to dramatically increase supply. Infinite illustrations, music, marketing copy, videos, performances, books leaves the discovery of human work almost impossible. Work that isn’t visible can’t contribute to one’s income.

Profit

At a time when many artists struggle to cobble together a living from multiple jobs, generative AI is creating an entirely new market. Industry forecasts estimate that AI-generated content could produce between $5 billion and $10 billion in annual revenues across creative sectors, while music and audiovisual creators are projected to lose 24% and 21% of their revenues, respectively, by 2028. The question is not simply whether AI will generate wealth, but who will capture it.

Today, the overwhelming share of AI-generated value flows to the companies that own the models, computing infrastructure, platforms, and datasets rather than the creators whose work helped make those systems possible. Even where licensing agreements exist, they are often negotiated between large technology firms and major media or entertainment companies, leaving many independent creators without a meaningful stake in the value generated from their work. The settlements involving AI music platforms Udio and Suno, for example, largely benefited major record companies, while independent musicians remained outside those agreements.

This raises a broader economic question about what mechanisms should exist to ensure that creators participate in the wealth those systems generate. The challenge is not only one of permission or attribution, but of building economic models that recognize creative work as an ongoing source of value rather than a one-time input into AI development.

The concentration of AI infrastructure makes this challenge even more urgent. A relatively small number of companies increasingly shape how creative work is produced, discovered, and monetized. As these firms become gatekeepers for the next generation of creative tools, artists face a larger question: who will own and govern the infrastructure of creativity in the AI era?

The companies that have historically financed and distributed creative work are confronting the same uncertainty. Publishers, record labels, film studios, and news organizations are simultaneously suing AI developers over copyright claims while negotiating licensing agreements with those same companies. They cannot afford to ignore AI’s rapid adoption, yet they also risk accelerating a system that could undermine the long-term value of the creative works on which their businesses depend.

Preserving the Humanity in Creativity

We must preserve the distinctly human role at the heart of arts and culture and human expression. As the Creators Coalition on AI asks, “what happens when we relinquish humanity’s most ancient and fundamental capacities to machines at scale?” Artists do more than produce content. They draw on lived experience, cultural memory, community, and imagination to create work that reflects and challenges society. And if we outsource these essential functions to AI, how do we preserve cultural diversity? AI tends to reproduce dominant cultures because that’s what exists online. We must consider what happens to minority languages, Indigenous cultural knowledge, and local traditions. Finally, generative AI has deep impacts on the environment and water we need to preserve ourselves and the planet.

Creative Worker Organizing

Perhaps unsurprisingly, creative workers are recognizing these threats and taking action. This is not a single movement, but a broad and fragmented set of actions across music, visual art, writing, film, and performance.

In 2023, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) successfully established historic guardrails against AI in its collective bargaining agreement. The rules protect writers from being replaced by AI, ensuring that AI cannot write or rewrite literary material, undermine human writers’ credits, or be used to bypass fair compensation.

The NewsGuild, which represents 27,000 members across North America, has also been at the vanguard of the labor response and turned their concerns into contractual demands. Their demands are straightforward: use AI as a tool, not a replacement for journalists, protect jobs and pay, label AI content clearly, get consent before training on their work, and keep editorial control with journalists, not executives.

SAG-AFTRA’s June 2026 TV/Theatrical Agreement built on previous AI protections negotiated in prior cycles, including further restrictions on the use of synthetics and providing performers added contractual protection against AI replacing their work. SAG-AFTRA also supported the Human Artistry Campaign, which has 7 core principles for AI applications and protests the unauthorized use of creative works in AI training under the Stealing Isn’t Innovation campaign.

Artists are organizing outside unions as well. In 2024, artists and organizations co-signed a letter denouncing AI training, calling “unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI” an “unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works.” Industry groups like the Artists Rights Society have created a code of conduct for artificial intelligence developers on behalf of their community of visual artists, and Fairly Trained certifies AI companies that get a license for copyrighted work used in their training data. Additionally, Music Artists Coalition, Songwriters of North America, BMAC, and National Independent Talent Organization (NITO) have issued coordinated statements demanding consent, fair compensation, transparency and an end to forced opt-ins.

New collective efforts are emerging every day. The Creators Coalition on AI (CCAI) recently launched as “an agnostic convening organization, born from the necessity for a central hub for cross-industry discussions about how AI is impacting the entertainment industry.” They have aligned around a set of principles for responsible AI use in the creative and entertainment industries, and their list of artists – both big names and less recognized – is long.

And then there are the individual artists like Cate Blanchett, who co-founded a nonprofit, RSL Media, and launched the Human Consent Registry. This free tool allows anyone to legally and technically declare whether AI platforms can use their face, voice, name, or likeness for training or generation.

The public is even getting involved with an online backlash and boycott movement. When the Wall Street Journal reported that Google / Deep Minds was investing $75 million in A24 as part of a research partnership to develop new AI tools for movie production, fans had a meltdown. Overall, Americans believe AI will have a negative impact on society. And just last week, Meta launched an Instagram AI feature that let anyone generate AI images from public users’ photos by default, then rolled it back within days after widespread backlash over privacy and consent concerns.

Legislative Action

While there is growing tension between state and federal approaches to AI governance, including federal attempts to prevent states from regulating AI, there has also been some meaningful progress for artists and creative workers.

At the federal level, Congress has considered a series of AI-related legislative proposals. One of the first federal laws addressing generative AI harms was the TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed in 2025. The law targets the online distribution of non-consensual intimate images, including AI-generated sexual deepfakes as well as authentic imagery shared without consent. While it does not address broader concerns raised by artists, it established an important federal precedent by regulating a specific category of harm arising from generative AI.

More directly focused on performers and creative workers, the NO FAKES Act was reintroduced in 2025 in both the House and Senate. This bipartisan (and controversial) proposal would establish federal protections against unauthorized AI-generated digital replicas of an individual’s voice and likeness, creating a national right-of-publicity-style framework. The legislation would allow individuals to control the commercial use of synthetic replicas (AI-generated people or personas) based on their voice or likeness, including provisions that extend protections after the individual’s death, though the specific duration and structure remain subject to ongoing debate.

Additional federal proposals addressing generative AI include bills focused on transparency, provenance, and training data disclosure, such as the COPIED Act (Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act) and the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act. These proposals reflect growing congressional interest in disclosure and data transparency, though none have become law.

Separately, the U.S. Copyright Office issued a multi-part report on copyright and artificial intelligence addressing issues such as copyrightability of AI-generated works, training data, and digital replicas. It reaffirmed that works generated entirely by AI are not eligible for copyright protection, while human-authored contributions remain protected under existing law.

Just this month, legislators introduced the CREATOR Act (Creative Rights for Artists’ Technique and Originality Are Reserved Act) which, if passed, would be a bipartisan measure addressing a gap in intellectual property laws by protecting creators (mostly visual artists) against style impersonation.

At the state level, several jurisdictions have moved more quickly to address AI’s impact on creative workers. New York enacted legislation in 2025 requiring disclosure of AI-generated “synthetic performers” in advertising, and expanded posthumous rights-of-publicity to cover unauthorized commercial use of an individual’s name, image, voice, and AI-generated digital replicas. New York’s FAIR News Act, which is awaiting Governor Hochul’s signature, requires news organizations to include clear, conspicuous disclaimers on any published content that is created through generative artificial intelligence.

Tennessee’s ELVIS Act, enacted in 2024, explicitly extends right-of-publicity protections to include a person’s voice and prohibits unauthorized AI-generated voice cloning and digital impersonation. Illinois’s Digital Voice and Likeness Protection Act expanded its publicity and biometric privacy frameworks in ways that increasingly intersect with AI-generated likenesses, providing performers with legal avenues to challenge unauthorized commercial use of their identity, including voice and image in synthetic form.

California advanced AI governance (AB1836 and AB2602 among others) through a combination of transparency, safety, and intellectual property-related measures affecting generative AI systems, particularly around disclosure and the use of copyrighted works in training data, though its framework is still evolving and has not been consolidated into a single comprehensive statute.

Emerging Solutions

Is there economic infrastructure that could benefit artists? Some are considering collective licensing frameworks similar to the work of ASCAP and BMI which have long handled music royalties. This model would let AI companies pay into a shared pool that distributes revenue to creators based on how much their work contributed to training. This might be best suited for music and theater where there are rights-management bodies that exist at scale.

Several publishers, music apps, and stock media companies have begun piloting opt-in training pools with varying results. In 2025, a collective launched a nonprofit called RSL Collective (with Reddit, Yahoo, Medium and Quora as founding participants) which functions as a clearing house for creatives. It negotiates and manages licensing on behalf of participating publishers, rather than each publisher having to cut individual deals with every AI company.

And while we’ve focused on the private sector mostly, it’s important to note that governments are also becoming major purchasers of AI and being forced to confront these issues. Government should be asking key questions, such as:

• should publicly funded arts organizations be required to disclose AI use;

• should grant recipients of public arts funding be required to protect artists’ IP;

• should government procurement require licensed AI models and prioritize human-created work;

• should government concentrate their workforce development on upskilling and reskilling artists and creative workers as AI takes jobs; and

• should schools receiving arts funding have policies around AI?

The research, litigation, new solutions, and organizing make it clear that creative workers are not waiting to find out how their future will be written. They’re advancing their own answers through contract negotiations, legislation, and public campaigns that name the harms they’re experiencing. Yet, none of these actions is sufficient by themselves. Addressing the deeper issues, especially for arts workers who aren’t covered by unions, requires public understanding that creative labor is human labor and an irreplaceable component of our society. The systems and rules we build around AI must treat creative labor as something worth protecting and preserving.

Perhaps Joanna Woronkowicz is right and AI will “take on routine tasks while leaving the core creative work to humans.” But we can’t leave it to chance. Now is the time to take our fates into our own hands.

Things We’re Reading and Viewing

• In the midst of World Cup fever, these World Cup documentaries are worth a watch, especially The Workers Cup!

• A cultural district in Minnesota is successfully fighting displacement.

• Whelp, AI is not only changing our language, but also the actresses who star in movies.

• A new study on the social benefits of paid family leave finds “the estimated return on investment for every $1,000 invested in paid family leave lies between $7,000 to $29,000 in net social benefits after accounting for fiscal costs.”

Advocacy and Policy Happenings

• The Living Wage for All campaign collected enough signatures to put a $30 minimum wage on the ballot in Alameda County this November!

• No surprise, but health care cuts are turning out to be a major issue in close House races going into the fall elections.

• The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law on Friday, despite President Trump’s refusal to sign it. The bipartisan legislation aims to increase the supply of affordable housing and is a notable example of Congress actually functioning as it should!

• It’s likely major AI legislation will be marked up in committee at the end of July, but it’s not clear yet which bills will be considered.

• The National Convergence for Democracy will take place on August 21-23 in Minneapolis and promises to be an excellent opportunity to brush up on your organizing and direct-action skills!

• WGA Files Lawsuit to Block Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery Merger today!

Last Thursday, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) introduced new federal legislation that would establish a $25 minimum wage for all, automatically increase over time, and eliminate the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers, incarcerated workers, and disabled workers. The bill is a companion to the Living Wage for All Act in the House (H.R.8555), introduced by Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL) in April.

The new federal legislation is the latest achievement of the National Living Wage for All Campaign, which is also leading active state and local campaigns in nine states and Washington D.C. The goal of these campaigns is to establish living wages for all workers nationwide.

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What’s a living wage?

Living wages enable all workers to earn enough money to meet their basic needs where they live. Unlike the federal minimum wage, which sets a specific dollar threshold for the whole country (currently $7.25/hour), a living wage starts by calculating the cost of living in a particular place, and estimates what a person or a family living there needs to earn in order to pay their bills. A living wage in a big city will likely be higher than one in a rural town, because the cost of living in the city is higher.

The MIT Living Wage calculator is perhaps the most well-known tool for calculating a living wage in any particular place, but there are others as well. The Economic Policy Institute publishes its Family Budget Calculator, and New York City has its own True Cost of Living calculator, broken out by New York City neighborhoods.

Living wage legislation would also eliminate the subminimum wage, which sets an even lower minimum wage for tipped workers ($2.13), incarcerated workers (under $1), and/or disabled workers ($3.50). The subminimum wage is a relic of slavery, established to avoid paying Black and brown women working in the restaurant industry a fair wage. The subminimum wage has been consistently defended by the National Restaurant Association, though seven states have passed One Fair Wage legislation guaranteeing these workers a full minimum wage. The Living Wage for All campaign builds off these successes.

Living wages are an essential piece of any affordability agenda

Living wages are an especially important tool for addressing affordability challenges, because they are responsive to variable economic conditions, like the inflation we’re experiencing now. When prices go up, the living wage increases too.

That’s very different from the status quo, where the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr has lost 30% of its purchasing power since it was last increased in 2009. The national Fight for $15 campaign was incredibly successful at winning a pay raise for millions of low-wage workers, only to see those gains eroded as the cost of living grew faster than workers’ paychecks.

Today, the affordability crisis is driving the national policy conversation. While some argue increasing the minimum wage could exacerbate affordability challenges, the data doesn’t support that position. Living wage legislation offers a powerful tool to address the affordability challenges many Americans face.

How would a living wage benefit artists?

Artists could really use a raise. According to a recent national study, working artists reported a median income of just $15,000 per year from their main job, and 27% earned less than $2,500 in the past 12 months from that job. Fully 57% were worried about at least one form of financial vulnerability – food, housing, medical care, or utilities – and 37% used some form of public assistance.

A CRNY study of New York State artists found roughly 30% of artists report an annual household income of under $15,000/year and another 30% with household incomes between $15,000 and $25,000/year. All told, 85% of New York artists had annual household income of less than $50,000/year. For comparison, median individual earnings in New York State is $70,770/year.

At $25/hour, Living Wage For All legislation would deliver an annual salary of about $52,000/year to full-time hourly workers, a meaningful increase for many artists who struggle to make ends meet. Living Wage for All campaigns in more expensive communities like New York and Alameda County are pushing for even higher thresholds.

And while the legislation only guarantees a living wage to those who earn income via hourly (i.e. W2) employment, the same national study found that 53% of working artists earn income from full or part time work for an organization or person other than themselves, including them in its benefits.

The 48% of artists who earn income via self-employment wouldn’t fall under the legislation, but they would still benefit from upward pressure on wages. For example, when calculating project fees, freelance creative workers could use their local living wage standard to justify their proposed fee, even if the law doesn’t technically apply to them.

Artists are also more likely than other workers to hold multiple part time jobs, many of which are paid hourly. For example, the same national study found that “nearly half of working artists (48%) had at least one temporary job in the last 12 months, while just over three-quarters of working artists (76%) had at least one part-time job over the last 12 months.” More than a quarter (27.5%) held two or more part-time jobs.

As artists combine income from multiple sources, many are likely to take on part-time, hourly work to supplement their income from their creative practice. The common trope of an actor paying the rent by waiting tables is a stereotype for a reason. Living wage legislation helps ensure those side gigs actually pay the bills, making a creative practice more viable for many more workers.

Building on important initiatives in the arts sector

Of course, new living wage legislation isn’t the first time artists have fought for fair pay. Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) was founded in 2008 in New York City by a group of visual and performing artists and independent curators. Today, W.A.G.E. publishes detailed rate information for artists working in the nonprofit sector. Their fee calculator is a four-tiered system that sets a floor wage for 15 categories of work, and scales these fees up using a fixed percentage of an institution’s operating budget.

W.A.G.E. certifies institutions who voluntarily adopt their wage standards and provides tools for artists to request institutions commit to their standards through their WAGENCY for artists and art workers. All told, W.A.G.E. has helped artists get paid over $25 million since 2014.

Another important initiative in the arts is Pay Equity Standards, which were developed by a group of organizers in the Chicago theater community. Inspired by organic food certification, the program allows nonprofit arts organizations to obtain certification if they can demonstrate that they meet a checklist of pay equity requirements, which include a commitment to reaching MIT Living Wage standards. The program was launched in January 2022, and is operated by the nonprofit On Our Team.

Other organizations publish crowdsourced data about standard pay rates to help freelance artists negotiate better rates. For example, Dancers Alliance publishes standard rates, Dance/NYC publishes a compensation tool, and the Graphic Artists Guild publishes their Pricing and Ethical Guidelines Handbook. And of course unions negotiate higher wages for their members through collective bargaining agreements.

Prevailing wage standards offer another tool

Prevailing wages are the basic hourly rate (including wages and benefits) paid to workers in a given industry/sector in the same geography. Governments often use prevailing wage standards to set wage floors for work paid for by government contracts (most often in construction, but also in service industries).

Federal law requires federal contracts to pay prevailing wages, and many states and localities have their own prevailing wage laws as well. The National Endowment for the Arts, for example, requires that all grants and contracts adhere to prevailing wage and benefit standards, though this requirement is rarely enforced. You can look up relevant prevailing wage standards here.

The federal rates are prepared by the U.S. Department of Labor’s (USDOL) Wage and Hour Division, under federal regulations, primarily through a survey program of employers administered by the division. Given this methodology, it’s likely that government statistics are less accurate in industries with high rates of self-employment or contract work, like most arts sectors.

That said, prevailing wages are often higher than minimum wages, helping governments set and enforce higher wage and more generous benefit standards in an industry. They are especially helpful in setting higher wage standards in industries with strong unionization rates. W.A.G.E. recently built their Skills Calculator based on the prevailing wage data made available by the BLS.

Challenges we need to wrestle with as a sector

While of course arts workers should be paid a living wage, it’s important to acknowledge that many organizations that hire arts workers are cash-strapped, small nonprofits themselves. In fact, many of the people who hire artists are artists themselves. Think of a musician who acts as a band leader one night, and a member of the band the next. In a sector that faces constant threats to funding and insufficient support, finding the funds to pay artists fairly can feel like an impossible task, even when we all agree it’s the right thing to do.

Yet there are workarounds. Pay Equity Standards acknowledges the challenges organizations face, and requires them to make and publish a transparent plan to pay MIT Living Wage standards within five years. W.A.G.E. acknowledges that the budgetary constraints of a small nonprofit are different from a large cultural institution, and scales its fee standards accordingly.

The federal Living Wage for All bill recognizes the same challenges, and gives small businesses more time to comply with the new law. While large businesses with 100+ employees/$1B+ in revenue must reach $30 by 2030, small businesses with 25 or fewer employees get a full decade, until 2037, to reach that threshold. It is possible for the arts organizations to pay a living wage, but it may require reorganizing budgets, programming, and operating practices to do so.

Funders also have a role to play. As previously mentioned, the NEA requires all grantees to comply with prevailing wage standards for all the work they fund, yet this requirement is not enforced. Funders in the public and private sectors could require all of their grantees to pay a living wage, and increase their grant amounts to account for those increased costs.

Individual artists have a role to play as well. It’s on all of us, collectively, to reject the starving artist trope and demand fair pay. Fee setting tools like the ones shared above give artists more leverage to negotiate for themselves. Of course, power dynamics and the need for paid work restricts our individual power, but collective advocacy in the public and private sectors helps improve working conditions for all.

How artists are supporting the Living Wage for All campaign

Artists and creative workers are joining the fight. For example, the National Arts Policy Alliance (NAPA) officially joined the Living Wage for All campaign in March, bringing the voices of creative workers into the center of the campaign and into alliance with other workers who share their precarious working conditions.

Since that time, creative workers have attended campaign events, planning calls, rallies, and joined the federal bill introduction last week. Experienced narrative and cultural strategists are also helping the campaign build the narrative muscle it needs to win hearts and minds in 2026 and beyond. Teaching artists are involved in the campaign through the National Education Association, and calling for living wages for teaching artists specifically in New York City.

Going forward, there will be many more opportunities to connect artists and artist-led organizations into the state and local Living Wage campaigns happening in New York, Illinois, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Alameda County, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Michigan, Hawaii, and Connecticut.

Are you an artist or an organization who wants to add your voice to the campaign? Fill out this form.

Together, we can ensure that all workers – artists and non-artists alike – can depend on the living wage we all deserve.

Things We’re Reading and Viewing

• New musical software is threatening jobs for musicians on Broadway

• Google’s Deep Mind Institute just invested $75 million in independent movie studio A24, with the partnership focused on investing in new AI tools to support film production and distribution

• Who will fight for resale royalties for artists when long-time champion Rep. Jerry Nadler of NY retires?

• Reflecting on the harms of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, one year after its passage.

• Can we bridge political polarization by rebuilding local power?

• New research finds nearly one half of working aged adults had trouble affording health care in 2025.

Advocacy and Policy Happenings

• The House and Senate just passed a landmark bipartisan affordable housing bill, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which would increase the supply of housing and improve affordability for renters. President Trump is currently refusing to sign the bipartisan measure unless Congress passes his election reform bill.

• Newly proposed Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines would further politicize and destabilize federal grant making. The Council of Nonprofits has a helpful overview and guide to submit comments before the July 13th deadline.

• The Choreographers Guild won historic new protections for choreographers under the new SAG-AFTRA contract, and this new report delves into the realities and challenges of the profession.

• Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have a new bipartisan plan to save Social Security

• A new congressional report finds few families benefit from childcare tax breaks that could save them money.

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Photo by Joshua Hoehne

Jon Batiste moved from New Orleans to New York City to attend Juilliard, where he earned both a Bachelor’s and Master’s of Music in Jazz Studies. Upon graduating in 2011, he spent his first three years trying to survive as a working musician. His band, Stay Human, could barely find lucrative gigs, often choosing subways and sidewalk busking by day and couch-surfing with friends by night. He finally landed his Late Show contract in 2015 and the rest is history.

What if federal policy had decided not to support his degree choice? And more urgently, what if the government had never bothered to understand what his career path actually looked like, and designed policy around that ignorance?

That is exactly what’s happening now. Last year, the One Big Beautiful bill established new higher education accountability standards, which are being implemented via a Department of Education rule scheduled to take effect this July.

The New Rule Threatens Higher Education in the Arts

The new rule, called the Student Tuition and Transparency System (STATS) and Earnings Accountability Framework, strips federal student loan eligibility from programs whose graduates fail to meet earnings benchmarks. Graduate programs must see their alumni out-earn the median salary of workers aged 25 to 34 with a bachelor’s degree. Fail twice in three years and a program loses federal loan eligibility, leading to likely program closures and students transferring or quitting.

Prior accountability consequences applied mainly to for-profit and certificate programs. By extending the earnings test to every degree program, this framework puts nonprofit arts and design schools at risk of losing federal aid for the first time, at a significantly higher bar than before, which measured graduates against the earnings of high school diploma holders.

A preliminary analysis from the Department of Education‘s own data, first reported by the The New York Times, shows that many of the country’s most prestigious programs would not pass. Yale’s master’s programs in visual arts and music would fail. Harvard’s master’s in museum studies would fail. Juilliard’s undergraduate and graduate music programs would fail. Ninety percent of religious studies graduate students and 100 percent of culinary certificate recipients would fail.

The costs land hardest on students with the fewest resources. Young people from low-income communities and communities of color face the steepest barriers to the creative economy, with the fewest opportunities for mentorship, professional networks, and capital. Students in arts master’s programs alone carry nearly $311 million in federal loans. Those students are disproportionately dependent on that federal aid. When programs lose loan eligibility, the doors that were barely open will close entirely. While elite institutions with large endowments may find workarounds, students with high economic need at smaller institutions will bear the full cost of this rule.

A Misguided Response to a Legitimate Problem

Some higher education programs genuinely do exploit students. For-profit colleges have a documented history of charging high tuition for credentials with poor labor market value, targeting low-income and first-generation students. That problem is real, it has harmed many people, and it deserves a serious policy response.

But this one is misguided. It fundamentally misunderstands the value of higher education in the arts and liberal arts. Even accepting its narrow economic view, it fails to account for how creative workers actually earn a living or the systemic failures of federal workforce data in this sector. Most importantly, it establishes accountability for career outcomes without ever having mapped what those pathways actually look like. We are grading a journey we have never bothered to trace.

The Assumption Nobody Is Debating

The earnings test assumes that if your degree doesn’t increase your earning power within four years, it has failed.Higher education has historically justified itself on its ability to foster critical thinking, civic participation, cultural transmission, and the kind of generalist thinking democracies need. Federal policy is now explicitly rejecting that rationale.

The rule also assumes creative skills have declining economic relevance, when the actual labor market demonstrates the opposite. As AI reshapes how we do our jobs, employers across every sector are increasingly dependent on precisely the competencies that arts and liberal arts programs develop, including design, communication, problem-solving, storytelling, and collaboration. These skills have growing applications in technology, healthcare, science, clean energy, and transportation. We are defunding the training pipeline for the skills the economy most urgently needs at exactly the moment we need them most.

One Blunt Instrument

Even accepting earnings as a valid measure, the proposed test ignores the realities of creative careers.

The career arc of a working artist is fundamentally incompatible with a four-year earnings snapshot. According to the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, artists experience substantial income variability in the first years after graduation, with a median income of $45,000 three years out. Year four is often the lowest point of a creative career, not a representative one. A violinist building a performance career, a filmmaker accumulating credits, a visual artist developing a body of work: none of these trajectories register correctly in a single early-career window.

A study of New York State artists found roughly 30% of artists report an annual household income of under $15,000/year and another 30% with household incomes between $15,000 and $25,000/year. All told, 85% of New York artists had annual household income of less than $50,000/year. The pandemic forced a long-overdue reckoning with the precarity that had always defined creative working life, which predates this rule and persists regardless of program quality. Measuring a structurally precarious career at its most precarious moment and calling it an educational failure is a significant mistake.

We Are Measuring A Career that Federal Data Has Not Captured

The federal government is applying a hard accountability standard to a workforce sector it has not fully captured, and treating the absence of clean data as evidence of failure.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics was built around the assumption that a worker has a primary employer in a primary field. Artists routinely have neither. Income is episodic, multi-sourced, and often informal, coming simultaneously from performing, teaching, selling, licensing, and consulting, crossing occupational categories in ways existing systems were never designed to track. For example, the same person may be a musician, an educator, and a small business owner depending on which week you look. Their income may also be informal, with a mix of cash payments, barter arrangements, in-kind compensation, and deferred payment structures that never enter any official record.

The IRS sees fragments of this through self-employment filings. And even reported income likely underestimates actual incomes.The GAO estimates sole proprietors underreport income by 57 percent. Even the Department of Education’s own datasets make it likely that programs will be held accountable for the wrong data, as existing data sets assign schools to the wrong program codes, and federal ACS data may be insufficiently granular to provide reliable benchmarks.

Given all the potential points of failure in this framework, it is striking that the rule includes no appeals process.

We Are Holding Institutions Accountable for Pathways We Have Never Mapped

Creative career pathways are among the least mapped in the American workforce. We have detailed longitudinal data on nursing graduates, engineering graduates, and MBA holders. We have almost nothing comparable for working artists, musicians, designers, or the humanities graduates who carry creative competencies into other industries.

Unlike nursing or engineering, creative careers have no formalized apprenticeship pipelines, no credentialing bodies connecting training to employment, and no federally supported career transition programs. Artists navigate fragmented pathways with little institutional support, even as their labor drives economic development in communities across the country.

The policy conversation has focused entirely on whether programs should be punished. It has almost entirely ignored whether graduates should be better supported after they leave. Building that support infrastructure would also begin to generate the longitudinal evidence of how creative workers move through the economy, what they contribute, and what support actually makes a difference.

Mapping creative career pathways responsibly means tracking how artists move through residencies, gig work, and portfolio development over ten to fifteen years, not four. It means redesigning census occupation codes to capture multi-source creative income. It means coordinating across the NEA, the Department of Labor, the Census Bureau, and the Department of Education to build a shared longitudinal picture of creative workforce outcomes.

None of that infrastructure exists yet, but other countries have built it. The UK treats creative graduates as economic infrastructure and funds research into creative career outcomes accordingly. Germany subsidizes arts training without salary thresholds. Canada funds career development post-degree, explicitly acknowledging the gap between graduation and sustainable income.

What We Are Actually Choosing

If this framework becomes permanent, it will quietly reshape what kinds of knowledge America decides to fund and pass forward. A country that only subsidizes education producing immediate financial return will defund the study of its own history and culture, hollow out the civic professions, and tell a generation that learning for its own sake is a luxury the government will not support. This rule will accelerate the closure of private art colleges we’re already seeing from cities like Nashville and San Francisco.

We are also making a choice about whether to keep creative careers invisible in our data systems or finally do the work of making them legible. Mapping creative career pathways, understanding how artists build sustainable working lives at ten and fifteen years, and building workforce infrastructure to support them is a prerequisite for any accountability framework that claims to be serious. Right now we have neither the data nor the infrastructure. This rule locks in that ignorance and calls it accountability.

We all agree that college should be worth the money. The harder question is how we decide what “worth it” means, and whether we are willing to do the work needed to map, define, and support creative career pathways in this country.

What We’re Reading and Watching

• AI music generator Suno is arguing that it creates a way for all people to be creative and make music while remaining “one of the most controversial companies in music” as its value soars.

• AI is coming for our playlists and our publishing.

• The rapid rise of housing costs and homelessness has prompted researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to explore the role of direct cash transfers as an alternative to housing vouchers

• A new group of comedians are working on health care solutions in Chicago.

• Great piece in the New York Times on the 1960s Arts Worker Coalition

• World Cup public art!

• Who benefits from Broadway tax credits?

• A new way of giving blood, arts included.

• The history of ticker tape parades in NYC! GO KNICKS!

Advocacy and Policy Happenings

• Colorado signed the Artist Corporation into law!

• The International Labor Organization (ILO) just established the first set of international labor standards for gig workers

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On May 13th, the Colorado State Senate passed a bipartisan bill establishing Artists Corporations, or A-Corps. The governor signed it on June 2nd making Colorado the first state to establish a new corporate form designed specifically for artists.

That sounds exciting. But what’s an A-Corp?

An Artist Corporation is a new legal business entity – like an LLC – that artists can use to structure and hold their creative business.

In fact, an A-Corp technically is an LLC (a limited liability corporation), but one with special provisions that are specifically designed for artists.

Specifically, an A-Corp:

• Must have an artistic mission

• Separates economic rights from voting rights

• Grants at least 51% of governance/voting rights to its artist owner(s)

• Allows collective ownership among a group of artists or collaborators

• Holds intellectual property, and ensures intellectual property rights return to the artist(s) if the company dissolves

• Can be created using a simple form without lawyers

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But what difference does that make in practice?

It makes quite a bit of difference. Let’s take each element in turn.

Artistic mission: This part might sound fluffy, but it’s an important tool to protect artists’ creative control. Standard corporations have what’s called a fiduciary duty to generate financial returns for owners and investors. This requirement has historically limited companies’ ability to make decisions that prioritize other goals, like social or environmental impact. That’s why B-Corps (Benefit Corporations) were created: to allow companies to balance the requirement to deliver financial returns to shareholders alongside the interests of other stakeholders, such as workers, customers, suppliers, the local community, and the environment.

A-Corps take the B-Corp model, and apply it to artistic and creative decisions. Requiring every A-Corp to have a stated artistic mission in its founding documents gives that artistic mission legal weight. It allows an artist to turn down a lucrative licensing deal, for example, if it conflicts with their artistic mission. It protects artists in situations where creative and financial interests collide.

Separation of economic and voting rights: The arts sector is full of examples of artists who took investment or signed deals, only to find that the money came at the cost of artistic control. Labels own the masters. Publishers hold approval rights. Studios retain the final cut. In a traditional company, economic stake and decision-making power are linked. Investors who put in enough money can get control. This is how artists lose control of their catalogs, their creative direction, and ultimately their companies.

The A-Corp separates economic and voting rights by law. Investors can hold economic rights like distributions, royalties, and revenue participation without receiving any voting power over creative or business decisions. An artist can raise capital to fund a tour, produce an album, or build a studio, and the people providing that capital have a legitimate claim on the financial returns, but no seat at the table when it comes to how the work is made or what the company does next.

51% artist control: Separating economic and voting rights is a strong protection, but it raises the obvious follow-up question; what stops investors from simply acquiring enough voting shares to take control anyway? The A-Corp answers this with a hard floor. Artists must hold at least 51% of all voting power at all times.

No matter how many investors come in or how the shares are structured, the artists running the company retain the deciding vote. The 51% floor doesn’t prevent an artist from making bad deals, taking on too much debt, or building a company that fails. But it does guarantee that whatever happens, the creative and business direction of the company stays in the hands of the people making the work.

Collective ownership: A lot of creative work is collaborative. A band makes an album together. A film crew shoots for months. A game studio builds imagined worlds across years of collective effort. Under current law, the people who contribute creative labor typically have two options: work for a flat fee and walk away with no stake in what they helped build, or negotiate a custom agreement that requires expensive lawyers and rarely reflects the full reality of who contributed what.

The A-Corp introduces a new type of ownership unit — the A-Corp Share — which can be issued in exchange for creative contributions, not just capital. A collaborator of any kind can receive an ownership stake that reflects their actual role in making the work. This is a meaningful departure from how equity normally works, where ownership flows from money, not labor.

This matters because ownership compounds in a way that fees don’t. A flat payment for creative work ends the day it’s made – you’re paid for your time. An ownership stake in a creative work keeps appreciating as long as the work has value – you’re paid for the value that you helped create.

Intellectual Property ownership and reversion: Intellectual property (IP) refers to the legal ownership of creative work. IP can be owned, licensed, sold, and inherited, just like physical property. For artists, IP is often their most valuable asset. It’s what generates royalties, licensing fees, and long-term revenue. And it’s what the traditional deal-making structures in creative industries are designed to capture, whether that’s a label owning a musician’s masters, a gallery controlling when and to whom a painter’s work is sold, or a dance company holding the rights to choreography that individual dancers helped create.

In a standard corporation, intellectual property belongs to the company. If the company is sold, the IP goes with it. If the company dissolves, creditors can claim it. An artist can build an entire body of work over a career, watch the company that owns their work fold, and have no legal claim to the work they spent years creating.

The A-Corp addresses this in two ways. First, artistic work held by an A-Corp can never be transferred to non-artist investors or third parties. A label, a fund, or an outside partner can earn revenue from the work, but they cannot hold the work itself. Second, if an A-Corp dissolves, ownership of all artistic work reverts to the artists who created it. These reversionary rights are protected from creditors, meaning a company’s financial failure cannot strip artists of their creative output.

Together, these provisions change the fundamental relationship between an artist and their catalog. The work follows the artist, not the money. No matter what happens to the company, the creative output remains with the people who made it.

Simple form: Every protection described above is technically achievable today. A good lawyer can draft an LLC operating agreement that includes all of it. The problem is that doing so costs tens of thousands of dollars, requires knowing exactly what to ask for, and produces a custom document that has to be negotiated from scratch every time.

The A-Corp makes these protections accessible via a standard form with checkbox and fill-in-the-blank provisions covering ownership, governance, IP terms, and more. An artist won’t need a lawyer to access the same protections that have historically been available only to the wealthy and well-connected. And they won’t have to negotiate these terms on a case-by-case basis. Once they form an A-corp, its protections become the default.

Awesome. So when do I get my own A-Corp?

Soon, hopefully! Colorado Governor Jared Polis is expected to sign the bipartisan legislation any day. Once it’s signed, the law takes effect in August 2026. But the state will need some time to implement. They are currently estimating that the forms will be ready by July 2027.

Once established, Colorado residents can start creating A-Corps right away. Those who live outside Colorado will likely be able to access the form if they hire a registered agent in the state, something many people do when they form LLCs to handle the compliance side of things. A registered agent typically costs between $100-$300/year. One caveat: if you’re doing business in your home state, you may also need to register there as a foreign entity, the same complexity that applies to any out-of-state LLC. It’s worth getting advice before you form.

However, other states are also considering their own A-Corp legislation. Yancey Strickler, the Kickstarter founder behind this A-Corp effort shared that potential bills are in the works in seven or eight states, many planned for 2027 legislative sessions.

It’s also worth noting that while the specific legislation is written to try to make grantmakers comfortable funding artistic work through A-Corps, it’s still an open question whether foundations can grant directly to A-Corps without tax consequences. Similar to L3Cs (Low Profit Limited Liability Companies), the law allows foundations to fund artistic work via program related investments or other philanthropic vehicles. However, A-Corps are not themselves tax-exempt entities, as these determinations are made at the federal, not state level. Ultimately, the hope is to amend federal law to clarify that foundations may grant directly to A-Corps without tax consequences.

What will it take to get an A-Corp bill in my state?

The Colorado bill passed with strong bipartisan support, and that wasn’t an accident. As Strickler put it: “We made the decision from the beginning that this is not about art as a moral good or art as the holder of capital T truth. It was about artists and creative people as a workforce that’s under-equipped and is more important to our communities than we generally acknowledge.” The pitch to legislators was an economic growth argument, and it was bipartisan from the start. “If it wasn’t bipartisan, I don’t know if it would have passed,” Strickler said. “The fact that we had a leading Republican in the House and the Senate standing up, and they’re both ranchers, talking about the importance of the arts in their communities, that’s what got people really comfortable with this.”

Some opposition emerged from the legal community. A representative from the Colorado Bar Association testified against the bill on the grounds that most of what the A-Corp does is already possible through a custom-drafted LLC operating agreement. It’s a fair point, and one that Strickler acknowledges. His rebuttal: “To say you shouldn’t be allowed to build this because LLCs exist is like saying because a sedan can pull a trailer, you shouldn’t be allowed to make a pickup truck.” The A-Corp is making existing protections accessible to artists who can’t afford the lawyers required to build them from scratch.

For advocates pushing A-Corp legislation in other states, the Colorado example is useful: lead with community benefits and economic growth, build bipartisan sponsorship early, and be prepared to explain why a simple, plug and play process matters.

Opportunities to build economic power

As a legal form, the benefits of an A-Corp will mostly accrue to the artists who decide to form them. And that’s a big deal. But there’s also a larger vision here, one in which many small things ladder up into a much bigger whole.

For example, Strickler is very excited about the possibility of bringing many A-Corps together to access group rate health insurance, and is already speaking with insurance providers in Colorado about the opportunity. While A-Corps don’t solve the challenge that large-group health insurance is tied to W-2 employment in this country, they could provide a useful model and test case for new portable benefits structures, and help spur innovation in this area.

A-Corps might also help unlock opportunities to tie new benefits and protections directly to creative workers more broadly. Strickler, for example, imagines a parallel initiative around a state-based Artist Identification Number. This simple registration process through which artists and creative workers could obtain an official ID would make them legible in government systems. A number like this would make it much easier to capture data on creative workers This is a perennial problem for government when trying to determine policy. It would allow legislators to design support programs and benefits specifically for people who hold one. Imagine tax breaks for landlords who rent to artists, protections for arts districts, or even basic income for artists.

Finally, A-Corps have the potential to fundamentally shift the economics that underpin creative production in this country, moving us away from extractive structures where artists forgo long-term economic benefits and creative control in exchange for investment and access to audiences. In a world where creative production is housed within A-Corps, artists build and retain the economic power they need to sustain themselves and their creative practices over the long term.

Note: This entry was changed on June 14th to represent that the bill that it addresses was signed into law.

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What Are We Reading and Viewing?

• The Pope’s encyclical on Artificial Intelligence: Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

• This piece from the Economic Policy Institute shows how the affordability crisis is driven more by slow income growth (and income inequality) than rising prices - a good argument to build Living Wage for All in every affordability agenda!

• This article in NPQ argues that community based organizations are essential democratic infrastructure.

• The most recent research on artists receiving guaranteed income emphasizes “the intrinsic value of artistic labor over monetary incentives, especially nonlabor income.”

Advocacy and Policy Happenings

• Massachusetts just recognized the nation’s first rideshare drivers union

• Enrollment in ACA marketplace plans is plummeting due to the expiration of federal subsidies (and increased costs), while health insurance companies are trying to direct the blame away from themselves

• Federal cuts to SNAP (food assistance) forces San Antonio to cut free lunch for school kids

• The French Senate just passed the most artist-friendly AI legislation yet, which puts the burden of proof on AI companies to prove that they didn’t steal work to train AI models. Meanwhile, the GUARD Act, which protects kids from the harmful impact of AI chatbots passed out of committee in the Senate with bipartisan support.

• Hawaii just passed a law intended to undo the power of corporations in elections that was formalized through Citizens United.

Photo by Kelcie Herald

Our current model of culture and arts funding, which depends on advocacy to win allocations from national, state, and local agencies, is broken. Discretionary funding is just that: discretionary. Shifts in the political winds can be devastating, as when the Trump Administration cut $27 million in approved NEA grants and proposed to eliminate the agency altogether, or when the New Hampshire legislature attempted to zero out its entire arts budget. And even when advocacy succeeds, public funds rarely reach individual artists.

Tying arts and cultural budgets to fiscal and political cycles breeds instability that is felt acutely by nonprofits and the artists they employ. Policymakers should instead establish dedicated, recurring revenue streams for arts and culture, designed from the outset to include artists and cultural workers.

Dedicated tax revenues provide the certainty we need

This idea isn’t new. Twenty seven state arts agencies receive appropriations derived from sources other than the general fund, including hotel/motel, sales, entertainment, and conservation taxes, as well as lottery funds, gaming funds, and interest from statewide cultural endowments. These earmarked funds (where revenues are set aside for a specific purpose) can provide predictable funds year after year that aren’t subject to governmental budget whims. They are limited to a specific geography, which could be at the city, county, state or regional levels, and collected via a variety of mechanisms.

Property and Income Taxes

Property taxes are one of several tools governments can use to dedicate public revenue for arts and culture, though they are not common. Property tax increases are often politically unpopular, and can be difficult to get passed, though some communities have managed to do so. For example, St. Louis uses a property tax to support the St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis Zoo, and Museum of Science and Natural History. Voters later approved adding the Missouri Botanical Garden and Missouri History Museum to the district.

Other communities tax residents based on their income. Portland, Oregon implemented the Arts Education and Access Tax in 2012, which is a $35 tax on Portlanders who earn over $1,000 per year. Most of the funds go to public school arts education programs and arts and cultural non-profits. This year, the city is trying to increase the annual rate to $50 for individuals and $100 for joint filers. Low-income filers earning less than $20,000/year are exempt.

Sales Taxes

Sales taxes, which can be levied on any good, have emerged as a more politically viable path to dedicated arts and culture funding. Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) learned this lesson after failing to pass a property tax levy, and then winning a cigarette tax that finances a $158 million arts and culture fund.

The oldest and most celebrated model is Denver’s Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, created in 1988. Built around a 0.1% sales tax, it now funds nearly 300 qualifying organizations across three tiers and has generated over $1 billion since its founding — the second-largest cultural funding mechanism in the country. Denver’s success became a template: Salt Lake County’s Zoo, Arts & Parks tax and King County, Washington’s “Doors Open” program both adopted the same rate, and similar frameworks have spread through states like Minnesota and Washington, where advocacy efforts eventually moved state legislatures to create formal cultural access programs.

At the municipal level, Columbus, Ohio’s ticket fee is a 5% charge on events at larger venues, and channels revenue into two dedicated funds administered through the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Because contributions scale with attendance, Columbus describes it as a “user-funded” model: those who consume the most arts contribute the most back. St. Paul, Minnesota has the STAR Program which uses a half-cent sales tax to provide grants for neighborhood improvements (Neighborhood STAR) and cultural projects (Cultural STAR). And Manitou Springs, Colorado went even further when voters passed a 0.03% sales tax on all purchases to fund arts, cultural, and heritage projects, which is expected to bring in around $500,000 every year, with two-thirds earmarked for facility improvements and a third for small grants. Salt Lake City, Utah’s Zoo, Arts & Parks (ZAP) tax imposes a 0.1% sales tax on retail sales, services, and restaurant purchases. Meanwhile, Inspire Washington won the right for cities and counties across Washington State to establish a maximum 0.1% sales or property tax to fund local arts, science, and heritage programs.

At the county level, Allegheny Regional Asset District in Pittsburgh collects a 1% county sales tax and redistributes the funds through a competitive grant process to civic, cultural, and recreational entities, libraries, parks, and sports facilities.

At the state level, Minnesota’s 2008 Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment, a 25-year constitutional measure, increased the state sales tax by three-eighths of one percent and distributed the additional revenue across four funds, with 19.75% dedicated to arts and cultural heritage. By tying arts funding to environmental and civic priorities, Minnesota made the case that culture belongs alongside clean water and public parks as a shared public good.

Lottery Taxes

Eight states have mechanisms where lottery and gaming revenues account for state arts agency funding. Iowa and Maryland offer the most direct models: Iowa splits its gaming tax revenue evenly between operational support grants and community cultural grants, while Maryland directs a portion of its admissions and amusement tax explicitly to the Maryland State Arts Council.

Colorado and Kansas take a broader economic development approach, routing gaming revenues into larger funds from which arts agencies receive a share. Massachusetts created a unique “gaming mitigation” program, using 2% of gross gaming revenue to protect nonprofit and municipal performing arts centers from the competitive threat posed by expanded gambling. Oregon relies on lottery bonds rather than ongoing tax revenue, funding Oregon Arts Commission projects on a biennial basis.

West Virginia and Wisconsin round out the group, with West Virginia routing lottery funds through an arts and tourism debt service fund, and Wisconsin drawing on tribal gaming compact revenues; a model rooted in agreements with sovereign tribal nations under federal law.

Hotel and Tourism Taxes

Hotel and tourism taxes have become one of the most common mechanisms for directing visitor spending toward arts and culture. The logic is that tourists benefit from cultural amenities, so their dollars should help sustain them.

Columbus, Ohio has one of the longest-running hotel tax-to-art programs in the country, launched in 1978. The city’s 5.1% hotel tax has provided revenue to arts and culture since 2019, though that arrangement is now under review. A recent report recommends reallocating funds away from the Greater Columbus Arts Council (GCAC) — which had received 29% — and directing 72% of funds (up from 43%) to Experience Columbus, the local destination marketing organization, on the grounds that tourism promotion drives broader economic returns. To offset the reduction to GCAC, the report recommends instituting a cigarette tax and raising the city’s ticket tax from 5% to 8% for events exceeding 750 attendees.

San Francisco offers one of the most celebrated models. In 2018, 74% of voters approved Proposition E, dedicating 1.5%of the city’s 14% hotel tax to arts and cultural programming. The program is widely regarded as an international model for public cultural support.

Houston has a similarly direct pipeline: by state law, 19.3 cents of every dollar collected from the city’s Hotel Occupancy Tax must fund the city arts program, with 74.5% of that amount distributed as competitive grants to artists and arts organizations. San Diego takes a more discretionary approach, using a 10.5% Transient Occupancy Tax with a portion directed to arts at the city council’s discretion. In 2012 the council approved a “Penny for the Arts” plan, though the allocation can shift with changes in political priorities.

Miami operates a more layered system. Twenty percent of Tourist Development Room tax revenues fund cultural grants, and a separate Convention Development Tax directs 66% of its funds to tourist facilities, cultural centers, neighborhood cultural institutions, and educational organizations.

New Jersey also has a state occupancy fee imposing a rate of 5% on charges for hotel and motel rooms. Two percent of these funds go to the NJ Cultural Trust which uses a dedicated portion of this tax to fund a 1:1 match program, leveraging private donations greater than $100,000 to the endowments of cultural nonprofits. And outside of the U.S., Scotland is set to launch (in July 2026) the UK’s first Visitor Levy - a tourism tax, generating sustainable funding for culture, heritage, infrastructure, and community wellbeing while promoting responsible tourism.

Beyond hotel taxes, some states have found creative ways to capture revenue from the entertainment economy. Missouri taxes non-resident entertainers and athletes. Known as the “jock tax,” it requires venues to withhold 2% of compensation for any performer paid more than $300 before a live audience, from musicians and comedians to dancers and their entourages. Those funds flow to cultural programs across the state, including arts, humanities, libraries, and public television.

What Makes These Models Work?

The most durable models tend to share a few traits: they create a dedicated, automatic funding stream that is not subject to annual budget battles, they tie arts funding to something the public already values (tourism, construction, everyday commerce), and they distribute funds across tiers so both large institutions and small community organizations benefit.

They are also built for the long haul. Successful policy should explicitly state that funds must supplement and not supplant existing budgets. Program design matters just as much. Laura Zabel, Executive Director of Springboard for the Arts, cautions that narrow definitions and rigid program design “puts the cultural ecosystem in a gatekeeping position of deciding who is and is not a cultural organization, from a values perspective.” Clear, specific program design can preempt litigation and sidestep ongoing disputes about where arts and culture begin and end. Advocating for local administration and administrative cost recovery, while remaining attuned to place, is equally important. A hotel tax carries very different implications for New York City than it does for a small town in upstate New York.

Anticipating unintended consequences and carefully analyzing the tax burden—who is actually paying, and how much—should be part of the design process from the start.

Zabel also points to the potential of cross-sectoral coalitions working toward shared goals: “One of the main values of the [Minnesota] Legacy Amendment was symbolic. Arts and cultural heritage, clean water and climate, historic preservation and public media were presented together as key components of quality of life. It is a strong place for arts and culture to be in. Maybe you can build a coalition instead of a go it alone approach.”

In the end, political will is the prerequisite and it tends to materialize when the tax falls on entities that can absorb it, whether large corporations or, in the case of hotel taxes, visitors rather than residents. France has been a leading example of this approach, drawing revenue from major platforms to reinvest in domestic creative industries. The country recently established a 1.2% levy on large music streaming services to support the French music industry, alongside a 2% tax on video streaming that funds French film and audiovisual content. Canada has pursued a similar strategy with a 5% streaming tax directed toward local creators and French-language content.

Do These Funds Trickle Down to Artists?

Sometimes, but not consistently. Most arts tax models raise money intelligently but then lose it in institutional plumbing before it reaches artists. The pattern across almost all these models is the same: public money goes to government arts agencies or councils which go to nonprofit organizations and these funds are (sometimes) regranted to or provide employment to individual artists. Each step involves gatekeeping, application processes, and overhead.

In San Francisco, the funds get closer to artists, but still flows through institutions first. Their hotel tax provides $6.4 million to fund the Cultural Equity Endowment, which supports small to mid-sized organizations and individual artists. The SF Arts Commission, which administers the program, has explicitly carved out a lane for individuals. Themed around “Keeping Artists in San Francisco,” they offer grants up to $50,000 to individual artists and an Artistic Legacy Grant providing up to $100,000 over two years to artists with deep community roots. This is the most direct of the tax models but still requires artists to apply through a competitive grant process.

To address this, any arts tax should include mechanisms that ensure funds reach artists themselves. For example, policymakers could require that a minimum amount or portion of revenues go to individual artists. If regranting must be the mechanism for distributing funds, that could occur through peer-panel regranting, with regranting pools judged by fellow artists. Grant tiers could also be tied to career phases, not project proposals. Policymakers should leverage local and regional arts councils and arts service organizations which are often deeply embedded in their communities and have proven their effectiveness in distributing pandemic relief funds.

Perhaps most ideal, policymakers should look beyond grant programs, and consider using these taxes to create a portable benefits fund or guaranteed income fund for artists and arts workers like the one that Ireland has secured or has been piloted by Springboard for the Arts, Creatives Rebuild New York, IndieSpace, Yerba Buena, and others. This could even be expanded to support freelance and gig workers more broadly.

Dedicated Public Support for a Public Good

Ultimately, the arts and culture sector needs dedicated revenue streams that don’t rely on the discretionary whims of politicians. Dedicated taxes can provide an important tool achieving that goal. But it’s not just about getting more money into the system, it’s about distributing the funds more equitably and in support of individual artists. We need a sustainable path that will deliver long-term benefits to our creative workers, communities, and culture.

What We’re Reading and Watching

• Brand new report on unionization among dance workers

• How accessible is guaranteed income for artists with disabilities? Follow Ireland’s story.

• A “shrewd move” by Taylor Swift “guaranteed a better deal for thousands of more artists” and offers evidence that contracts establish precedent.

• The Oscars banned AI to protect human actors.

• How do we make folks whole who lose jobs from AI? Ideas are flying around including AI dividends and negative income taxes. Is the debate moving away from guaranteed income as a solution?

• The Obamacare enrollment decline due to the expiration of tax subsidies is real.

Advocacy & Policy Happenings

• Speaking of discretionary funding fights, sign this petition urging Congress to maintain FY 2026 funding levels for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in FY 2027. It also calls for clear appropriations of language ensuring funds are used as intended according to statute and not redirected elsewhere.

• The Center for Cultural Innovation released four sets of policy trackers for these important and urgent topics: Portable and Universal Benefits (Sheet, Dashboard); Income Supports (Sheet, Dashboard; Community Ownership (Sheet; Dashboard); and Artists, Tech and AI (Sheet, Dashboard)

• The US Department of Arts and Culture just launched a new campaign – No ICE at the World Cup. You can get involved here!

• New guaranteed income for artists research article.

• Nebraska just became the first state to implement Medicaid work requirements

• The latest Chicago Arts census is out, providing useful new data for Chicago arts advocates!

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Live Nation and its subsidiary Ticketmaster were just found guilty of operating as an illegal monopoly. Many advocates hailed the verdict as a huge win for fans, independent venues, and artists.

While most of the media coverage focused on the harm to fans (between 2019 and 2024, average ticket price of the highest grossing artists on tour has increased by almost 44%, from $95 to about $137), we couldn’t help but wonder about the artists themselves. Is the verdict likely to help them?

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What happened?

Live Nation is the country’s dominant concert promoter. They represent artists, stage tours, book acts, and run venues nationwide (among many other things!). In 2010, they acquired Ticketmaster, the dominant ticket sales platform with exclusive contracts at hundreds of venues.

Both companies had long been criticized for abusing their market power (remember when Pearl Jam fought Ticketmaster in the mid-90s?), so the merger was unpopular. Even so, the Obama Department of Justice allowed it with a consent decree meant to prevent anti-competitive behavior, but it didn’t work.

Live Nation violated the consent decree repeatedly, and in 2024, the Biden Department of Justice sued both companies for operating as an illegal monopoly. Forty states–red and blue–joined the case. Nothing unites the country like righteous fury over Taylor Swift tickets!

The trial began on March 2nd in Manhattan. A week in, the Trump Department of Justice surprised everyone announcing a settlement: Live Nation would be required to provide up to $230 million instate damages, divest from 13 amphitheater booking agreements, cap its service fees at 15%, and extend its consent decree by eight years.

Critics have described the settlement as little more than a slap on the wrist, though one provision requires LiveNation to provide artists with their own ticketing data, which the National Independent Talent Organization argues “levels the playing field and gives artists real agency in building their careers.” So some good news there.

Most states refused to sign on and continued the trial without the federal Department of Justice. That strategy really paid off. On April 15th, the federal jury found Live Nation & Ticketmaster guilty of illegal monopoly behavior on all counts.

Specifically, the jury found that Ticketmaster unlawfully maintained its monopoly over ticket sales, Live Nation did the same with amphitheaters, and Live Nation illegally forced artists to use its promotion services at venues it controls. A big loss for both companies.

That’s great news! Isn’t it?

Yes, the guilty verdict is excellent news, because it confirms that monopolies harm not just consumers, but also artists, independent venues, and the competitors across Live Nation’s business lines.

That said, the outcome isn’t settled yet. The jury found the company guilty, but the judge still has to determine the remedy (punishment). State Attorneys General will present their preferred remedies, Live Nation will respond, and the judge will decide with a lot of discretion. Options include breaking up the company, requiring them to pay damages, and mandating divestitures or practice changes.

Whatever the judge decides, Live Nation will almost certainly appeal the decision, so we can’t expect major changes soon. The judge is also reviewing the settlement agreement between Live Nation and the Department of Justice to determine whether it serves the public interest. Several Democratic Senators already urged him to reject it. The exact outcome is uncertain, but there will likely be opportunities to influence it, from weighing in with state AG offices to submitting public comment on the settlement.

How will this affect artists?

That’s also not clear. Anti-trust law has traditionally focused on harm to consumers, but artist advocates have been working tirelessly to broaden that lens, with some real success.

Groups like Future of Music Coalition, Artists Rights Alliance, Music Workers Alliance, American Association of Independent Music, and the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (among others!) have pushed for an approach that considers workers and other stakeholders, not just consumers. Alongside allies at the American Economic Liberties Project, who brought all of these arguments together into a roadmap for the case, they submitted public comments, congressional testimony, and met with the Department of Justice to keep artists in the conversation.

This matters because the current situation isn’t working for artists. Touring and merch sales make up the bulk of many artists’ revenue, while income from streaming and record sales barely moves the needle. But touring is increasingly unworkable too.

Jenny Toomey of Tsunami, Simple Machines, and longtime musicians’ advocate describes this, “In 2025 Tsunami put out a Grammy-nominated box set with Numero Group and did our first national tour in 25 years. We had a lot of success. Incredible reviews, we were number one in Billboard over Taylor Swift. The New York Times named it one of the top 12 box sets, and we even sold out some shows around the country. But I saw firsthand that what was easy to do 25 years ago is now unsustainable. It was an unquestionable success and we barely broke even. Unless we did a lot better financially, there’s no way music would sustain us. So I wonder how young kids starting out manage?”

Jenny isn’t alone. NPR connected artists’ struggles on the road to rising costs and corporate consolidation, noting that Live Nation controls so much of the market, independent musicians have fewer choices of venues, promoters, and pay rates.

So yes, breaking up Live Nation and Ticketmaster could help, but only if it goes far enough. Even without Ticketmaster, Live Nation still controls artist management, concert promotion, venue ownership and operation, brand partnerships, and festival production. Simply separating Ticketmaster doesn’t resolve the deeper problem: when one company manages the artist, promotes the tour, owns the venue, and books the festival, it’s sitting on both sides of every negotiation.

As Northwestern law professor Peter DiCola observes, “a lot of people are hoping that they break them up and take Ticketmaster away. I think that’s fair and I can root for that too. But what I also want is for the artist management not to be integrated in the venue, and for the tour promotion not to be integrated into venue ownership. I think those should have to be separate markets, that there should be arm’s length negotiations and real competition.”

That’s why artist advocates have argued for structural separation of all Live Nation’s business lines, including ticketing, venues, promotion and artist management.

Is the trial our only chance to improve the market for artists?

Not at all. Maine is pointing the way on two fronts. First, the Maine Music Alliance successfully fought Live Nation’s attempt to build a large venue in downtown Portland — which would have threatened the city’s thriving independent music scene. Just last night, the Portland City Council voted to block the project.

Maine is also leading on ticketing reform. In June 2025, it passed the strongest ticketing reform law in the nation (S.P. 403/L.D. 913), imposing a 10% cap on resale prices, banning speculative ticket listings, requiring upfront free disclosure, and adding new protections against counterfeit tickets. Maryland, Minnesota, and Michigan have also passed ticketing reform laws, and New York, California, and others are considering resale price caps this session.

At the federal level, the TICKET Act, passed the House in 2025 but hasn’t cleared the Senate. The Fix the Tix coalition (largely made up of independent venue and artist advocates) argue that as written, the bill does little to address the problems in the market. The Fix the Tix coalition is pushing for legislation to include more meaningful reforms: fee transparency, a complete ban on speculative ticketing (when brokers list tickets for sale on secondary markets—like StubHub, SeatGeek, or Vivid Seats—that they do not yet own or possess), and a 10% cap on resale prices. Right now, the states look like the best path forward.

Do these ticketing reform bills help artists?

They’re primarily consumer protection bills, but the benefits to artists are real, even if their effects are more downstream.

More affordable tickets may mean fans attend more shows and spread their spending across more artists. Bans on speculative ticketing and bots can rebuild trust between artists and fans. And requiring all fees to be shown upfront promotes competition not just on ticket prices, but on the fees themselves — which currently inflate profits for secondary sellers, not artists.

Ultimately, the interests of artists and fans are aligned. Kevin Erickson, the head of Future of Music Coalition, explains, “Strong rules of the road can reorient the character of marketplace competition, away from extractive practices, and toward firms competing to better serve diverse artists and audiences – towards firms competing to put on successful events – that gives artists more choices, autonomy, and leverage that we currently lack.” To be sure, extremely popular artists could use that leverage to charge more, but they’d have to do so in a market where fans would know exactly who to blame for higher prices.

What else can we do?

Anti-trust enforcement and ticketing reform efforts are essential, but there’s more to address. Spotify takes home 30% of all recorded music revenue, very little of which reaches artists. Many stakeholders are considering strategies to increase income for artists from the various channels fans use to listen to it.

Chappell Roan made headlines suggesting in her now-famous Grammys speech that record labels should provide artists’ a living wage and health insurance (apparently some do). Jenny Toomey and Peter DiCola went further, suggesting platforms like Spotify should bear responsibility as well.

Right now, the music industry simply isn’t working for the vast majority of musicians. While there is no silver bullet, increasing artists’ economic power and making sure they get paid a living wage by the companies that profit off their work is a good place to start.

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What We’re Reading and Watching

• Wondering why artists are so great in government settings? Psychology Today’s article frames artists as community problem finders with research by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi reminding us that, “Problem finding may well be at the origin of the creative process.”

• Can’t wait to see this new movie by Joel Alfonzo Vargas that focuses on the intense pressure of “mad bills to pay.”

• A new NEA report shows participation in the arts increases civic engagement!

• This podcast series, Sounds of Justice, explores music as a powerful vehicle for social justice.

• Subvert is a new music platform – framed as an alternative to Bandcamp – that’s owned and controlled by its community.

• Excited to check out this new substack on Guaranteed Income.

Advocacy & Policy Happenings

• Congress just introduced a new Living Wage for All bill, which would raise the minimum wage to $25/hour and eliminate the subminimum wage for tipped, disabled, and incarcerated workers.

• Lots of opportunities to join May Day Strong actions across the country!

• Take action to hold Live Nation accountable and thank your attorney general for doing the right thing on behalf of fans and independent stages in your state.

• Here’s a roundup of state arts legislation from NASAA.

• The Millionaires Tax in Washington State will expand the Working Families Tax Credit for more than a million people and reach nearly half the kids in the state.

• The Trump Administration is working hard to reduce the number of people able to access the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and its working.

• Colorado state Senator Marc Catlin supports the A-Corp, a new tax structure for artists.

Photo by Sara Cottle

Do cultural districts serve artists and communities, or displace them? New legislation advancing in Illinois, California, and Massachusetts offer promising models to ensure the benefits of these reforms go to the people who make and preserve culture, not just the developers who aim to profit from them.

What are cultural districts?

According to the National Association of State Arts Agencies (NASAA), a cultural district is a state-designated geographic area that utilizes cultural resources to encourage economic development and cultivate synergies between the arts and other businesses.” NASAA’s most recent policy brief identified 19 states with formalized programs sustaining more than 400 cultural districts nationwide. More cultural districts exist at the county and municipal level as well. They’re run by everyone from tourism departments to arts agencies, and they offer a mix of tax incentives, grants, and technical assistance.

According to research published in Profectus magazine, five states (Maryland, Iowa, Louisiana, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Texas) have the most robust policies, offering tangible financial perks: exemptions from admissions taxes, property tax credits, and income tax deductions for artists. California recently added 10 new cultural districts — bringing its total to 24 — each receiving five years of official designation, $10,000 in funding, and marketing support.

New York just enacted its first cultural district law, taking a notably different approach: rather than a broad statewide program, it designates specific communities. East Harlem (”El Barrio”) was named first, followed by bills for the Harlem Renaissance Cultural District, Little Yemen in the Bronx, and Little Panama in Brooklyn. Each designation requires its own legislative coalition, which is a slower process, but it gives communities more explicit and durable legal recognition. On the flip side, communities without strong political champions remain invisible, while those with effective advocates get written into law.

Why do cultural districts exist?

The logic behind cultural districts is both social and economic, stabilizing the arts businesses already rooted in a neighborhood while signaling to the outside world that a place is worth visiting, investing in, and preserving.

Economic growth. Research across Louisiana, Maryland, Iowa, New Mexico, and Texas found that following designation, employment in core arts and cultural establishments rose roughly two to four percent relative to comparable areas without designation — gains concentrated in existing businesses, not new openings. Cultural districts, in other words, help sustain what’s already there more than they seed what’s new. Maryland alone logged $149.5 million in state GDP, $8.1 million in tax revenues, and 1,185 jobs in a single fiscal year. Property values can also increase. In Lafayette, Louisiana, home values rose about seven percent after designation — a double-edged result, as we’ll get to.

Tourism and visibility. State designation puts a neighborhood on the map, attracting visitors and entrepreneurs and helping cities grow their cultural sector and expand their tax base.

Community and social cohesion. At their best, cultural districts do something harder to quantify: they formally recognize what makes a place distinct. They create shared spaces that foster pride, celebrate local history, and strengthen community resilience, functioning as keepers of neighborhood narrative and catalysts of social cohesion.

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All roses?

Here’s the central irony of cultural districts: they often displace the very artists and communities who made an area worth designating.

Rising property values aren’t just a sign of success — they’re frequently the beginning of the end for the people who created the culture in the first place. Baltimore’s Mount Vernon Cultural District fueled gentrification that pushed out low-income renters. Chicago’s cultural planning benefited more affluent, white residents at the expense of underserved communities. Economic benefits tend to concentrate downtown, leaving outlying neighborhoods — often poorer — to absorb the spillover costs without the gains.

And when original residents and business owners are priced out, the authentic cultural identity that justified the district disappears too. What’s left is often a performance of culture rather than the real thing.

Do they work for artists?

Cultural districts work for artists when they:

• Create real paid work with public art commissions, opportunities for teaching, festivals, and performances, curatorial and design control, local residencies and vendor opportunities. Artists need income, not exposure.

• Provide affordable space for rehearsal, studios, fabrication, storage, performance and exhibition venues, and housing. If there is no plan for space, cultural district designation can be just a countdown clock to displacement.

• Help artists build audiences and local infrastructure. Artists often benefit from clustering with nearby peers, small venues, curators and presenters, technicians, cafes and gathering spots, nonprofit partners, and foot traffic from residents and visitors. This ecosystem can reduce isolation and increase collaboration.

• Give artists political standing, including zoning accommodations, capital dollars, preservation of historical spaces, small business protections, arts infused public planning, and recognition as workers and economic contributors. They can be a policy tool and not just a neighborhood identity.

Cultural districts fail artists when:

• Artists are used as place branding. Artists move into cheap space, the area gains authenticity and buzz, the city or developers market it as creative, rents rise, and then artists are displaced. Artists’ incomes do not increase as drastically as land values.

• Institutions benefit more than working artists. Unpaid work, exposure, community engagement, and occasional and short-term gigs don’t pay the bills or help artists build long-term financial security.

• Culture is defined too narrowly. Social practice artists, folk artists, culture-bearers, nightlife artists, Black, immigrant and working class cultural productions and informal cultural economies can all get overlooked. This matters because many of the artists who actually make neighborhoods culturally alive are not always the ones most legible to planning departments.

As Gonzalo Casals of the Cultural and Arts Policy Institute has said: “All neighborhoods are cultural districts.” The folks at Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts (NOCD) take this further, arguing that culture already exists in a place and should be recognized and protected, not manufactured from scratch.

Naturally occurring cultural districts can support artists by valuing existing cultural producers, supporting legacy spaces and local networks, helping investors understand the attributes of the community, and including artists and culture bearers, not just institutions..

Districts paired with land trusts, master leases, subsidized artist live/work space, and long term affordability covenants can be helpful, along with districts tied to small businesses where maker and designer support can be included. And finally, districts should include artists in the planning process, not just in the programming, but in the decisions about budget, land use, public space design, and budgets are all key. Artists need a seat at the decision making table.

Innovative cultural district legislation worth watching

The most important recent examples share a common feature: they put real investments and protections behind the cultural district designation, not just a name on a sign.

Illinois SB1833 explicitly targets communities at risk of gentrification. Administered through the Office of Economic Equity and Empowerment, it prioritizes areas with documented economic disinvestment and requires an explicit equity and food justice framework — criteria almost unheard of in comparable legislation.

California AB 812 (2023) links cultural districts to affordable housing: any new low-income housing built inside a designated district must reserve at least 10% for artists and culture bearers. San Francisco’s Artist Space Trust is implementing this on the ground, acquiring properties inside cultural districts and permanently removing them from the speculative market.

San Francisco’s CHHESS Report requirement mandates that each district co-develop cultural preservation, housing stability, and economic strategy in a single binding document — turning cultural districts from honorary designations into active governance instruments. Proposition E (passed in 2018 with 75% of the vote) backs this up with $3 million annually from the city’s Hotel Tax — a self-reinforcing funding loop where tourism revenue funds cultural preservation.

San Francisco’s Transgender District — the first legally recognized trans district in the world — was founded in 2017 by three Black trans women and covers six blocks of the Tenderloin. Its programs span tenant protections, workforce development, arts, cultural heritage conservation, and land use planning. It has been catalytic in spurring identity-based cultural districts across the Bay Area.

Massachusetts has built arguably the most comprehensive statewide system: 58 designated districts, $810,000 in FY2024 grants, and a 2023 Urbanism Award from the New England Chapter of the Congress for New Urbanism — recognition from city planners, not just arts advocates.

Who is a cultural district actually for?

The difference between a cultural district that serves artists and one that displaces them isn’t the designation — it’s the design. Before celebrating a new cultural district designation, we should ask ourselves:

• How are artists getting paid?

• How are artists staying?

• Who controls the district? Who decides?

• Who counts as culture?

• What happens when land values rise? Who benefits?

Mandatory housing set-asides, dedicated tax streams, anti-displacement eligibility criteria, and genuine artist inclusion in planning decisions are what separate a policy tool from a marketing campaign. Success depends heavily on intentional design, appropriate incentives, and plans for sustainability that prioritizes affordability, equity, and genuine community engagement over purely economic development goals.

The question was never whether a neighborhood has culture worth protecting, it’s whether the people who made it will still be there to see it recognized.

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What We’re Reading and Watching

• It wasn’t so long ago that the government supported art as essential to human flourishing and a healthy democracy, and provided a great model of public policies that treat creative workers as essential workers.

• Otis is out with two new reports worth reading, their 2025 Report on the Creative Economy, as well as their analysis of AI’s impact on the creative economy in California. Spoiler alert: they find AI hasn’t destroyed jobs, but changed them.

• Josh Kline published a critique and analysis of the conditions undermining art and artists in New York City, and Aruna D’Souza’s published this response.

• Demos just published a great new piece on care as essential public infrastructure.

• Here’s a helpful summary of the latest news on efforts to expand benefits and organizing rights to gig workers.

Advocacy & Policy Happenings

• Copyright Alliance is leading a new campaign against AI theft of creators’ intellectual property, releasing protest “Silent Albums” and “Empty Books” featuring prominent musicians and authors.

• Over 1,000 writers, actors, and directors released a letter on Monday opposing Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, outlining the harm it would cause for the industry.

• MusiCares is calling on music professionals to participate in its 2026 Wellness in Music Survey, an annual initiative considered the gold standard for understanding the health and well being of the music community. The survey is open through April 17, and responses are entirely anonymous.

• The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has proposed a rule that would expand work requirements and term limits in federal rental assistance programs, putting millions of families at risk of eviction and homelessness, hunger, and adverse health outcomes. CLASP is calling on organizations across the anti-poverty movement to submit a comment opposing this rule on regulations.gov no later than May 1, 2026 to oppose these attacks. We encourage advocates to use the template comments linked here, which are tailored for cash, housing, health, and nutrition advocates, as well as directly impacted tenants.

• West Virginia Governor Morrisey signed the state’s new portable benefits law, which allows companies to contribute to portable benefits accounts for independent workers without triggering misclassification liability.

• Efforts to eliminate the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers are under attack in Chicago, though the Mayor is standing strong.

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A couple of weeks ago, the Department of Labor proposed a new rule that would make it easier to classify some workers as independent contractors. Specifically, the new rule would narrow the factors used to determine if a worker is an employee or an independent contractor from six co-equal factors to two priority factors: 1) the nature and degree of control over the work and 2) their opportunity for profit or loss.

The media covered the announcement as a major roll-back of Biden-era regulations. And this is technically true. In 2024, the Biden Administration implemented a rule of their own that established the six co-equal factors to determine worker classification. So this new Trump Administration rule would undo that Biden-era regulation. And yet, the Biden rule just rolled back a 2021 rule implemented by the first Trump Administration, which was in turn rolling back Obama-era regulations.

We’ve been stuck in the same cycle for years, without delivering real economic security for gig workers. It’s time for a new strategy.

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Why does worker classification matter?

Classification is a big deal because most labor protections and benefits are tied to employment. So for example, the Department of Labor’s new proposed rule applies to three laws: the Fair Labor Standards Act (which grants minimum wage and overtime rights), the Family Medical Leave Act (which grants the right to take unpaid time off work to care for a family member), and the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (which grants protections for agricultural workers).

Only workers who are deemed “employees” under these laws benefit from their protections. Independent contractors aren’t covered.

These exclusions date all the way back to the New Deal, when Congress passed new labor laws that established the right to collectively bargain, minimum wage and overtime, the 40 hour workweek, as well as Social Security and Unemployment. Unfortunately, the system was never truly universal. Agricultural and domestic workers—occupations held primarily by Black workers—were excluded from New Deal protections in order to win Southern Dixiecrat votes. The self-employed were also excluded.

Today, many of these jobs are still disproportionately held by women and people of color. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 90% of domestic workers are women, and 51% are Black, Hispanic, or Asian American and Pacific Islander. Federal farm labor data shows that 63% of farm laborers are Hispanic—only 33% are White. These trends extend to self-employment; 96% of Black-owned businesses and 90% of women-owned businesses are businesses-of-one. And Black and immigrant workers are overrepresented in the industries where misclassification occurs today, such as construction, truck driving, and home care.

So yes, classification rules matter, because they are the gateway to a broader set of labor protections. Excluding workers from employment classification excludes them from the benefits we all deserve. And yet, we have poured significant resources into this misclassification fight, with little to show for it.

State classification fights have under delivered

When California passed AB5 in 2019, it marked a major victory for those seeking to expand employment rights via classification rules. AB5 implemented a very strict worker classification test (the ABC test) that would have reclassified many independent contractors as employees, granting them labor protections under the law.

But gig platform companies—Uber, Lyft, Doordash, and Instacart—spent $224 million to pass Prop 22, which classified their workers as independent contractors in exchange for a set of narrowly defined benefits, including health care stipends, minimum earnings guarantees, and occupational accident insurance. Recent studies show these benefits are extremely limited and lack meaningful enforcement mechanisms.

Meanwhile, concerns that the law would undermine independent creative work led lawmakers to pass a second law, AB2257, which excluded many creative industries from the rules altogether. Ultimately, AB5 failed to deliver expanded protections to many of the workers it hoped to support.

The broader litigation landscape tells a similar story. The largest misclassification settlements – GrubHub’s $24.75 million deal with 60,000 California delivery drivers, Lyft’s $27 million settlement, Uber’s earlier $100 million proposal – are all monetary only. They don’t reclassify any workers.

Ultimately, the mechanisms for fighting misclassification are individual and adversarial: a worker files a complaint, an agency investigates if it has capacity, a lawsuit proceeds if someone can afford an attorney. Even when these cases succeed, the settlement comes as a one-time check that may not cover the full statutory period, often excludes workers who’ve since moved on, and almost certainly won’t result in reclassification or new protections.

Winning a misclassification case doesn’t make a worker whole; it recovers a fraction of past losses while leaving the structural conditions that produced them entirely unchanged. If the goal is to actually get protections to the workers who need them, misclassification legislation and litigation can’t be the whole strategy.

Promising local models offer a path forward

Worker advocates are coming to the same conclusion, and experimenting with different strategies to expand labor protections to excluded workers.

Several jurisdictions, including New York City, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Washington State, and California have passed sector-based pay standards for app-based drivers, with others considering similar proposals. In New York City, Los Deliveristas Unidas succeeded in passing a first-of-its kind minimum wage law for app-based delivery workers.

These minimum wage laws are remarkable for a couple of reasons. First, they win labor protections for an entire sector through advocacy rather than collective bargaining, avoiding the need to negotiate employer-by-employer. That approach addresses one of the biggest barriers to organizing independent workers: they are not concentrated in a single workplace.

Second, these minimum wages are designed to reflect the real costs of self-employment. In Seattle, for example, the $28.19 hourly minimum incorporates not only the city’s $16.39 minimum wage for large employers, but also drivers’ vehicle expenses, health insurance, payroll taxes, and license fees. The same model could be adapted for other forms of independent work by accounting for occupation-specific expenses, such as materials for visual artists, equipment for filmmakers, or physical therapy for dancers, alongside the cost of social protections like health insurance and paid leave.

Finally, these laws offer a powerful enforcement mechanism that is implemented by city agencies. New York City recently announced a $5 million settlement with delivery companies for violations of its Minimum Pay Rate for delivery workers. Instead of having to go to court individually or organize a class action suit, workers can rely on the government to enforce their rights.

Seattle’s 2019 Domestic Worker Ordinance offers another model. The law extends minimum wage, rest and meal breaks, and civil rights protections to nannies, house cleaners, and home care workers, regardless of classification. In doing so, it sidesteps the employee-versus-contractor fight and delivers baseline protections to the workers who need them.

In 2021, the city began developing a portable paid time off benefit for domestic workers through a partnership between the Seattle Domestic Workers Standards Board (DWSB) and a coalition of domestic worker organizations, with worker leadership at the center of the design. The portable benefits effort is still in development, but the process points toward a model in which workers define the priorities that matter most to them.

Classification is a means to an end – but not the only means

In many ways, the gig and domestic worker advocates are stepping off the merry-go-round of classification rulemaking entirely. They are demanding protections for the workers they represent—regardless of classification—and they’re winning.

Advocates for independent creative workers can learn a lot from their efforts. According to a recent study of artists, 34% of artists are fully self-employed, 50% are self-employed in their primary job, and 11% juggled three or more jobs in the past year. Creative workers are disproportionately excluded from the labor protections we all need and deserve.

Yet unlike other sectors, much of the creative sector is legitimately organized around project-based work. By and large, independent creative workers are not misclassified. It doesn’t matter to them whether there are two or six factors in a classification test. They won’t qualify for minimum wage and overtime protections either way. But they sure could use a minimum income. And they sure could use the right to organize.

We have amazing efforts in our sector, such as W.A.G.E, which sets and enforces minimum wage standards for artists. How might we build on those efforts? How might we learn from the successes of worker advocates in other sectors and even win government-mandated minimum wages and social protections in creative industries? Could we address the broad precarity in our industry through local sectoral bargaining councils?

The possibilities are endless, but only if we stop fighting about the means, and start focusing on the ends.

What We’re Reading and Watching

• How should we count artists? This new piece by Joanna Woronkowicz and Doug Noonan explores the ways our reasons for counting artists shape the methodological choices we make.

• New AI Roadmap for Arts and Culture Organizations from the DeVos Institute

• Even after the Justice Department settled the case against LiveNation, the trial continues (led by the states). See the latest from the Fix theTix Coalition.

• New survey of people enrolled in health insurance through ACA marketplaces shows widespread anxiety about affordability, now that subsidies have expired.

• Just in time for tax day, a thoughtful analysis from the Roosevelt Institute on the various tax reform proposals coming out of Congress

Advocacy & Policy Happenings

• The Supreme Court just ruled internet service providers aren’t liable for bootlegged music

• Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) introduced the American Stories Act (S. 4058), which would authorize NEA and NEH to: “foster projects, productions, and workshops through film, radio, video, and similar media, for the purpose of broadening public understanding of civics and the United States Constitution

• Colorado lawmakers introduced new legislation – the Colorado Artists Company Act – establishing the A-Corp, a new entity designed specifically for artists.

• Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-NY), Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) introduced the Music In Our Schools Month Resolution to affirm the importance of music education and the Guarantee Access to Arts and Music Education Act of 2026 (GAAME Act) to improve access to music and the arts for disadvantaged and low-income students.

• May Day Strong is launching an art library for May Day organizers and attendees. They invite visual artists to submit graphic art that supports their efforts to build a pro-worker, pro-student, pro-immigrant, and pro-planet movement to take on the billionaires.

An Historic Step

On March 12, 2026, the State of Georgia passed an historic resolution connecting arts and health. While this resolution is a formal statement of opinion by the legislature and does not create binding law, it’s still an important tool to drive policy. House Resolution 1007 (HR 1007) made Georgia the first state to formally recognize the arts as a resource for mental health treatment. The Resolution was a bipartisan initiative and included cross sector partners from the arts, healthcare, and public health. It allows them to allocate funding for arts-based interventions to support health and well-being.

According to Dr. Jill Sonke, Director of Research Initiatives at University of Florida’s Center for the Arts in Medicine, “this particular resolution has a fair amount of specificity and is action-oriented and can serve as both commitment and intention.” HR 1007 states that policymakers “acknowledge the essential role of artists, arts organizations, art therapists, and arts for health initiatives in supporting recovery from trauma, addressing mental health concerns and conditions, building community resilience, and increasing public safety.” While this doesn’t guarantee an outcome, it allows the legislature to fund arts and health initiatives, dedicate new funding streams from other sectors, or mandate partnerships.

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The Context: Social and Arts Prescribing

The Georgia Resolution stems from a variety of relatively recent efforts connecting arts and health, which build on years of cross-sector collaboration. A seminal 2019 field scan, Creating Healthy Communities Through Cross Sector Collaboration, provided an overview of this connection in the context of creative placemaking. More recently, there has been a growing discussion about social prescribing, and its subset, arts prescribing.

Social prescribing connects people with non-clinical support and services within their communities. While it has been more commonly adopted in countries with government-funded national health services, it is now gaining ground in the US. The growing evidence base covers a range of activities, including arts, culture, social groups, nature-based activities, and volunteer opportunities.

At its core, social prescribing is a personalized, community-driven approach to care that addresses the social determinants of health by connecting individuals with non-clinical supports and services. It’s based on the idea that an individual’s health is directly related to their connection to the community in which they live, work, and grow.

Arts prescribing is a distinct and growing subset of social prescribing. In an arts prescription program, physicians, mental health clinicians, social workers, and other care providers can refer patients or clients to experiences like art and music classes, park or garden memberships, dance and writing workshops, or concerts, right alongside traditional referrals to medication and specialists. Massachusetts; Dallas, Texas; and Kansas City, Missouri are all leading the country’s arts prescribing movement.

Early US Programs and Evidence

In 2024, The Massachusetts Cultural Council teamed up with healthcare provider SocialRx (formerly ArtPharmacy) to offer art-based social prescribing after a three-year pilot garnered positive feedback. The program represents the nation’s first statewide arts prescription solution. Patients are connected to workshops, classes, gallery visits, and performances to bolster mental health, reduce isolation and loneliness, and address potentially chronic illness. Provided with 12 “doses” over a one year period, insurance companies cover the cost so that the experiences are free for patients. SocialRx aggregates the offerings and matches patients with their preferred programs. The data coming out of this work is positive - 70% of members experienced an improvement in their mental health, while arts organizations benefited from a new revenue stream.

Other states are following suit. Connecticut has its own program, and SocialRx reports working with California, Arizona, New York, Georgia, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and North Carolina as well. Tennessee has also built strong arts and health infrastructure — led primarily by the Tennessee Arts Commission (TAC) working with state health agencies — spanning arts, aging, disability, health, and hospital systems focusing on rural, aging, and Appalachian communities.

Insurance Innovation

Insurance companies are also experimenting. Blue Cross Blue Shield created a partnership in Newark, New Jersey with NJPAC and Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey - ArtsRx. It’s the first model with an insurance carrier as the key partner and allows its members and Rutgers University students to receive referrals for six months of free arts prescriptions across the City of Newark. Eligibility runs through Horizon’s existing “Neighbors in Health” program, which employs community health workers to assess members’ social determinants of health and connect them with local resources.

In Dallas, Texas, the Parks & Recreation Department, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Baylor Scott, & White Healthcare are collaborating on a case study to better understand how to do this work. And in Kansas City, Missouri, they’ve launched a five year ArtsKC pilot and are building the community and coalition infrastructure that typically precedes formal insurer engagement.

State Level Leadership and Medicaid Pilots

In 2019, Rhode Island was the first state to create a state level roadmap integrating arts and public health, led by the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and the Rhode Island Department of Health. While visible and well-documented, the policy, practice, and research recommendations did not lead to the comprehensive state-wide work that participants had hoped. RISCA has continued to support this area of work and it was a pioneer in engaging a health department in statewide arts strategy.

More recently, Medicaid has been covering traditional health practices in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oregon to support physical and mental health, including sweat lodges, music, therapy and dance. In California, the two-year pilot (October 2024 - December 2026) with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is partnering with Indian Health Service facilities, tribal facilities, and urban Indian organizations to cover practices that Indigenous health care practitioners have been struggling to get insurance to cover for years.

Where do artists fit?

First, as the arts develop stronger and more diversified funding streams through healthcare partnerships, the hope is that artists — those often delivering the arts prescriptions — will benefit. Ideally, this would lead to more stable, consistent, and increased pay. But that outcome is far from guaranteed. If insurance reimbursements flow primarily to organizations, will those funds ultimately reach the artists themselves? Policymakers should be asking this question now and considering legislation that addresses the long-standing precarity of artists’ livelihoods.

Second, many of the artists engaging in healing work do not have reliable access to healthcare or mental health support themselves. While 84 percent of artists report having health insurance, more than half (57 percent) report being somewhat or very worried about at least one marker of financial vulnerability—such as affording food, housing, utilities, or medical care—and 32 percent worry specifically about covering medical costs.

Finally, artists delivering this work may need new forms of training. Trauma-informed practice, teaching artistry, and building partnerships with healthcare providers are increasingly part of the role. As the field grows, it will be important to define clear expectations for artists and ensure they are compensated for the reskilling this work requires.

As arts prescribing expands, an important question remains: how can legislation, resolutions, and insurance programs better support the labor delivering these services? The healthcare system has historically relied on — and often undercompensated — the workers providing care. Without careful policy design, there is little reason to assume artists will be treated differently.

The field is at a tipping point. Early pilots show the concept works, insurers are starting to engage, and states are investing. The next challenge is scaling up and building a reimbursement system that makes arts prescribing a routine, sustainable part of American healthcare.

What We’re Reading, Viewing, and Listening to

• Making Care Work: Why Our Economy Should Put People First, a book by Nancy Folbre, was just released and we are excited to read it!

• New data report from Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, Measuring Early-Career Earnings for Arts & Design Grads: Evidence from SNAAP on Income Volatility, Advanced Degree Pursuit, & Long-Term Career Trajectories.

• How can artists support government and cross-sector work? These two articles - one at Next City and one at Urban Omnibus explore this idea more

• Can’t wait to go see this at the NY Historical Society tracing the impact of the largest legal organization for low-income individuals in the United States.

• Last night, the Academy’s new Oscar for Casting Director might recognize key labor in the industry.

• OpenAI’s Artist-in-Residence launches Phyzify.

• Clock It Podcast featuring Symone Sanders Townsend, Eugene Daniels, Tony Goldwyn, and Myles Frost talking about why artists need community.

• Video documentation of If You Hear Something, Free Something, a sound intervention system in NYC’s MTA with artist Chloë Bass.

Advocacy and Policy Happenings

• Virginia’s paid family leave legislation is now law

• The Justice Department settled its case against Ticketmaster/Live Nation, but many state attorneys general say the deal doesn’t do enough to protect artists, venues, and fans, so they will continue to pursue their lawsuits.

• Urban Institute has released this helpful safety net tracker.

• Wyoming and West Virginia passed bills allowing platforms to contribute to gig workers’ portable benefits accounts without changing their employment status.

• Connecticut Governor proposed new healthcare policies, including a public option and portable benefits accounts.

• This letter is promoting a new civic future and includes a lot of artists from across the country - read and sign on if it works for you! They are , “committed to a new civic future where people feel agency over their lives, where neighbors are connected through relationships of trust, and where communities have the power to shape their own futures.”

Last week, the Virginia legislature passed a suite of bills that would provide paid sick time (SB199/HB5) and paid family and medical leave (SB2/HB1207) to Virginia residents. While the bills still need to be reconciled, it’s all but certain that Governor Spanberger will sign them.

Meanwhile, Sen. Sanders and Rep. DeLauro just reintroduced the Healthy Families Act, a federal paid sick leave bill in Congress (S1664/HR3409), and the House held a hearing on paid family and medical leave last week.

Though they’re often conflated, “paid leave” encompasses two separate policies – paid sick time and paid family leave. Paid sick time ensures that workers can take paid time off from work when they or a family member is ill (typically taken in increments of hours or days). Paid family and medical leave is social insurance that allows workers to take a longer period of paid time off (typically weeks) to care for a child, a family member, or themselves.

While paid family leave is typically associated with welcoming a new child, only 25% of leave is taken for that reason. The rest are used for personal medical issues, to care for a sick or disabled family member, or to support military deployment.

Recent progress in Virginia is important and worthy of celebration, but let’s also pause to acknowledge that we shouldn’t have to work on this at all.

The U.S. is the only industrialized country that lacks a national paid family leave benefit. While we have the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), employees who qualify only receive 12 weeks of unpaid job-protected leave with continued access to employer-sponsored health insurance. It is job protection, not wage replacement. According to the Department of Labor, only 27% of workers have paid family leave, with low-wage workers and BIPOC workers even less likely to have coverage. Only 58% of low-wage, private sector workers have access to paid sick days.

Recent research on artists found only 8% of working artists have access to paid parental or family leave, just 23% have paid sick leave, and only 25% have paid holidays or vacation.

But while both federal and state paid leave proposals will help a lot of people access essential benefits, they still fail to include independent creative workers in meaningful ways.

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Independent creative workers are not covered by paid sick time laws

While the press releases for paid sick time laws tout benefits for all workers, in reality they only cover employees. These policies guarantee employees can earn paid sick time, which their employers are required to grant. For example, the Healthy Families Act allows workers to earn up to seven job-protected paid sick days each year (one hour of paid sick time for every 30 hours worked, up to 56 hours per year).

But these laws are silent on the self-employed.

Some might argue that paid sick time doesn’t make sense if you work for yourself. Not getting paid when you’re not working is simply a cost of doing business. Who’s going to pay you for not working? But on the other hand - don’t we all get sick? And doesn’t everyone need a way to protect their financial security when they do?

We had to wrestle with this problem during the pandemic, when lots of independent workers couldn’t work due to shutdowns or for fear of catching or spreading COVID. The crisis was especially acute in the arts, when theaters were shut down, concerts were canceled, and movie theaters were closed. Millions of independent creative workers were unable to work due to illness.

At that time, Congress passed a special paid time off benefit for independent workers and the self-employed. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) established the Self-Employed Tax Credit, which was extended in the American Rescue Plan (ARPA). This refundable tax credit covered paid sick time at 100% of average daily self-employment income, up to a maximum of $511/day ($5,111 total).

Not to get too much into the weeds of nerdy tax policy, but the fact that the benefit was structured as a refundable tax credit is important. Even self-employed workers who didn’t have tax liability (like lots of low-income arts workers) got cash payments to cover time that they were unable to work due to sickness.

New paid sick time laws at the state and federal levels should include a benefit, similar to the Self-Employed Tax Credit that expired in September 2021, to ensure independent creative workers have access to paid sick time.

Paid leave programs also disadvantage independent creative workers

To date, thirteen states plus Washington, D.C. have passed paid family and medical leave programs, many of which have been implemented. Virginia will become the fourteenth jurisdiction if/when its new bills become law.

Yet Virginia’s paid family leave program, like that of many other states, is much more costly for the self-employed than traditional employees. Contributions that fund an employee’s paid leave are split 50/50 between the employer and employee, but the self-employed must contribute one hundred percent to participate in the program.

In effect, the self-employed pay twice as much as traditional employees for the same benefit. This mirrors the program design in Washington D.C., Maryland, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, not to mention (in a topic for another post) our whole Social Security system. It’s worth calling out California separately, which requires the self-employed to contribute a whopping 9.78% of their income to participate in the state paid family leave program, compared to 1.10% of income for employees.

But there’s another (better!) way to structure these programs. Washington State also requires employers and employees to jointly fund the program. But they exempt small employers (including sole-proprietors) with fewer than ten employees from the requirement to contribute. So, the self-employed pay the same portion of their income into the fund as a traditional employee. Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, and Oregon have also designed their paid leave contribution schemes to treat independent workers equitably.

Federal lawmakers are also starting to recognize how important it is to establish parity for the self-employed when funding social insurance programs. The FAMILY Act (S2823/HR5390) was first introduced in Congress in 2013 to establish paid family and medical leave for all, and was structured around a 50/50 employer/employee payroll tax, requiring the self-employed to pay both halves. But due in part to advocacy by independent worker advocates, the most recent version of the bill (reintroduced by Sen. Gillibrand in September 2025) eliminated the payroll tax altogether, and included several other provisions designed to improve implementation for the self-employed.

This is meaningful and important progress, because if and when we finally DO establish a federal paid leave program, we won’t be replicating the same inequitable treatment of independent workers in its very structure.

Federal lawmakers could also help the self-employed by reinstating the Self-Employed Tax Credit created during the pandemic, which in addition to providing paid sick time (as mentioned above) also covered paid family leave at 67% of average daily self-employment income, up to a maximum of $200/day ($2,000 total).

How might we improve the programs we DO have?

Recent research from Molly Weston Williamson finds that in states that allow the self-employed to opt into their paid family and medical leave programs, only about 142,000 self-employed people out of 7.3 million nonemployer small businesses have enrolled—a mere 1.93%. Participation rates remain consistently low, ranging from just 0.22% in California to 6.25% in New York.

Why aren’t the self-employed enrolling in these programs? Certainly, some may find it too expensive, especially in states with higher contribution requirements. But in other cases, program design may prevent independent creative workers from accessing these programs when they need them. New York, for example, requires the self-employed to enroll in the program within 26 weeks of becoming self-employed, or wait two years prior to claiming any benefits. Many independent workers do not know about this requirement, go looking for the program when they need it, but find it’s too late to enroll.

Virginia’s bill solves this problem by allowing the self-employed to claim benefits upon enrollment, but requiring them to remain in the program for three years, improving accessibility while also ensuring people don’t enroll to claim benefits without paying into the pool. Other states should adopt a similar model.

Another more comprehensive solution would be to automatically enroll all independent workers in paid family and medical leave programs from the outset, just as employees are automatically enrolled by their employers. States could enroll independent workers if they file 1099 income above a certain threshold in the prior tax year. Massachusetts, for example, requires self-employed workers who file a particular state tax form to enroll in the program. Automatically enrolling the self-employed would not only eliminate the need for waiting periods, but would deliver on the promise of truly universal coverage.

Ultimately, there is plenty of progress to celebrate when it comes to paid leave policy, but plenty more work to be done. As these fights continue, let’s make sure that independent and creative workers aren’t left behind.

What We’re Reading, Viewing, and Listening To

• Tabitha Arnold’s beautiful and inspiring textiles highlighting working class struggles

• Two pieces about reclaiming AI, one through the lens of Afrofuturism and the other through worker ownership

• This Health Affairs article about how state health insurance marketplaces are trading accessibility for affordability, meaning many people can’t access the care they need if they choose the insurance plans they can afford.

• This super cool tool from Lafayette Square Institute creates a custom four page report with 36 unique economic security indicators for any state, congressional district, or municipality.

• A tool from the Urban Institute on How To Build Guaranteed Income Programs and Coalitions.

• An upcoming webinar hosted by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program: Worker- and Community-Led Strategies for a Fairer Economy

• Alyssa Milano’s substack on misguided “elite” myth about actors’ wealth and that supporting those families in crisis is an act of community and compassion, not elitism

Advocacy and Policy Happenings

• The Department of Labor just released a new proposed rule on worker classification that would make it easier for companies to classify their workers as independent contractors, repealing the Biden-era rule from 2024. You can submit a public comment here by April 28th, 2026.

• The Department of Health and Human Services released new proposed rules for ACA Marketplaces, which would allow cheaper plans that incur much higher out of pocket costs (like $31,000 family deductibles). You can submit a public comment here by March 13, 2026.

• Never submitted a public comment before and want to give it a try? Governing for Impact has an excellent resource for you: How to Write Adverse Comments

• Illinois just introduced the Creative Workforce Development Act (HB5422), which provides skills training, business development, financial literacy, contract education, and career transition support for independent and project-based creative workers, along with portable benefits and labor protections, to support cross-sector integration and career development.

• Really loving these “Rental Rip-off” hearings hosted by the NYC Mamdani administration to provide direct lines of communication between tenants and city officials.

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Image by Alexandra Slo

At an Assembly of New York Artists recently, artists stood up to share their ideas for how artists might sustain their livelihoods. A non-artist lawyer added a simple, but powerful recommendation for affordability — create a way for artists to collectively purchase supplies across New York City.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this idea. Artists have long needed and advocated for affordable space and supplies. For example, the CREATE NYC strategic plan called for “mechanisms for organizations to pool resources and encourage block buying of resources and materials.” The writers recommended purchasing shared administrative and general operating resources, as well as insurance.

What role might the public sector play in supporting group purchasing for artists? Can sustained public investment in access to creative materials contribute to affordability and if so, how might it be executed?

Existing Models

Group purchasing isn’t a new idea. Many artists join cooperatives and collectives to pool resources and share supplies. Printmaking, woodworking, sculpture, glassblowing, photography, and pottery collectives and makerspaces often pool resources to buy shared supplies or specialized equipment. Some artists use social media groups to purchase, share and/or trade bulk materials, while others create art supply mutual aid networks or form art-buying collectives that pool financial contributions. Many cooperatives focus on gallery and retail spaces, while others provide rehearsal space.

Within the nonprofit arts sector, some local arts councils and arts and cultural organizations create supply banks or lending libraries for expensive equipment. For example, the Greater Augusta Arts Council operates a Technology Lending Library offering podcast equipment, cameras, studio lighting, projectors, and Marley flooring to members for up to 5 consecutive business days. The Museum of Northwest Art (one of our favorites!) provides Art Box Lending Library with art materials and lesson plans for teachers, available for three-week checkout periods.

In terms of pubic programming, Materials for the Arts was established in New York City in 1979 by artist Angela Fremont, and provides access to free art supplies for nonprofits with arts programming, NYC public schools, and city, state, and federal agencies. It diverts over 6 million pounds of materials from landfills each year while making these goods accessible for reuse and is one of my favorite places to go shopping! As a publicly funded program coordinated by NYC’s Department of Cultural Affairs, it’s almost an example of public infrastructure for collective purchasing. But it’s inaccessible for an individual artist who isn’t fiscally sponsored, and it doesn’t always have what an artist needs.

Materials are often left out of artists’ grants as well. The NEA and many state arts councils don’t fund ongoing operational costs like recurring supply purchases, which makes a dedicated “art supplies fund” challenging within existing grant structures. However, there are some project-based grants that do include materials as part of specific budget items. For example, the Center for Cultural Innovation’s “Investing in Artists: Tools & Equipment“ program awards grants of $1,000–$5,000 to individual craft artists to purchase artistic tools and equipment. Though the program supports individuals, not collectives, it does support the acquisition of materials.

Adaptable Models

The arts and culture field has solved a related issue for organizations — back office financial services — with the establishment of ArtsPool and Arts FMS. And there are already government purchasing cooperatives like Choice Partners, a national purchasing cooperative that offers bulk purchasing and procurement contracts for visual art, craft, and music supplies, but these are primarily designed for schools, libraries, and government entities, not individual artists or artist collectives.

Can we imagine public infrastructure that enables individual artists to access bulk purchasing power and bridges the gap between existing institutional purchasing programs and the fragmented individual artist market?

Implementation could take many pathways. Here are a few possibilities:

• Expand the Reuse Infrastructure: Climate policy and cultural policy could converge within our reuse infrastructure. Artists nationwide depend on organizations like Materials for the Arts, SCRAP Creative Reuse (Portland, Baltimore, Richmond, Ann Arbor), Scraplanta (Atlanta), Big Reuse (New York) and other creative reuse centers across the country for affordable materials—fabric, paint, wood, electronics, paper goods diverted from waste streams. These centers advance both environmental sustainability and cultural accessibility, yet they operate on fragile funding with limited reach. State and local governments could recognize reuse centers as dual-purpose public infrastructure deserving direct investment to stock more than just reused supplies. Artists could gain predictable access while centers gain stable revenue. It might even be possible to coordinate centers across cities with shared inventory systems, reciprocal memberships, and collective bargaining with large material donors and regional hubs with distribution capacity.

• Government Purchasing Cooperative Extension: We might adapt the Choice Partners Model so that artists can access the ability to purchase at bulk discounts. Government agencies, such as economic development, small business services or arts and culture, might provide access to universal purchasing cards or subsidized memberships for registered artists, similar to library cards. Artists could register, order through a city portal, and then be invoiced. While based in Texas, government entities outside of Texas may sign up and follow their state procurement laws. Spending could be tracked to demonstrate economic impact and continued investment.

• Artist Led Cooperative: We might support the establishment of an independent artist supply co-op, similar to food co-ops or credit unions. Many local municipalities have invested in support for worker cooperatives. These models could be adapted to support artist-led group purchasing cooperatives, where artist members would pay equity investments to create capital for bulk purchasing.

• Hybrid Platform Model: We might establish an online platform that aggregates artist demand across regions, where artists submit orders and the system batches by vendor and product, triggering a bulk purchase when a threshold is met. The platform might need to take a small percentage from either the vendors or the artists to cover operations and the distribution would either be centralized or direct-to-artist shipping.

Each of these solutions have strategic components that include policy and advocacy, vendor negotiations and partnerships, technology, and sustainability value propositions to explore, and most important, commitment to affordable solutions for individual artists!

What We Are Reading, Viewing, and Listening To

• The Atlantic’s article on Andrew Yang by Xochitl Gonzalez

• All things Puerto Rico…starting with this new book on Nuyorican and Diasporican Visual Art.

• Neuroscience and music findings with pianist Nicolas Namoradze.

• The Arts as Civic Strategy panel at Association of Performing Arts Professionals conference.

• The Courage of Imagination, A Pro-Democracy Movement, and the Civic We by Roberto Bedoya.

• More details on the Ireland Guaranteed Income for Artists Scheme released.

• A human-centered App that supports SNAP clients to figure out if they have exemptions from the program’s work requirements.

• What does co-creation and meaning-making look like by government leaders and will NYC get it right?

• Workplace Justice Lab published this piece on the stories behind the stories in Minneapolis

Policy and Advocacy Happenings

• Lawmakers in New York City recently introduced the Delivery Protection Act in City Council, which would require Amazon to treat their last mile delivery drivers as employees.

• The Transparency and Responsibility for Artificial Intelligence Networks (TRAIN) Act introduced by Congressmembers Dean (PA-04) and Moran (TX-01) can help musicians, artists, writers, and other creators determine if their copyrighted work was used to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) models without their permission.

• The National Association for Music Education has introduced legislation and a toolkit for advocacy - the Mandating Arts Education Standards, Training, and Resources Overall (MAESTRO) Act seeks to ensure that all students, regardless of where they live, have access to a well-rounded education that includes the arts.

• Senators Schiff and Curtis introduced a bipartisan bill to protect creators’ work and implement transparency safeguards in AI models on February 10th - Copyright Labeling and Ethical AI Reporting (CLEAR) Act.

On Friday, January 23rd, tens of thousands of people marched in subzero temperatures to demand an end to ICE occupation of Minneapolis. Called the “Truth and Freedom March,” organizers from labor unions, faith groups, and community organizations called for an economic blackout. It was the first citywide general strike in 80 years.

Then last Friday, January 30th, protestors across the nation staged general strikes in solidarity with the action in Minnesota. In the face of state violence and terror, ordinary people are using their collective power to stand up for their neighbors and communities in inspiring ways.

Why general strikes matter

General strikes are a unique and powerful form of protest. Unlike a traditional strike, when workers withhold their labor from a single employer, a general strike is a coordinated work stoppage across multiple industries and sectors in a city or region. Minnesota organizers expanded the call to all economic activity: “No work. No school. No shopping.” The goal is to bring the economy to a halt to force change. It’s a flex of community power.

Some advocates judge the success of a general strike on specific economic metrics, for example lowering the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP (the featured measure of U.S. output or the market value of the goods and services produced by labor and property located in the U.S.) which is currently around $30 trillion; ~ $82 billion per day.

But GDP isn’t actually measured in real time—it’s calculated quarterly or annually, well after the fact. At the same time, 70% of our GDP is from consumer purchasing. So, if we stopped buying goods for long enough, we could impact this number by slowing growth. In fact, author Scott Galloway is calling for a “targeted, month-long national economic strike attacking the tech companies and firms enabling ICE” here. With a shorter general strike, people can observe proxies like canceled events, shuttered businesses, or reduced sales.

Ultimately, though, the goal isn’t actually to reduce GDP by a specific percentage, but rather to demonstrate that the economy can’t function without ordinary people’s cooperation. The threat of sustained economic paralysis and mass demonstration creates political leverage.

General strikes blur the line between labor action and mass political protest. They exert pressure by being immediate and visible. If transportation stops, stores close, schools shut down, and hospitals run on skeleton crews, the disruption becomes impossible to ignore as daily life grinds to a halt in noticeable ways.

General strikes are also economically costly, especially if sustained. Multi-day general strikes–like what we’re seeing grow from Minnesota to a nationwide action–create compounding pressure as losses mount and normal functioning becomes untenable.

What role for the arts in all this?

In the Twin Cities, arts institutions have stepped up. The Walker Art Center, Springboard for the Arts, and many others shut down for the day, their participation providing a very public show of solidarity with the broader community. Arts institutions are essential community infrastructure. They’re not separate from the struggles of their neighbors; they’re woven into the fabric of the communities they serve.

Individual artists have stepped up too. Many prominent artists and celebrities supported the strike and urged their followers to join. Actors, musicians, and public figures with large platforms used their visibility to amplify the strike’s message and encourage participation.

But not every artist has the same platform as Pedro Pascal.

Non-celebrity creative workers face unique challenges when participating in a general strike. They are three times more likely to be self-employed. What does withdrawing your labor mean when you don’t have an employer to withdraw it from? Gig workers bear individual financial risk without strike funds or job protection. Lacking traditional employer-employee relationships, success depends on mass participation across sectors.

But creative workers can still contribute meaningfully to general strikes. Although arts workers’ individual economic leverage is limited (especially if they’re self-employed), their collective power is meaningful.

We have collective economic power

Creative workers make meaningful contributions to the economy. We can use economic impact studies, like the ones America for the Arts regularly releases, to make their often invisible labor and economic contributions more visible. When arts and cultural workers can quantify and publicize their economic contributions, they can better measure and share the impact of withdrawing that labor.

Even without precise measurement, collective work stoppages create noticeable disruptions. If enough arts workers withhold creative labor—stopping work on projects, not submitting content, refusing commissions, canceling performances—those actions disrupt the industries that depend on them. When writers stop writing, musicians don’t perform, and designers don’t deliver work, the economic impact ripples outward.

Organized labor is another source of collective economic power in the arts. The 2023 entertainment union strikes won meaningful concessions on the structures of work and use of artificial intelligence. These models offer a promising blueprint for building and wielding economic power for individuals who don’t have a single employer. The major drawback is that these unions don’t include all workers in their sectors. Many creative professionals lose benefits or protections when they don’t meet minimum hour requirements or work outside traditional employment structures.

Sectoral bargaining offers another way to leverage the collective economic power of artists. This model could bring employees and freelancers into the same “bargaining unit,” eliminating the problem of organizing workplace-by-workplace and potentially covering the full range of creative work.

We have collective cultural power

Artists wield cultural power, shaping narratives, influencing public discourse, and determining what stories get told and how they’re understood. Unlike economic power, which derives from the ability to withhold labor or disrupt production, cultural power stems from artists’ unique position as meaning-makers and storytellers. They can occupy public space and stage actions that often get more media coverage than standard picket lines.

Just this weekend, artists staged a People’s Filibuster at The Public Theater, reading “seminal texts from the founding of our nation alongside writings and songs that articulate our shared ideals and democratic aspirations, not as history alone, but as a living call to action.” Creative workers don’t just produce content—they frame how people understand events, define what’s visible and what remains hidden, and create the symbols and language through which communities express their values and demands.

When artists wield this power collectively, they can shift public opinion, amplify marginalized voices, document history as it unfolds, and make abstract political struggles tangible and emotionally resonant. For example, last year’s Fall of Freedom mobilized the arts community to push back against authoritarianism, using the unique tools the arts sector can bring to bear.

Cultural power operates both through traditional channels—performances, exhibitions, publications—and through decentralized networks of social media, memes, street art, and grassroots cultural production that can spread rapidly across communities and movements, building critical mass.

Artists are skilled at communicating and amplifying messages. They create imagery, music, posters, videos, and social media content that explains why the collective action is happening, spreads awareness, and mobilizes others. Minnesota artists like Sean Lim, D Guzman, and Andi Fink are creating and sharing protest posters and shirts for the community. Jessica Seamans of Landland designed a now-ubiquitous poster that incorporates the loon—the Minnesota state bird—into classic imagery from the American Revolution.

Artists also play an important documentary role. Photographers, filmmakers, and writers can document the human impact of ICE enforcement, as well as the protest and collective action that emerges in response, creating historical records and real-time coverage that shapes how the event is understood.

We can all wield the power of solidarity

When people and institutions across sectors stand together to say no, it’s transformative. And artists are stepping up to help, not limited to their identity as artists, but as neighbors and community members. Renee Good was an artist herself.

Community-rooted organizations like Springboard for the Arts are doing incredible work in Minnesota, helping connect members of their community to support neighborhood action, and providing resources to support this crucial work.

Minnesota is showing us what real organizing looks like. It’s neighbors standing up for neighbors. It’s mutual aid. It’s doing the work despite the very real risks. It’s standing up for basic human decency.

A general strike doesn’t require everyone to have an employer to strike against. It requires collective refusal to participate in business as usual. The question isn’t whether artists can strike—it’s how they can support and join the networks and movements to add their individual actions to a greater collective whole.

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What We Are Reading, Viewing, and Listening To

• New songs released by Bruce Springsteen and Billy Bragg

• A Eulogy for Creative Placemaking

• Check out how arts fits into the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP), which connects communities with the data they need.

• Creativity as a Social Good and what it means to have creativity at social scale.

• University of Notre Dame enters the Guaranteed Income pilot and debate.

• Poet aja monet on working class artists and organizing.

• What should the response to “Trump’s unprecedented focus on arts and culture” be?

Policy and Advocacy Happenings

• Met Museum workers voted to unionize. This website tracks unionizing at museums over time.

• Talks in the Senate to extend Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies have stalled, leaving less hope for reduced premiums this year.

• NYC delivery workers won $5M settlement for back pay, due to violations of the city’s minimum pay law for delivery workers. Instacart is suing NYC over the new laws, which offer a new model of labor protections for gig workers.

• The Human Artistry Campaign announced the launch of the Stealing Isn’t Innovation advocacy campaign to “protest Big Tech’s illegal mass harvesting of copyrighted works to build and power their Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) platforms”.

• U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) introduced the Visual Artists Copyright Reform Act (VACRA), which attempts to make it easier for visual artists to register their copyrights and protect their work.

• New work requirements or SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits, also known as food stamps, went into effect this weekend, likely pushing many people out of the program.

• The U.S. Senate is holding a hearing on music ticketing reform on January 28, 2026 at the Consumer Protection, Technology, and Data Privacy Subcommittee.

Image: Sarah Calderón; Mural: Delphinoto

Growing momentum for guaranteed income

In 2022, Ireland–yes, the entire country–launched a guaranteed income for artists and creatives pilot providing a weekly stipend of €325 to 2,000 artists. In October, following a successful three-year pilot, Ireland announced that the program would become permanent. 2,000 artists across Ireland will receive $1,500/month of unrestricted cash. Artists who practice “creative or interpretative expression (whether traditional or contemporary) in whatever form, including visual arts, theatre, literature, music, dance, opera, film, circus and architecture, and any medium when used for those purposes” are randomly selected from those who are eligible (artists who are over 18, Irish residents, tax compliant, and provide evidence of creative practice or career in the arts). Ireland recognized financial instability and chose to care.

They’re not the only ones making these experiments permanent. The Marshall Islands just implemented Universal Basic Income (monthly no-strings-attached funds for all). Called Enra, this is the first initiative to offer cryptocurrency and it pays every Marshallese citizen-resident (not household) living in the country, including children, a flat amount of around $800 per person per year, delivered in quarterly payments of about $200 with no-strings-attached. In comparison, applying a similar percentage allocation based on our GDP in America, it would be about $9,000 per person per year, or $750 per month.

In the United States, Cook County (home to Chicago) recently became the first county to establish permanent funding for guaranteed income at the county level. The Cook County Board of Commissioners approved $7.5 million for the program through its FY 2026 budget, which totals $10.12 billion. The program will build on the success of the Cook County Promise Guaranteed Income Pilot, which provided $500 monthly payments to 3,250 low-to-moderate income households for two years. And, of course, Alaska has the Alaska Permanent Fund, which has paid a basic income to all Alaska residents since 1982, funded by oil revenues.

There have been over 150 guaranteed income pilots since 2017, many funded by the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) after the pandemic, with others philanthropically funded. Legislators are attempting to build on these efforts. In October 2025, Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ-12) reintroduced the Guaranteed Income Pilot Program Act that would establish a three-year nationwide pilot program that gives monthly support payments to individuals by the US Department of Health and Human Services. Following that, in November 2025, Rep. Rashida Tlaib introduced the Economic Dignity for All Agenda which includes three legislative bills that focused on Guaranteed Basic Income for families, a phase-out Universal Basic Income, and a Baby Bonus. A version of two of these bills (The BOOST Act and The End Child Poverty Act) were introduced in past legislative sessions. The Universal Baby Bonus Act is new.

How does guaranteed income for artists fit into this work?

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Springboard for the Arts in St. Paul, MN, Black Music Action Coalition in Nashville, and Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) all launched Guaranteed Income for artist pilots in the last six years. Yerba Buena implemented two programs. The first, launched in 2021 in partnership with the City of San Francisco, supported 130 artists with $1,000 per month of no strings attached cash for 18 months. The second provided the same support to 60 artists and was distributed via a Creative Communities Coalition, a collaboration of six San Francisco-based arts and cultural organizations, closing in 2024.

Creatives Rebuild New York’s programs ran for 18 months between 2021 and 2024, providing $1,000 per month to 2,400 artists for 18 months across New York State. Springboard’s work continues: launched in 2021 as a component of St. Paul’s People’s Prosperity Pilot, Springboard’s program now supports more than 100 artists with $500 per month of restriction free cash in St. Paul and Otter Tail County, Minnesota, for five years. Black Music Action Coalition, in partnership with the Academy of Country Music, launched a program in 2023 providing Black Nashville-based artists with $1,000 per month for a year. They followed up with another program for 30 Georgia musicians for $1,000 per month for a year funded by artist Gunna. Small programs have popped up since then, too, with one at Indie Space pushing pilots toward wealth building solutions.

All of these pilots included rigorous research, many employing the gold standard of evidence: randomized control trials. They’ve found that, similar to participants in other pilots, artists experienced positive impacts on financial stability, creative practice, well-being, and sector retention. Artists were able to pay for basic needs like food, rent, and utilities (CRNY found a 19% reduction in food insecurity); pay off debt; reduce depression and stress; and increase creative focus and hours spent on artistic practice (CRNY found a 19% increase in time spent on arts-related labor). Participants also reported improvements in their mental and physical well being (CRNY found a 29% reduction in severe anxiety and depression) and long-term career benefits.

Guaranteed income is particularly powerful for artists because it allows them to “choose work that works for them.” Participants used payments to pursue professional development opportunities and to deepen their artistic practice with new techniques and collaborators, which in turn led to increased visibility and recognition in their creative fields. Artists who identified as caregivers reported the ability to provide care with less stress and more joy in their caregiving roles (CRNY found improved work-life balance for 75% of caregiving artists). These are all good things.

Why guaranteed income for artists?

If the evidence is there, why does guaranteed income remain controversial—especially when it comes to artists? There is ample evidence that guaranteed income works for all folks who are in need of a financial floor and could serve as an essential component of our social safety net. In fact, artists receiving guaranteed income in these pilots were experiencing financial need, living below the federal poverty level or the self-sufficiency standard.

Some critics argue that guaranteed income programs for artists are problematic. After all, while artists experience significant economic precarity, so do many other populations. And yet, artists would uniquely benefit from guaranteed income programs for several reasons:

First, artists do work that the market systematically undervalues. They create public goods that benefit everyone: shared cultural identity and meaning; new ways of imagining the future; and stronger communities. They preserve cultural memory and history—often for communities that would otherwise be erased. Because this value is so widely shared, markets often fail to pay for it, even when society benefits enormously.

Second, artists operate in structurally precarious labor conditions with highly irregular and unpredictable income, delayed or speculative payment, unpaid labor, and limited access to benefits. This instability, which makes them economically vulnerable, is built into cultural labor markets. Artists have very few safety nets to rely on and these challenges are compounded for BIPOC and LGBTQIAP+ artists, disabled artists, and those artists who live in rural or underinvested communities.

Third, when artists have stable, predictable or smooth income, they work smarter, invest in education and furthering their skills, and are more likely to remain in the sector long term. While there’s a common fear that guaranteed income discourages work, research demonstrates the opposite. Guaranteed income doesn’t replace work—it makes great work possible. Artists are unfairly criticized for their so-called irresponsible career choices (despite most holding multiple jobs), it can be difficult to make the case for their receipt of guaranteed income. Perhaps making the case for them, makes “the moral case for everyone else too.”

So yes, there are strong arguments for why artists specifically need guaranteed income programs, just as there are strong cases for other communities as well. For example, many guaranteed income pilots target specific groups like students, single mothers, or those recently released from prison. At the same time, there are powerful arguments for a universal basic income for all, rooted in Juliana Bidadanure’s call to “stop viewing the right to an income exclusively through the lens of productivity and embrace instead our universal dignity.”

But though artists would specifically benefit from guaranteed income programs, it’s important to say out loud that they aren’t especially deserving of them. Artists share precarious financial conditions with many other groups, all of whom need–and deserve–a robust social safety net.

So should we be advocating for guaranteed income for artists?

We should be working in solidarity with other groups to support guaranteed income for all, and similar cash policies that address systemic poverty. We should be joining the Economic Security Project (ESP) and Income Movement, which are are advancing economic justice and have outlined clear blueprints for states, local organizations, and individuals. It also means joining and launching state cash alliances aimed at advancing economic security broadly. Creative Rebuild New York, for example, launched the New York State Cash Alliance as a state-wide coalition working toward these goals.

Artists, who are often participants in many guaranteed income pilots, are perfect additions to bringing the data and messages to life and telling their stories about guaranteed income impacts. They can be key allies in driving toward these systemic solutions.

Within the arts sector itself, guaranteed income has the potential to be more efficient and more equitable than traditional arts funding. It reduces merit-based gatekeeping and unpaid application labor, reaches artists often excluded from institutions, and supports the conditions people need to create (not just the final products). Society thrives when more people can create, tell their stories, and shape public imagination. Protecting cultural pluralism means providing income security for all artists, not just a select few. Encouraging arts funders to consider this option and embracing guaranteed income’s values, using funds already earmarked for artists, could be a meaningful step forward.

In short, artists, like others, deserve guaranteed income. Evidence shows that income security strengthens, rather than diminishes, creative contribution, economic participation, and civic life. We should support national guaranteed income programs that expand economic security for all, while also considering how the lessons from guaranteed income pilots can improve conditions in our field.

It turns out this isn’t an either/or. It’s a both/and.

What We’re Reading and Viewing

• The 2026 Artist Corporations Letter by Yancey Strickler keeping us updated on a new legal form designed for creative people and artistic purposes.

• The NYTimes’ analysis of Trump’s workforce cuts including agencies that are part of arts and culture.

• Trumps travel bans are hurting touring musicians.

• More than 300 NYTimes Opinion readers responded to a January invitation to share their experience of rising health care costs.

• In this MLK day week, a reflection on Guaranteed Income and Martin Luther King, Jr.

• Check out these two Substacks: Building transparency in the public art field and Essays and Provocations on Arts Leadership, Culture, Power, and Equity in the Arts.

Field Happenings

• ARTISTS IN NYC . . . attend this Assembly to voice your policy ideas on January 26th from 4 - 7 pm!

• Join the Stealing Isn’t Innovation campaign to push back against unlicensed AI use of copyrighted work.

• On January 15, Representative Ro Khana (D-CA) introduced a Creator Bill of Rights to recognize creators as a distinct category of small businesses and independent workers deserving of modern protections, aligning with this work from New York artists and creative workers.

• On January 12, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the FY26 minibus appropriations package with overwhelming bipartisan support (397 to 28), securing $207 million each for the NEA and NEH with no cuts.

• The Administration has pulled out of the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies, as well as the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Culture, which works with a number of international museums.

• Crypto currency is moving into the guaranteed income space via a new pilot in NYC and the Marshall Islands program mentioned above.

• NY Governor Hochul announced an investment in affordable, universal childcare for children under five across the state, and will partner with Mayor Mamdani in NYC to deliver free child care for 2 year olds!

• Elon Musk’s X Corp has filed an antitrust lawsuit against dozens of music publishers – plus the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) – accusing them of colluding to force the social media platform into taking industrywide licenses at “supracompetitive rates”.

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Many artists are welcoming the new year with the unwelcome news of massive increases in their health insurance premiums and new barriers to Medicaid coverage.

Why is this happening? Well, Congress couldn’t agree on a plan to extend Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies, which expired on December 31, 2025. These subsidies, also known as Premium Tax Credits, are based on your income and lower health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs if you buy a plan through the Health Insurance Marketplace. The subsidies were increased during COVID, making health insurance more affordable for many more people. Without the subsidies, ACA premiums will more than double, rising to $1,904/month on average.

This is going to have a big impact on artists and other creative workers who depend on ACA marketplaces to get coverage. According to the National Survey of Artists, 15.4% of artists who have coverage obtain it through a health insurance marketplace, and 21% are on Medicaid. The self-employed are especially dependent on marketplace coverage. If you rely on ACA coverage, you can use this calculator to estimate the difference in your premiums.

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Despite Congress’ failure to act, all hope is not lost. Just before the holiday break, four House Republicans broke ranks and signed onto a Democratic measure requiring a floor vote on a three year extension of the ACA subsidies. That vote will take place this week, and is likely to pass the House. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to pass the Senate, where lawmakers rejected the same proposal just last month.

However, a bipartisan group of Senators are working on an alternative compromise they hope can garner 60 votes and pass the House. It’s possible they’ll devise some kind of deal that pairs an ACA subsidy extension with Republican’s preferred health insurance reforms, like Health Savings Accounts and Association Health Plans.

The politics surrounding a potential compromise are tricky, though. While some Republicans worry about going into the mid-term elections without addressing this key affordability challenge, many of the party’s hard liners are ideologically opposed to any expansion or extension of the ACA. Democrats, meanwhile, have staked a claim on the issue (even shutting down the government over it last fall), but may not be willing to compromise and hand Republicans a political win so close to the mid-terms. We should know the outcome, one way or another, this month.

Meanwhile, arts workers who depend on Medicaid, which provides health coverage for low income adults and children, will also face new challenges this year. The Republican budget reconciliation bill that passed last year, known as H.R.1 or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, included several provisions to limit Medicaid coverage. The largest of these changes is a new work requirement, which will require recipients to prove that they are working (80 hours of work activities per month) or looking for work. Given many arts workers are self-employed and experience significant income volatility, the challenge of demonstrating eligibility, even if they are in fact eligible, is likely to push many artists off the rolls. All told, the Congressional Budget Office estimates this legislation will result in over 10 million Americans becoming uninsured.

Given all these changes to health coverage, it’s no wonder arts workers need help sorting through their options. United Health Care Fund in New York recently released this guide for arts workers, which while focused on New York, includes some links to resources in other states. The Entertainment Community Fund (formerly the Actors Fund) also operates an Artists Health Insurance Resource Center which provides educational resources and support for creative professionals. If you’re considering enrolling in a bronze or catastrophic plan to save on premiums, this resource will help you evaluate the trade offs.

Ultimately, though, we need policy change to deliver universal, affordable, high quality health insurance to all. You can make your voice heard by reaching out to your representatives and letting them know how expiring ACA subsidies and new Medicaid requirements impact you and your community. Let them know what kinds of solutions to the health care crisis you want to see. Collective pressure is how we turn individual harm into lasting, systemic change.

What We’re Reading and Viewing

• Policy Literacy for the Creative Sector is an open-source policy brief educational template for creative workers and arts and cultural organizations. It provides baseline educational content on cultural policy and serves as an editable template for hosting policy briefs and discussing policy!

• I (Sarah) just visited the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, an awesome museum that is so well curated and inspiring, you want to touch everything. I did not, of course, but I can’t say I blame Bad Bunny.

• Arts and culture is at the periphery of each of these recommendations but oh how we wish the experts asked about how to improve NYC had read this great website!

Field Happenings

• Minnesota’s new paid leave law went into effect on January 1st. Employees will be automatically enrolled, but the self-employed need to opt in separately.

• NEA Chairperson Mary Ann Carter has been confirmed, and the House Appropriations Committee released a conferenced funding bill for FY26 that funds the NEA and NEH at $207 million for FY26, including a meaningful increase for the Arts and Juvenile Justice Program. This is just one of 12 funding bills that need to advance before the end of the month.

• ​​U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) introduced the Visual Artists Copyright Reform Act (VACRA), which would modernize copyright registration for visual artists to make it easier and less costly for high-volume visual artists to register and protect their works.

• The Creative Act of 2025 (H.R. 6165) was introduced on November 20, 2025 by Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) and was referred to House Transportation and Infrastructure and Financial Services Committees. It establishes a grant program to increase job opportunities for artists and creative professionals and improve arts facilities and programming.

• The Native Arts and Culture Promotion Act (S.3375 / H.R.6285) was introduced in late 2025 by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), Sen. Mazie K. Hirono (D-HI), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Representatives Jill Tokuda (D-HI) and Ed Case (D-HI) to modernize and expand federal support for Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native arts, specifically by making Native Hawaiian Organizations more eligible for grants under the existing American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian Culture and Art Development Act. It was referred to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and the House Committee on Education and Workforce.

After the birth of her first child, Lenka Clayton wrote this Manifesto to call attention to the overwhelming lack of institutional support for artist parents. Her reflections make it clear: affordable childcare is a necessity for anyone who wants to have kids and make art.

Childcare costs are overwhelming American families, in and outside the arts

Childcare is one of the most urgent contributors to the affordability crisis, and artist parents are certainly feeling the squeeze.

Recent data from New York State shows 68% of artists with children who are caregivers don’t have $400 to cover an emergency. This is unsurprising, given nearly half (48%) make less than $24,999, 41% have unstable housing, 30% cannot feed themselves, and 63% carry unmanageable debt. The stress takes a toll: only 49% state that they are in good mental health.

Meanwhile, childcare can cost more than housing, transportation, healthcare, or food. In 2023, the Annual Childcare Landscape Analysis found that in every state across the country, the price of center-based care for two children exceeded average annual rent payments by 25% to over 100%.

The affordability debate creates opportunities for progress

Partly in response to recent Democratic wins this fall, the nation is focusing on affordability, which provides an opening for universal child care policies. As Julie Kashen and Anna Wadia wrote just after the November election, “In New York, Zohran Mamdani won his mayoral race on a bold vision: publicly-funded child care for every New Yorker. In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill secured her gubernatorial win after championing the Child Care for Every Community Act, which caps family costs and raises wages for care workers. And in Virginia, Abigail Spanberger clinched the governor’s mansion on a campaign that named affordable child care and paid family and medical leave as essential to helping families make ends meet.”

These politicians are capturing momentum generated by recent calls for a universal childcare system. For example, Etsy recently published a report proposing federal, state, and local childcare reforms focused on the unique needs of the self-employed. New Yorkers United for Childcare published a roadmap for universal coverage last year, and the Roosevelt Institute, Community Change, and Economic Security Project shared principles for a universal childcare system in July. Though the specifics differ, they all offer exciting visions of paths forward.

State and local governments are stepping up

New Mexico just became the first state to offer universal, free child care for children up to 13 years old. As of November 1, 2025, the state will make child care available to all families regardless of income. New Mexico’s program is the result of years of organizing by a coalition of child advocates, parents, and early childhood educators, which won statewide voter support to fund the program from a portion of New Mexico’s Land Grant Permanent Fund—a permanent fund that uses oil and gas revenues to fund their public schools and universities.

Other states are following suit, including Connecticut, which created an Early Childhood Education Endowment to make child care free for families earning less than $100,000 and a cap of 7% of income for others.

Some cities are also exploring new programs. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani was elected on a platform of universal childcare in New York City, and New York State Governor Hochul has indicated she’s willing to work with him to reach that goal. This builds on efforts by state lawmakers like Jabari Brisbort (D, WF) who introduced universal childcare legislation last session.

There’s less hope at the federal level, but opportunities for progress

Most of the federal childcare bills tackle pieces of the childcare crisis, but wouldn’t deliver universal coverage. They can be divided into three general categories—efforts to increase supply of childcare, reduce costs for parents, and address childcare workforce challenges (i.e. too few workers and too little pay). First Five Years Fund provides a great overview here.

One of the major problems driving the childcare crisis is that there are simply not enough childcare providers to meet demand—51% of parents live in a child care desert. The Child Care Modernization Act of 2025 (S. 2828) introduced by Senator Deb Fischer (R-NE) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) seeks to address that gap by strengthening and reauthorizing the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), which funds much of the childcare infrastructure in this country. The legislation proposes key changes, including providing states with more flexibility, offering new grants for supply and facility improvements, and providing technical assistance to rural and in-home providers. It also focuses on workforce support, such as improving provider reimbursement rates, and includes enhanced reporting and transparency requirements for states.

Another major challenge is affordability. Parents pay too much for childcare, full stop. Yet many of the proposals in Congress only address the employment-based tax credits parents can use to subsidize care, which disproportionately benefit wealthy individuals and almost entirely exclude self-employed and independent workers. In contrast, the Child Care for Working Families Act introduced by Bobby Schott (VA-03) and Patty Murray (D-WA) would make high-quality child care affordable for families by ensuring that working families pay no more than seven percent of their income on child care. If signed into law, the bill would allow the typical family in America to pay less than $15 a day for child care.

Finally, many federal bills attempt to increase the number of childcare workers and improve their job quality. For example, the bipartisan federal Child Care Workforce Act (S.4880) introduced by Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL), Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) would establish a competitive grant program to improve childcare worker pay and job quality, modeled on Washington DC’s innovative Early Childhood Pay Equity Fund.

In the meantime, many arts organizations are stepping up

In the absence of government action, how have arts and culture organizations filled the gaps for artist parents?

Unfortunately, efforts to date have been mostly piecemeal. Arts and cultural organizations often have limited benefits systems and difficulty delivering health care, let alone child care reimbursements. Some unions where artists and cultural workers are members, like IATSE, have day care or babysitting reimbursements for members’ children. Many unions also partner with the Parent Artist Advocacy League (PAAL) which provides national and chapter grants of up to $1500 for childcare costs, although union membership is not a requirement for the grants.

In some cases, grant programs and residencies provide additional funding for childcare. For example, a new artist grant from Artists & Mothers aims provides $25,000 grants to artists in New York for childcare. The Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York offers a parent residency grant that allows an artist to come for a four week residency and provides them with a $1,450 unrestricted stipend that can be used for childcare costs. Artists can choose to bring a caregiver or co-parent with them, find a local childcare facility, or pay for childcare at their family’s home location. Interlude in the Hudson Valley, NY also provides a residency with space for families and children and an almost $600 stipend for childcare. And many others have followed - Abron Arts Center, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Elsewhere Studios, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Kala Art Institute, to name a few.

Some programs offer more direct support. For example, Lenka Clayton set up an Artist Residency in Motherhood toolkit and mentorship program. And in Georgia, at the Alliance Theatre, artists are being supported with EXPAND Childcare, a free childcare program that provides child care for children of artists with non-traditional schedules. Supported with a grant from Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning, we’ll see how this promising pilot fairs.

Stopgap measures are important, but ultimately we need to pass universal childcare programs

These programs are all wonderful, but they only help a select few artist parents. A recipient of the Artists & Mothers grant, Carissa Rodriguez, named the core issue: “The care work that holds us together as families and communities - is a vital part of what makes art possible.”

I recently watched the movie, Artists in Residence, which followed the lives of three single-mother artists who felt that they had to choose between their motherhood responsibilities and their profession. They shouldn’t have to choose.

We need a universal childcare system that supports all families and children, and in so doing, unlocks the creative capacity of all parents.

What We’re Reading and Viewing

This is what we are enjoying this month!

• Vicki Shabo at New America, is working with Hollywood to seed TV and film content focusing on gender-equitable care through the Re-Scripting Gender, Work, Family, and Care Initiative. Watch ABC’s “High Potential,” where the mom negotiates to include child care in her job contract and says, “Do you have any idea how expensive child care is these days?”

• New York Times reporting on the mental health of dancers and how some companies and schools are focusing on dancers’ physical and emotional well-being.

• The Future of Infrastructure and Place by Elizabeth Hamby explores the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway in NYC and its impact on community. She writes, “the expertise to imagine better futures already exists within the communities most impacted by infrastructure decisions.”

• Paying for Professionalism 2025: A Report on New York City Teaching Artist Compensation & Employment by the Arts in Education Roundtable provides a comprehensive look at teaching artists’ livelihoods today.

• NYTimes guest essay by Caitlin Petre and Julia Ticona, Will Creative Work Survive A.I.?

• Where are the folk singer movement makers? They are here!

Field Happenings

• Artists at Risk Connection and a coalition of more than 100 local and regional partners around the United States are sharing The National Artist Safety Survey, a collective effort to better understand what artists and cultural workers are up against and to co-create real resources that strengthen artistic freedom and safety. Fill out before January 31, 2026!

• Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) Quick Grant cycle is on-going and can support caregiving expenses for California-based artiss, creatives, cultural producers and staff members of nonprofit arts organizations based in San Francisco or San José.

• In October, a broad coalition of philanthropic leaders announced Humanity AI, a $500 million five-year initiative dedicated to making sure people have a stake in the future of artificial intelligence (AI). Many of arts and culture’s leading foundations will drive “new investments toward establishing a people-driven future where AI delivers for humanity, strengthens communities, and enhances human creativity.”

• Detroit’s creative economy is being bolstered by Usher and Big Sean’s $1 million commitment to creative economy career pathways in partnership with the Michigan Central Boys & Girls Club of Southeastern Michigan.

Hot off the presses, we’re excited to share a new policy brief, Pay, Protections, and Power: Improving Job Quality Among Independent & Creative Workers, that Althea wrote for the National Arts Policy Alliance.

Study after study – including the newly published National Survey of Artists – show that artists and creative workers are more likely to work independently than other workers, and experience significant economic insecurity.

But while there has been lots of public attention regarding the precarity of gig and independent work, most of those debates focus on platform workers. There haven’t been as many efforts to analyze policy interventions designed to improve job quality among independent workers more broadly, or to consider their applicability across sectors.

This study seeks to fill that gap by exploring four elements of job quality among independent and creative workers – income and pay, working conditions, social protections, and organizing rights. It summarizes the nature of each challenge and presents policy innovations at the local, state, and federal levels to address them.

This study is not meant to provide a comprehensive set of policy prescriptions. Instead, we hope it serves as a resource for creative and cultural advocates looking for opportunities to improve job quality among creative and independent workers.

The brief documents incredible work already happening across the country, and suggests opportunities to build on these efforts to advance the broader movement for economic security and rights for all.

Read the new policy brief here, and look out for more detailed analysis of these issues on State of the Artist in the coming months.

When it comes to benefits, it can feel like there’s only bad news. Affordable Care Act subsidies are set to expire at the end of the year, increasing premiums by 26% on average. The Medicaid cuts Republicans passed this summer will leave nearly 5 million people without coverage. And if you get employer-sponsored health insurance, it’s not much better.

But there’s a bright spot in Dallas worth paying attention to.

Arete Health Shield recently partnered with the Dallas Music Office to create Creatives Care Dallas – a health and wellness program that makes preventative care and mental health resources affordable and accessible to gig workers and artists in Dallas County. For a $65/month flat fee, those who join Creatives Care Dallas will receive virtual primary care, 24/7 telemedicine urgent care, DNA assessments, virtual behavioral health, 15-50% discounts on dental, vision, and medical procedures, and $0 copay on the top 2,000 prescription medications. Creatives Care Dallas members can also include non-family members (up to four) on their coverage plan, which could include dance collaborators or bandmates.

Dallas modeled their program on Fort Worth’s Sound Care program, which was established to help Fort Worth musicians access reduced-cost preventative care and treatment with their local healthcare system. Health Alliance for Austin Musicians also provides important preventative care to creative workers. While these programs do not replace insurance and isn’t comprehensive coverage, these programs are still exciting because they address a key affordability challenge for creative workers.

Other communities are following suit. In New York City, the City’s Live Performance Industry Council is researching what health care benefit models might work for local artists and Freelancers Union is working on a feasibility study.

The Dallas program offers a promising model for portable benefits.

Portable benefits are safety net products, such as health insurance, paid leave, and retirement savings that, unlike traditional employer-based benefits, move with the worker from job-to-job, and can accept contributions across multiple gigs. To learn more you can read this Snapshot of Portable Benefits for Artists and Creative Workers.

Portable benefits are an important strategy for expanding social protections to independent and gig workers, but they don’t grant access to all employment rights and protections like minimum wage and overtime, unemployment insurance, protection from discrimination, or collective bargaining rights. Also, just because benefits are portable doesn’t also mean that they’re affordable. The design of these benefits really matters.

Unfortunately in the United States, the political debate about portable benefits is not focused on figuring out how to design a program that is truly accessible, affordable, and delivers high quality benefits to independent workers. That’s the debate we need to have! Instead the policy conversation has gotten all mixed up with the issue of worker classification – one that matters quite a bit to some workers, but is not as relevant to creative workers.

How did the portable benefits debate become about worker classification?

Over the last ten years, gig worker advocates have been trying to force companies like Uber and Doordash to classify their on-demand workforces as employees, granting them all the labor protections and benefits that come with employment. Gig platforms have fought this tooth and nail, arguing that reclassifying all app-based gig workers as employees would undermine not only their profitability, but their very business models.

The platforms offer up portable benefits accounts as a carrot in exchange for the ability to classify their workforces as independent contractors. Some of you might remember the fights in California over AB5, Prop 22, and all the ensuing lawsuits. This is the debate that continues to dominate any public conversation about portable benefits today.

That’s why most of the portable benefits bills moving forward at the state and federal levels are actually bills about worker classification. For example, portable benefits legislation passed in Utah (S.B. 233), Alabama (S.B. 86), Wisconsin (S.B.256), and Tennessee (H.B. 494) with pending legislation in Arkansas (S.B. 235), Hawaii (H.B. 1290), Massachusetts (H. 1108), Nevada (S.B. 336), New Jersey (S.1386), and Rhode Island (H. 5941), and unsuccessful bills failed to advance in Florida (S.B. 1130) and Wisconsin (S.B. 256). Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Maryland have supported pilot programs for DoorDash.

These laws differ in the specifics, but in general, they offer gig companies protections from misclassification lawsuits if they choose to provide platform workers benefits. A few portable benefits laws go further, and require gig platforms to contribute to portable benefits accounts in exchange for protection from misclassification lawsuits. For example, a novel agreement negotiated in Washington State (H.B. 1570) between the Teamsters and Uber & Lyft requires the companies to fund paid leave and unemployment benefits for drivers.

At least a few of these bills will actually expand benefit protections to platform workers. But will any of them help self-employed creative workers access portable, affordable, comprehensive benefits? No.

Most portable benefits bills would not expand coverage for creative gig workers.

Over one third of creative workers are self-employed, but most are legitimate independent workers, combining income across multiple gigs. New laws clarifying the classification status of on-demand platform workers will not impact their lives in any meaningful way.

Unfortunately, many of the portable benefits bills introduced in Congress this year are also focused on classification, allowing employers to offer limited, voluntary benefits on their own terms while avoiding obligations like the minimum wage, overtime pay, unemployment insurance, and collective bargaining rights. For example, the Unlocking Benefits for Independent Workers Act (S. 2210) introduced by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) creates a legal “safe harbor” for companies to offer benefits to independent contractors without jeopardizing the worker’s independent status. The Modern Worker Security Act (H.R. 1320) introduced by Rep. Tim Scott (R-SC), goes further, codifying an employment test that allows employers to more easily classify workers as contractors and avoid minimum wage and overtime protections built into the Fair Labor Standard Act.

Despite their names, these bills would not meaningfully increase access to affordable, portable coverage for self-employed artists or creative workers.

However, there are some promising federal efforts worth looking into.

Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Suzan DelBenne have been leaders on portable benefits for some time, and their Portable Benefits for Independent Workers Pilot Program Act (S.1696/H.R.3482) would provide funding to states who want to test out new approaches to portable benefits. One could imagine their program funding lots of local and state initiatives like the ones in Dallas and New York City.

Additionally, two bills introduced as part of Senate Republican’s portable benefits package could increase coverage for creative workers. Sen. Rand Paul’s Association Health Plan Act (S.1847) would allow the self-employed and independent workers to group together to access large-group health insurance, addressing many of the affordability challenges they face on the individual market.

Meanwhile, the Independent Retirement Fairness Act (S.2217) introduced by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) allows independent workers to participate in retirement savings plans reserved for employees—specifically, Pooled Employer Plans (PEPs) and Simplified Employee Pension (SEP) plans—without affecting their status as non-employees.

Both of these bills help individual creative workers access the large risk pools that are reserved today for employees of large companies. This is a big deal, and, if structured to provide real comprehensive coverage, could be the foundation of affordable, portable benefits in this country.

Finally, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced the Pensions for All Act (S.2335) which would grant all workers – including the self-employed – access to the same pension plan that federal workers receive. These pensions would supplement Social Security (what some refer to as the OG of portable benefits), which he proposed to expand through his Social Security Expansion Act (S. 393). Together these bills could ensure retirement security for all Americans.

What should artists and creative workers prioritize in the debate over portable benefits?

We should be working together to expand the conversation to include all types of workers who need benefits – including artists and culture bearers! Workers should not have to choose between flexibility and social protections. We all deserve a safety net, no matter how we work.

To be sure, the classification debates are important. Employee classification grants not just access to employer benefits, but our whole suite of labor protections, including minimum wage, overtime, and collective bargaining rights, just to name a few. Some fear that creating benefit systems outside employer-employee relationships could normalize precarious work, undermine union organizing, and dilute labor protections.

But those fears should not stop us from building truly portable benefits for rightly classified independent workers. One might hope for a government that not only debates the issues on the merits, but works together to creatively solve problems. Watching our current partisan hellscape play out in this Congressional hearing on the topic doesn’t inspire much confidence, however.

Which is why it’s on us, as members of the creative sector, to jump into these debates. We should be clarifying when a portable benefits bill helps us, and when it decidedly does not. We should build coalitions with other gig workers to call for the same. And we should demand real solutions, like the ones in Dallas and New York City, from our elected representatives.

It’s time to take back the debate – not just for creative workers, but for all gig workers who need affordable, portable benefits.

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What We’re Reading and Viewing

This is what we are enjoying this month!

• Artists at Work: Rethinking Policy for Artistic Careers by Joanna Woronkowicz which takes an in-depth look at artists’ careers and the policies we need.

• California released its first strategic plan for the creative economy. We were excited to dig into its commitment to workforce development and individual artists’ livelihoods.

• NORC at the University of Chicago released the National Survey of Artists: Findings Report to understand and make visible the lives and livelihoods of U.S. artists.

• The movie, Good Fortune, explores the gig economy and is on our watch list!

Field Happenings

• The Woodman Family Foundation (WFF) has launched its “Housing Stability Grant for Artists” in NYC, offering ~$30,000 over 3 years to visual artists.

• In September, Doris Duke Foundation and the DC Jazz Festival hosted Creative Labor, Creative Conditions: A National Convening on Artistic Labor & Advocacy a one-day conference in Washington, D.C.

• A great policy win for California! SB 456 passed and was signed by Governor Newsom! The bill removes barriers to artists’ work.

• AB1340 gives Uber drivers (~800,000 rideshare workers) the right to collectively bargain!

• Ireland passed guaranteed income for artists as a permanent scheme! Following a successful 3-year pilot, this government-funded policy will provide 2,000 artists across Ireland with $1500 per month of no-strings-attached cash.

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