🌱🐰💰 Keeping art and culture alive

The Good, the Bunny and the Money is our monthly take on the latest impactful success stories from across the U.S. and around the World.‌
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‌'🌱 The Good' looks at nonprofits leading the way in impactful change;

'💰 The Money' takes a dive into the private-sector champions driving financial inclusion & economic development; and

'🐰 The Bunny' showcases the most promising collaborations between nonprofits and businesses working hand in hand for the People and the Planet.

Last week we celebrated ‘Giving Tuesday’ a day of global giving when everyone everywhere can do something to support the good causes that mean so much to us all. Art & Culture is the lynchpin of our society, research suggests that public arts have a positive impact on community engagement: the chances that performing arts attendees will volunteer or participate in community meetings are 3.8 times greater than for non-attendees, regardless of demographic traits. At the same time, Arts & culture nonprofits have been hit hard by the pandemic: The average reported decrease in revenues equated to 68% while the number of full-time employees fell by 12%. In this month's edition we look at champions across non-profits, the private sector and collaborations between the two, who are leading the charge in donating for arts & culture.

🌱 The Good: An incubator for promising arts & culture

Innovation: Inspired by innovative models in business and tech, American Arts Incubator (AAI) is a reinvention of the incubator model for the art world — a dynamic entrepreneurial system that supports artists in developing their ideas into commercially viable creative products.  Each incubator addresses a social challenge such as economic equity, youth empowerment and gender equality. The AAI then sends a U.S. artist abroad to collaborate with local communities in each exchange country during a month-long incubator. These creative collaborations transfer skills in art, technology, and entrepreneurship to explore the social challenge in question and AAI then provides small grants to prototype creative projects to the challenge.  Each exchange culminates in an open house that showcases the prototypes and solicits public feedback.
Impact: Over 6 years of cohorts AAI has developed a network of artists and organizations working for change in their communities to enable creative collaboration to scale opportunities across the globe.

We spoke before… about our partner Youth Spirit Artworks  who use art to empower youth & homeless people to build job skills & self-confidence in San Francisco Bay Area

🐰 The Bunny: Yahoo and non-profits helping amplify Black artists using NFT's

Yahoo is collaborating with a range of private and non-profit partners to launch a new initiative aimed at amplifying Black artists and their work across the digital ecosystem. Black Art. Black Stories. Black Voices. is a multifaceted initiative commissioning 8 artists to create a piece of art reflecting their unique stories. Yahoo will then guide these artists through a cutting edge, digital transformation in the crypto art world, connecting them to new audiences. Kaleidoscope, an immersive production studio, will lead the mentorship and education into NFT marketplace, by providing access to some of the most impactful and future oriented professionals from the spatial art community. Yahoo Creative Studios will then take the artists’ original, physical, artwork and transform it into crypto art. It will then be made viewable in a 3D AR environment and then this Disrupt Space collection will be available to purchase, in an exclusive auction, on leading NFT marketplace, SuperRare, in December.

I'm an Artist why should I NFT? Provides access to a new market where digital art is currently attracting a premium (Critical to supporting your ongoing work) Also, NFTs have a feature that you can enable that will pay you a percentage every time the NFT is sold or changes hands, making sure that if your work gets super popular and balloons in value, you’ll see some of that benefit.

💰 The Money: Smartify the ‘Shazam’ of the art world

Challenge: The imposition of restrictions around the globe confined people to their homes and provided a new captive audience for museums and galleries. To capitalise on this shift the upfront costs for museums and galleries can be high, dissuading some institutions from shifting.

Enter Smartify: Which digitises museums / galleries exhibitions to engage audiences remotely with virtual tours, online events and on-demand courses. Embedded events, gift shops and ticketing all prompt audiences to buy or donate when they are most engaged. Not to discourage visitors to brick and mortar the app augments in-person experience, allowing users to instantly identify artworks and access information about them, by simply scanning them with a smartphone.

Impact:

• Access: Supporting over 300 museum partners access more than 2 million arts and culture lovers worldwide
• Affordable digitisation: The cost of Smartify comes in at only 2%-10% of the cost of a custom app reducing the barriers to adoption for museums/galleries
• Never in competition: As a social enterprise, Smartify donate time, services and a portion of profits to the venues they collaborate with.

🥕 What else we’re munching:

• A Manifesto for the Future Stage - how technology and funding innovation can preserve the theatre
• How Africa’s Cultural Institutions are Leading the Way in Audience Development and Research
• NFTs are disrupting the music industry. But fans aren't buying it
• EU aims to boost innovation in ailing cultural, creative sectors and the UK release a ‘boundless’ creativity report

Image Credits: Cover Photo by note Thanun via Unsplash; Statista; Smartify; Artnet

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