Transcriber: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Melanie Rozes
Recently, I spoke with a congressional staffer about the economy,
and I said the creative arts are critical to economic recovery.
Evidence shows that the creative arts encourage and foster growth
and community economic development.
We need to support the arts.
The staffer sympathetically looked at me, smiled and said,
"You know, arts spending is discretionary."
That conventional wisdom, those words of conventional wisdom
are popular in political circles, because they're expedient justifications
for the reduction and elimination of government funding for the arts.
We need a reality check.
The creative D.C. Action Agenda done in 2010,
revealed that the arts have a significant role to play in our local economy.
D.C. area is the forth largest creative center in the United States.
Ten percent of all of the jobs in the district alone
are directly creative positions.
It does not count the indirect jobs.
Five billion dollars are spent in wages
and seven thousand small businesses are direct creative enterprises.
So, I wonder, "Can it be that 10% of our economy is discretionary?"
We have to make a decision.
If we cannot commit to spending and supporting the arts,
we have to build a better system.
How do we do that? We need to shift the paradigm.
We need to think about shifting our thinking from money,
giving money to the arts, to one in which we invest in the arts.
And there's a little bit of a trick here,
because it's not about the principle goal being a financial return.
Our return on investment needs to be impact on our communities.
We need to think about this in a two-step process.
We need to think about what creatives need to succeed.
Quite frankly, this is rather simple,
because creative businesses need the same thing
that businesses in any other sector or industry require.
The key is figuring out how we provide those needs and meet those needs,
in a way that will create greater impact for our communities.
The second step is developing a strategy for a supportive infrastructure.
What do we need to make this happen?
The Washington Area Lawyers for The Arts is releasing a white paper next month,
and I worked on that with a team of people from George Washington Law School,
and what we discovered was there are lots of places
that have already found solutions to this issue.
There is no need to recreate the wheel on this.
We have places to look, both in the United States and internationally.
So, if we have some models to go on,
we then need to decide what programs and initiatives we need to create,
a supportive infrastructure, so that we can get this accomplished.
We need to also think about whether the laws we have
in our jurisdiction support creative businesses.
I'll give you an example.
The number one problem I hear from people in our community is space.
That sounds crazy, because we have lots of space in the district.
But people don't have the right space,
they can't figure out how to get access to the space,
they don't know how to connect to space and they can't afford the space.
Now, there are people who have been out there, working on these issues,
and we need to figure out a better way to make this happen.
We need to identify: what kind of space do creatives need to work?
And, once we've identified what that looks like,
we then need to make sure that we have a supportive infrastructure,
so that people can get access to that space affordably,
and for what they needed to use the space for.
I will follow, by asking a simple question:
Does it matter?
And what I will tell you is why it matters to me.
That's me, when I was little.
And I was surrounded by the arts.
No, my parents weren't artists, or photographers, or musicians, or poets.
They were not creative people, but they saw the value of the arts,
and they saw the value that arts played in the community.
I'm now a mom. I have two kids.
My son came up to me the other day and he said,
"Mom, I know what my destiny is."
I thought, "Wow, OK." (Laughter)
"What's that?"
"My destiny is to feed people's imaginations."
(Sigh)
"My destiny is to feed people's imaginations."
If we are going to feed people's imaginations,
we need to abandon a system
that pulls creative arts programing from ours schools.
Divests money from our creative businesses
and bankrupts our cultural institutions.
We need to adopt a system that invests in our future and our community.
Thank you.
(Applause)