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PUBLIC TESTIMONY

Testimony by Sarah Calderon, Executive Director of Creatives Rebuild New York

6:24:43

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124 sec

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Sarah Calderon, Executive Director of Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY), testified about the need for increased budgetary support for artists and creative workers in New York City. She highlighted CRNY's $125 million statewide initiative and emphasized the economic challenges faced by artists in the city.

Calderon requested a baseline of $75 million for the FY2025 budget for cultural spending.
She proposed exploring feasible policies and programs for creative workers to access high-quality healthcare benefits.
Calderon suggested considering portable benefits as a solution to support nontraditional workers in maintaining benefits across different jobs and gigs.

Sarah Calderon

6:24:43

wasn't called before.

6:24:45

Thank you, chair of Erin City Council.

6:24:47

CRNY is a hundred and $25,000,000 statewide initiative that provided guaranteed income for 2,400 artists and worked with a hundred community based organizations to provide artist employment and benefits.

6:24:58

There is a huge demand for this work.

6:25:00

22,000 artists applied for guaranteed income and 2,700 artists applied to employ artists to help support their mission based work.

6:25:08

I am here to help make the case to our leaders at city hall that New York needs to dedicate concerted budgetary resources to supporting creatives and artists in the city and urge you to allocate resource resources for an intergovernmental effort to advance this work.

6:25:23

As we've already heard, right, New York's creative economy is critical contributor to our overall economy, but we face enormous challenges as you've heard from all of my wonderful colleagues earlier today.

6:25:34

Despite the outsized impact on the economy, artists often live on the edge of hardship and economic uncertainty.

6:25:40

60% of artists in New York are making less than $25,000, and more than half of artists have no financial safety net and carry unmanageable debt.

6:25:50

Right?

6:25:50

We also found that 63% reported that if there was an unexpected 400 doll dollar emergency that came up, they would un be unable to pay for it.

6:25:59

We are asking, therefore, that we both have a baseline of $75,000,000 for the budget for '25 '20 '20 '5, which is, again, only 25¢ for every hundred dollar that's the New York City spends on culture, but or extends spends in general.

6:26:14

But we are also asking that we think about feasible, creative, and sustainable policies and programs for creative workers to access high quality health care benefits and to think across sectors in ways that could help support artists better.

6:26:28

One solution is portable benefits, which enables nontraditional workers to accumulate employer contributions and maintains benefits that stay within the worker stay with the worker across their different jobs

6:26:39

gigs and possibly to support a pilot portable benefits program.

6:26:46

Thank you.

Lauren Comito

6:26:39

and

UNKNOWN

6:26:44

Your time's expired.

6:26:45

Thank you.

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Testimony by Lauren Miller, Co-Director of HERE Arts Center on Arts Funding

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Testimony by Christopher Leon Johnson, Member of the Public