detail of It Happened in November, Kani Alavi, mural, Berlin Wall

JOIN THE ARTS Community Response to Proposed Changes IN City of Austin Cultural Funding Programs

After a nearly eighteen month review process, The City’s Cultural Arts Division recently released recommendations for broad, equity-focused changes in how the City of Austin funds cultural arts. As with any change in long standing practices, those affected have questions and concerns. To ensure that this feedback is heard at all levels of City government, ACA is coordinating a community response on behalf of our members. This effort will include:

• collecting, collating and delivering questions to Cultural Arts staff and its consultants, MJR Partners

• coordinating a working group to draft specific oversight requests to the Arts Commission

• coordinating a working group to draft a letter to City Council bringing their attention to this process

Before joining this effort, it is important you visit the City’s Cultural Funding Review site, watch the presentations and read through the slides. In addition to the information available from the city, and based on our best understanding of the current proposals, here are some answers to the most frequently asked questions we have heard so far:

• current CORE funding programs such as Organizational Support, Project Support and Community Initiatives will be entirely replaced by three new programs: Thrive, Elevate and Nexus

• NEXUS is the smallest new proposed program, offering $3000-$6000 contracts for community activation and collaboration between artists and community-based entities, with an overall funding amount of $500,000

• THRIVE is a cultural growth fund that invests in both programming and organizational support for African American, Native American, Asian, Hispanic/Latino, Middle Eastern, and Pacific Islander organizations, limited to 10 contracts, $50,000 - $175,000 each, so the total funding for this program appears to be variable

• ELEVATE, the program with the bulk of the allocation, is specifically for funding productions, with contracts capped at $100,000; peer panels will still be utilized for scoring applications in this category

• for-profit businesses will be eligible for Cultural Arts Funding, though parameters are still to be determined; this will also make fiscal sponsorship optional for all programs

• overall funding caps will be lowered and funding amounts decoupled from organizational budgets

• though arts education, professional development and artists services programming are eligible for funding by Hotel Occupancy Taxes under Texas Code 351.101(a)(4)’s provisions authorizing expenditures for the “encouragement” and “improvement” of the arts, it is unclear whether the City’s proposed programs will fund such activities