I’ve seen a lot of funding appeals in the last few months talking about how dire things are and how desperately your support is needed. This is not one of those appeals.

What I’ve also seen a lot of lately is abundance – an abundance of personal involvement in civic life; a wealth of understanding about what artists of all kinds add to our world; a rich desire to participate in creativity and art-making; an investment in those things that offer meaning and relevance in chaotic, consumer-saturated lives.

I feel particularly blessed to work in a field that is more focused on people and process than on product. Artists’ communities are like research-and-development labs for the arts, providing artists of all disciplines with time, space, and support for the creation of new work and the exploration of new ideas. The products of that work – books, paintings, songs and symphonies, poems and plays, designs and dances, films and photographs – often surface months or years later. And while supporting museums, bookstores, orchestras and theaters is essential in providing artists avenues to showcase their work, artists’ communities offer an opportunity to invest in creation, in the leaps of imagination and risk-taking that compel a person to put pen to page, or fingers to keyboard, or brush to canvas in the first place. These moments often happen in private, away from public view, but they happen every day at any one of more than 800 artists’ communities around the world.

Supporting artists in this work is what artists’ communities do best, and what the Alliance does best is advocate for and support the field as a collective voice, knowing there are things the Alliance can accomplish that no single artists’ community can do on its own. For example: partnering with the National Endowment for the Arts to create a new funding category just for artists’ communities; leading funding consortia that have brought more than $1 Million in new funding to our members in the last few years; bringing together national leaders to develop strategies for comprehensive support of today’s artists; and providing consolidated information resources to artists on the wealth of residency opportunities available to them. With tens of thousands of artists served by Alliance member organizations each year, support for the Alliance is an investment in the largest network of support for creative artists.

We are excited by the work we are doing, by the successes of the field, and the opportunities of the new year. Our plans are ambitious, our goals are vivid, and our enthusiasm is abundant. We’d love your partnership in this work, and hope you will support the Alliance with a gift of any size.

Thank you so much, and warmest regards for the new year,

Caitlin

To make a gift to the Alliance, please complete our secure online giving form at www.artistcommunities.org/donation or download a giving form. All donors will receive a written receipt of his/her gift.