Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries and International Relations

Quiet down, please. Good afternoon and welcome to today's New York City Council hearing from the Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries, International Intergroup Relations. At this point, I'd like to remind everyone to silence all electronic devices and at no point anyone to approach the dais, additionally known as to approach the witness table, unless invited to testify. If you would like to sign up for in-person testimony, please feel free to sign up by filling out a slip located outside in the hallway.

Chair, we are ready to begin.

Good afternoon. I am Deputy Speaker Nantasha Williams, Chair of the Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries, and International Relations. Welcome to our oversight hearing on what's next for Create NYC. In addition to our oversight topic today, we will be hearing the legislation. Proposed Resolution Number 163A, which I sponsored, which would designate the 4th week of November as the Shangri-La Week in the City of New York in celebrating the Shangri-La indelible impact on the music of the 1960s and ever since.

Resolution Number 164, which I also sponsored, which would call on the New York State Legislature to pass and the governor to sign legislation to designate Kwanzaa as a public holiday in New York. And proposed Resolution Number 625A, sponsored by Council Member Farah Lewis, which would declare October as Reggaetón Heritage Month in the City of New York to honor the legacy of reggaetón as a prominent expression of Afro-Caribbean and Latin American identity, and to recognize New York's pivotal role in facilitating the blend of cultures that is at the heart of this grassroots musical genre.

Before we hear Oh, and then also Resolution Number 186, sponsored by Council Member Amanda Farias, which would declare— which would declare and designate November 28th annually as Albanian Independence Day in the City of New York.

Before we hear about the resolutions and our oversight topic, let me say a few words about a perfect meetup of the arts and the libraries. It happened on October 6th, when the Brooklyn Library held a noteworthy event at the Central Library commemorating Banned Books Week. In February 2024, this committee held a hearing entitled New York City Libraries Fight Against Banning Books.

In that hearing, the committee honored the remarkable work that our libraries were doing to support the freedom to read for people throughout the US, not just here in our city. Our public libraries are still doing that work in the midst of an even more dire and repressive circumstance nationally, and we commend them for it. Brooklyn Public Library's October 6th event was entitled On Artistic Freedom.

It was a panel discussion by notable and award-winning visual and performing artists, producers, and publishers. All the panelists were outstanding as they spoke about censorship of artists and writers and performers in our current national climate. I want to give a special shout out to visual artist and children's book author and illustrator Christopher Mays, Among many other works, Chris wrote and illustrated Black Cat, and I have the book.

That's my new thing, bringing books. Illustrated Black Cat as one of the best children's books ever. Now his newest works are displayed throughout the lobby of Brooklyn Central Library. They are a series of large stained glass works that capture a group of New York City kids bicycling past the landmarks of the city with a kind of youthful exuberance and freedom of collective movement under the night sky.

In the words of the library, these literally brilliant works are represented on paper in Chris's newest children's book entitled Night Ride. Further, Chris has made 20 40-foot tapestries, which are also on display. On them, you can see giant characters from well-known banned books, reminding us what can be lost when books are banned in schools and public libraries across the country.

Thank you. As Chris said, it was important to him that his art be displayed not just in museums, but also in a public library, because he was, as he said, born into book worlds. His father was the late and very great young adult books author Walter Dean Myers, with whom Chris worked on the well-known book-long poetic masterpiece Harlem, among other projects.

Our committee is especially happy this month that our purview is both culture and libraries, because what a pair they make. Now let me invite Councilmember Lewis to speak about her resolution.

Thank you, Deputy Speaker and Chair Williams, for your leadership and for championing this resolution through the committee. Today I am proud and generally excited to bring forward Resolution 625, designating October as Reggaetón Heritage Month in New York City. And I want to tell you why this one is personal to me and some advocates that we have here in the room today.

Gregorio Mayers, founder of the Panamanian 507 Roundtable, and Dr. Mita from the Evenida Records. I grew up in Brooklyn. I was a dancer, and as a dancer, I had to learn every genre of music to choreograph routines and showcases, from jazz to hip-hop to Latin styles. And reggaetón was not optional, it was essential. Reggaetón builds body isolations, rhythmic musicality, and dynamic hip mobility that translates across every urban and Latin style there is.

During undergrad at LIU Brooklyn, my classmates and I didn't just enjoy reggaetón, we studied it. Our professors integrated it into our modern dance curriculum because it belongs there. It is a rich, cultural, layered, and physically demanding art form that deserves to be taken seriously. And that tradition continues right now on college campuses across this city. LIU Brooklyn and NYU Tandon, Pratt, Brooklyn College students are all gathering, networking, and building community around reggaetón.

It is not just music, it's a cultural home. But this resolution is also about honoring where it all began. In the 1980s, Afro-Caribbeans in Panama took Jamaican reggae and dancehall and translated it into Spanish, giving birth to reggae español. Pioneers like El General, Chico Man, Carlitos Sol and Renato laid a foundation that would change music forever. When El General came to New York City, he worked with Caribbean producers to craft the fusion of dancehall, reggae, and hip-hop.

That world would come to be known as reggaetón. Puerto Rican icons Daddy Yankee, Ivy Queen, Bad Bunny carried that legacy to every corner of the globe. New York City was part of that story, and it is time we made that official. Thank you. Reggaeton is a symbol of cultural identity. It is an economic powerhouse for Latin music.

It is a platform for social and political expression. It is a living history that all New Yorkers deserve to learn, celebrate, and carry forward. We owe it to our Panamanian, Puerto Rican, and Afro-Caribbean communities to enshrine that recognition right here in New York City. I urge my colleagues to support Resolution 625. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember. Now let me say a few words about my resolutions as well. Was there a greater girl group of the 1960s than the Shangri-La? Those of us from Queens and their fans around the world would argue that there was not. Lead vocalist Mary Weiss and her older sister Betty, who is the sole surviving member of the group, teamed up with the twins Marge and Marianne at Andrew Jackson High School in Cambria Heights, which is in my district, and made history with their Billboard Hot 100 number 1 hit, Leader of the Pack, in November 1964.

They knocked the Supremes' Baby Love out of number 1 spot. The Shangri-La had 6 top 40 singles between 1964 and 1966, starting in the summer of 1964 with Remember Walking in the Sand, which climbed to number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and gave audiences its memorable, wrenching— I'm not reading this out loud. Oh no, no, no lyric.

The Shangri-La, 4 teenagers from Queens— I'm gonna kill Regina, um, because she created this— have vocalists for the past 60 years, from the Ramones to Debbie Harry to Amy Winehouse. No one did it better.

Kwanzaa is an African American and Pan-African holiday honoring African history, culture, family, and community. The word Kwanzaa comes from the Swahili words meaning first fruits and refers to the harvest festival celebrated in Africa. Kwanzaa was created in 1966 by Dr. Karenga, chair of Africana Studies at California State University in Long Beach. and founder of the African American Cultural Center.

In his annual Kwanzaa message in December 2024, Karenga wrote that during Kwanzaa, we practice the ritual of candle lighting called Lifting Up the Light That Lasts, based not only on the history of our people and practice, but also from the sacred teachings of our ancestors. Karenga explained the 7 principles of Kwanzaa, which are unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith.

In 2012, President Obama wrote that Kwanzaa serves as a time of reflection, taking lessons learned from our past and looking forward to a more promised tomorrow. He wrote that we must recommit ourselves to building a country where all Americans have the opportunity to achieve their dreams, making Kwanzaa the 7-day period beginning December 26th and ending January 1st, a public holiday for all New Yorkers statewide would reaffirm our state's commitment to diversity while designating a time for celebrating and preserving African Americans' heritage and honoring their contributions to the cultural, political, and economic life of all New Yorkers.

Finally, let me turn to the topic of our oversight hearing: what's next for CreateNYC? As everyone in this room knows, New York City is the cultural capital of the world. Not by accident, but because generations of creative visionaries have made this city their home. From Broadway to the Bronx, from world-renowned museums to neighborhood theaters, community art centers, and grassroots cultural institutions, our city's creative spirit is woven into the fabric of who we are.

In 2017, in an attempt to develop a comprehensive citywide cultural plan worthy of its peerless cultural community, New York City adopted Create New York City with a bold promise that the arts would not be a privilege reserved for a select few, but a public good accessible to every New Yorker in every borough and in every neighborhood. Nearly a decade later, that law that established Create NYC gives us an opportunity to reexamine the plan.

So the time has come for us to ask a fundamental question: has Create NYC lived up to its promise. Because while New York City's cultural institutions continue to inspire the world, the people who make our city extraordinary are facing extraordinary challenges. Artists are struggling to afford the neighborhoods they helped shape. Small cultural organizations are fighting to keep their doors open.

And too many communities still face barriers to the funding, resources, and opportunities that allow arts and culture to thrive. Cultural equity cannot simply be a phrase in a planning document or a promise made at a press conference. It must be reflected in where we invest, whose voices we elevate, whose stories we tell, and who gets to participate in the cultural life of our city.

Today's hearing is an opportunity to examine what CreateNYC has accomplished, where it has fallen short, and whether the city has established the accountability and measurable outcomes necessary to revamp the city's cultural plan and turn it from a bold vision into lasting change. And I want to acknowledge my amazing committee members here, Councilmember Lewis, Ung, and Stevens, and Osei on Zoom.

Great. And I want to thank my staff and committee staff, Priyanka, Shaquille, Alejandro, Regina, Steven, and Carolina.

And do I need to read all of this? Yes. Okay. I would like to remind everyone from the public who wishes to testify in person today that you must fill out an appearance card, which is located on the desk of the sergeant-at-arms at the back of the room. Please fill out the slip even if you have already registered to testify in advance.

When you are called, please limit your testimony to 2 minutes, whether you are testifying in person or on Zoom. I'm also going to ask my colleagues to limit their questions and comments to 5 minutes. As a reminder to all of our witnesses, please state your name prior to your testimony for the record. We are ready to start with a special panel of experts who have done important research in this field, both at the time that CreateNYC was put together and continuing through today.

They are Mark Stern and Susan Seifert. Hi. from the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania. Because of the special nature of this testimony, I am waiving the time limit. Please say your name for the record when you start your testimony. You may begin.

Thank you. My name is Mark Stern. I'm a professor— professor— professor— is it on? Nope. Okay. I'm still Marc Stern, and I'm a professor of social policy and history at the University of Pennsylvania. Do you want to introduce yourself? My name's Susan Seifert. I'm a colleague of Marc, a city planner and social urban community researcher. Good afternoon.

My colleague Susan Seifert and I founded Penn Social Impact of the Arts Project in 1994 to analyze culture's contribution to community well-being in Philadelphia and other cities. We're completing our second study of New York currently. We'd like to summarize some of our findings and their implications. Much of the discussion of culture in in the United States now focuses on its economic impact.

By contrast, SIAP, Social Impact of the Arts Project, our value proposition sees cultural opportunities as an important aspect of community well-being and as a contributor to other dimensions of well-being, including health, educational opportunities, and social connection, especially in lower-income neighborhoods. In lower and moderate income neighborhoods, cultural engagement is a form of civic engagement. In many of these neighborhoods, what SIAP calls civic clusters, intentional social action by residents and local organizations allows otherwise disadvantaged communities to enjoy more cultural engagement than their economic standing would lead us to expect.

Over the past 4 years, we've used a lot of— accumulated a lot of data on more than 5,000 nonprofit cultural providers, 15,000 for-profit cultural businesses, over a million cultural participant households, and data on 11 other dimensions of community well-being to look at the connection with the arts. To document existing cultural assets and measures community well-being for every New York neighborhood and examine how they influence each other.

The social impact of culture is embedded, however, in existing social structures. The explosion of economic inequality over the past generation has coalesced into what we call a new geography of exclusion that has tilted the playing field toward higher-income residents and neighborhoods. The graph on page 1 of the handout that we circulated gives a concise look at the structure of cultural inequality.

The line shows the overall relationship between economic well-being and cultural assets. As you can see, the line has a steep rise as you move from poorer to well-off neighborhoods. The dots on that draw— on that diagram represent particular neighborhoods that are members of one of the 3 cultural clusters that we identified in our study. High market and market clusters are affluent neighborhoods with at least an average number of cultural assets.

Civic clusters represent lower and moderate income neighborhoods like Brownsville or Flushing with more cultural assets than their economic status would predict. Civic clusters represent what we'd like every lower-income neighborhood to have: a vibrant cultural life, adequate cultural assets, and better health, education, and community engagement. Most researchers and funders tend to focus on cultural organizations in isolation. CIAP uses the idea of a neighborhood cultural ecology to shift our attention from individual cultural providers to the density of cultural assets in a neighborhood because that density implies collect— or multiplies collective impact.

We found a lot of geographic change in cities' cultural ecology over the past decade, but little change in its overall economic structure. In fact, overall cultural assets are less equally distributed today than they were a decade ago. Between 2016 and 2025, although Manhattan remained the dominant location of cultural assets in the city, many neighborhoods closed the gap.

The shift of resident artists from Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens over the past decade was the most dramatic of these changes. As the number of artists living in Brooklyn and Queens including neighborhoods like Spadestuy and Ridgewood, the number living in many Manhattan neighborhoods and what you might think of as like iconic arts neighborhoods like Chelsea, the Upper West Side, and West Village declined.

Yet, although its geography changed, the unequal distribution of cultural assets across New York's neighborhoods remained largely unchanged. Although DCLA followed the cultural plan's recommendation to address the inequitable distribution of program funds to lower-income neighborhoods, these policy changes were swamped by the city's increased economic inequality. As I mentioned, we used a variety of sources to calculate 11 dimensions of well-being in addition to cultural assets.

They range from economic well-being to health, school effectiveness, to environmental factors like pollution and heat vulnerability. We then used cluster analysis to identify 4 types of community well-being clusters: central advantage, neighborhood advantage, diverse and struggling, and concentrated disadvantage. Many community well-being— although— sorry. Many community well-being dimensions mirror neighborhoods' economic standing. In other words, residents' chances to enjoy good health, effective schools, and strong social connection are all associated with their neighborhood's per capita income.

Although most cultural cluster remained stable over the last decade. 2 sets shifted in notable ways. A number of neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens that had been disadvantaged or diverse and struggling became advantaged. And secondly, in addition, many neighborhoods, particularly some in central Brooklyn and eastern Queens, that had been concentrated disadvantaged became diverse and struggling. The net effect was to reduce the number of concentrated disadvantaged neighborhoods from 65 in 2016 to 52 in 2025, which resulted in the number of residents living in concentrated disadvantaged neighborhoods to fall from 3.1 million to 2.5 million.

In other words, over 500,000 fewer New Yorkers live in a concentrated disadvantaged neighborhood than did so a decade ago. If we turn to the relationship of cultural assets to well-being, controlled for social advantage, we found that among affluent neighborhoods, culture had no unique influence on measures of well-being. But among lower-income neighborhoods, we find significant and strong relationships between cultural assets and morbidity, birth outcomes, school effectiveness, and personal social connection.

If we translate these statistics to examine individual risks and benefits, we find that compared to other lower-income neighborhoods, living in a low-income neighborhood with more cultural assets leads to fewer strokes, fewer low-weight births, and higher math and English and language arts scores. Looking ahead, DCLA for most of its history has served as a means of funding individual nonprofit cultural providers through the Cultural Institutions Group and the Cultural Development Fund programs.

The 2018— 2017 Cultural Plan called on the agency to use what we think of as a neighborhood lens in allocating funding As a result, the city expanded the CIGs to add members outside— located outside of Manhattan and shifted CDF funding to target neighborhoods identified by the city's Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity. An earmarked fund for underserved communities increased funding to about half of CDF grantees.

Applying a neighborhood lens to funding program was a good first step, but the next phase may require the agency to think its— rethink itself more thoroughly as a neighborhood-focused agency, including changes in how it operates internally, its relationship to other city and borough agencies, and the support for grassroots effort across the 5 boroughs. In terms of neighborhood focus, we learned a lot from one of our colleagues in Philadelphia, the Reinvestment Fund, a community development financial institution.

Their slogan is build from strength. That is, to identify a neighborhood's strength and build links between it and other neighborhoods that are more vulnerable. We've learned that civic clusters are points of strength that the city could use to build other stronger neighborhoods. In some ways, cultural providers in civic clusters are already doing this. We found that CDF grantees in civic cluster neighborhoods are connecting to other community-based organizations in their neighborhood more often than those in other neighborhoods.

We also found existing examples of cultural providers employing— employing strategies to build community capacity, including community asset mapping. And here we noted the Bronx Council on the Arts was working on this. Employing community organizers to link community concerns to cultural expression. And of course, Queens Museum began using that quite a while ago. And finally, cultural organized cultural organizing to activate neighborhood spaces, with the Kensington Cultural Council in Brooklyn being an example of that.

We're likely to overlook the fact that cultural engagement is a public good. What are the economic consequences of fewer low-weight births or stronger social connection in a neighborhood? The economic consequences of these social impacts affect all New Yorkers, especially residents of lower and moderate income neighborhoods across the 5 boroughs. The city made a good choice in addressing the unequal distribution of cultural assets among neighborhoods.

It can now build on that success by refining its approach to achieve a more just city led by a more equitable cultural ecology. Thank you.

Thank you. I just have a few questions, and I appreciate your testimony. And your research— oh, you had testimony as well? No, that was joint. Okay, great. So we understand you've worked in Philadelphia and other cities before your research in New York City. Are there lessons you learned elsewhere that could be applied to New York? And I always put a caveat because New York is such a large city, you know, like Philly, it's like, I think Queens has more people than the whole city of Philly.

So I know it's like always a difficult conversation and, you know, but it's It's sometimes as New Yorkers we think we have all the answers, and like, we don't. People are doing some things better in other places. So just wondering in your research if you think there's anything that could be applied to New York City or that New York City could learn from other cities.

Well, it is true that Philadelphia and New York are very different cities, and especially the cultural— their cultural ecology are notable. In Philadelphia, one of our mayors a couple of administrations ago just decided we didn't need an office on arts and culture and just closed it down for 8 years. Fortunately, next month the city's voting on a resolution to add the office to the city charter.

So that's one of the things when we were doing— most of our original work was in Philadelphia and looking at the 2 cities together, at one point it occurred to us that when we talk about social networks in New York, it seemed like we were always talking about what we thought of as vertical networks. How did a local group connect up to his city council person, to the central— to cultural affairs department, what have you?

In Philadelphia, we don't have that amount of resources, so like groups don't spend that much time looking about that. What we found is that when they think about networks, they tend to be more horizontal networks leading out to other groups in their neighborhood. And that that's— and I guess what we realized is that would be something that we didn't see as much in New York.

And that it would be great if they could complement those vertical networks with horizontal networks. Sue, did you want to add anything? Just the horizontal networks. I mean, I think the ways Philadelphia and New York are different is the lower and moderate-income neighborhoods are more the experience we have throughout Philadelphia. I mean, we have a full-class society, blue bloods, whatever.

But still, the— in the— and I would say city council really represents a lot of connection with their districts and neighborhoods. So we were thinking that one lesson might be cultivate DCLA or cultivating or working. It's not just with other cultural groups. It's neighborhood groups, community centers, rec centers, you know, economic, you know, business improvement. We saw this happening of necessity in Philadelphia.

We're offering it to you like an idea, and it probably is happening, but we didn't pick it up in our research. You know what I mean? Because that's really at the qualitative level. That's also fieldwork, whatever. And we're thinking, you know, you get out the door, you do some of this, you'll see it, you'll document it, and you'll fund it.

Maybe more flexible types of funding than the CDC. CDF, or, you know what I mean? Because one of our things is flexible neighborhood funds, which means just small groups funding partnerships over just organizations. So it's a combination of factors that may work in parts of New York, not where New York is the world cultural capital. We don't have that.

We're not doing that. It's never where we were anyway. We're city people. We started in Philadelphia. It's a dying city. You know, we're so excited to have cities revive and people move back to all of these neighborhoods. It's a new world and full of opportunity.

Okay. So your testimony also calls attention to civic clusters. If you could just explain a little bit more about what that is and why should the City Council take an interest in civic clusters? So, you know, in the diagram I pointed to earlier in my testimony, you can see civic clusters are, in a sense, lower-income neighborhoods that have lots more cultural assets than we would predict.

The reason we think they're important is because we think every lower-income neighborhood ideally could become a civic cluster. And so we've sort of been held— and so there's 2 parts to that. One is that it's easy to— because they're— it's very easy to miss them because they are lower-income neighborhoods. And secondly, because we think if we change— if you change strategic policies, you could build out to more of them.

Build from strength. You take the civic cluster, you look at who's next to it. Our community development friends, building from strength, they're taking the stronger— they're in Baltimore, they're in Philadelphia, they're all over the country. Build from strength, and the strong ones are like a civic cluster. They're not strong compared to the World Center, you know, Broadway's, but you build out from that, build from strength to the more vulnerable neighborhoods nearby.

Okay. I guess I was— I'm struggling to visualize what that looks like. Are you saying, like, for instance, I guess I'll use my district. Like, I have, you know, there are some cultural institutions maybe that are the center for arts and culture in Southeast Queens? Are you saying like using localized hubs of individuals or organizations to then expand out within those communities?

And then I guess in relation to us as council members, like how do we then use that model to support communities, especially communities that have been historically underserved? Well, suppose there was a program that said identify points of strength across the city and fund them working in a partnership with other groups in more vulnerable parts of the district.

So I think that's what sort of what we were imagining. And I want to add, I noticed you used the word cultural institutions. So in other words, grantees, the people we know, the IRS, the 501, blah, blah, blah. When we say nonprofit, we mean not-for-profit. It doesn't mean if your parents' theater group showing at the rec center, no revenue, you know what I mean?

That's a not-for-profit at a public facility with a cultural center. The libraries, I know that's part of your committee. The immigrant— we also look at embedded programs, immigrant-serving social service organizations. So many of the immigrant-serving immigrant and foreign-born organizations are cultural in our view. We take a very broad view. We don't just define things by the official 501 nonprofit.

Everything's nonprofit that isn't making money, okay? And we try to capture that, and getting to that will take more work. It's 5 boroughs. You've got a gigantic city, get it. Just pick a couple places to start. Don't go everywhere all at once. It's gigantic here, you know. So pick a place where some of your council or some of your staff from DCLA— from— it can be city planning.

I happen to be biased toward planning. Already have a hook. You know, they're already there. But they will be cultural whether they're on your list or not. They're probably not CDF eligible, okay? Or they may have gotten it together to apply and not made it. We're just saying that's what— because we're Philadelphians and we've been able to come back so much, we can do stuff like that.

In another city, that's what we consider a 5-city study with the 5 boroughs, right? It's a little different. So you have to— Yeah.

No, I get it. And, you know, Councilmember Stevens and I have been on conversations with folks in Baltimore on a separate topic. And I think one of the things that we realize is it's not that we're not doing some of this. It's whether or not government is responding in a standardized institutional way. Because, you know, I feel like in these localized communities, a lot of that, like, horizontal networking is happening.

But what I find and what we found And if anyone else has any other questions, I'll open up to my colleagues, is that, you know, because New York City is such a big city, our government infrastructure is also not malleable. So it is not flexible to certain types of change, to how we allocate money to different groups, especially for specific city agencies.

And that is an area of opportunity because I think that we could better serve community, whether it be arts and culture or youth violence, is sort of the topic that we've been talking to the folks in Baltimore about the way that their governments are able to adjust. Like, it seems like almost impossible here. So yeah, I do appreciate that.

I don't know if anyone has any other questions, comments. Okay, great. Well, thank you so much. Well, thanks very much for listening to us. Yes. Thanks. No worries. I love Philadelphia. I do. It's one of my favorite cities. You're welcome at any time. Yeah.

I love Philly. Okay. And now we'll be calling up the administration. So thank you so much for your testimony. I look forward to speaking to you all offline. We are going to ask DCLA to come up to the witness table. And in accordance with the rules of the council, I'm going to ask committee counsel to administer the affirmation to the witness.

Thank you. Good afternoon. If you could please raise your right hands. Do you affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in your testimony before this committee and to respond honestly to councilmember questions? Commissioner Vig? I do. Derek Wang? I do. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, everyone.

First of all, just very grateful for Mark and Susan, so thank you for that. Good afternoon, Deputy Speaker Dr. Williams and members of the committee. I'm Dia Vig, Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of New York. I'm here to testify on today's topic. What's Next for CreateNYC, and I'm joined by several members of my team from the agency.

I'm excited to be with you here today in part because the 2017 CreateNYC Cultural Plan coincided with my first stint at Cultural Affairs. I learned so much that I still carry with me from supporting the team that built the original plan. A very small group of us then condensed those hundreds of strategies into the 2019 Action Plan.

Broadly speaking, CreateNYC has proven to have great impact where it set strong, broad strategies that could guide agency efforts around equity. It fell short when it named dozens of discrete programs at varying scales and created indicators that proved hard to implement or track. Today, I want to reflect honestly on 10 years of the CreateNYC plan by examining what worked, what didn't, and what we're doing in the present day to address some of its bolder, more evergreen ideas.

I also want to be frank about what we need to do better. One inescapable fact is how much the world around us changed after the plan was released. The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped our entire city and put stresses on our cultural community we could hardly imagine in 2017. A new federal administration has weaponized some of the plan's foundations, radically shifting how we can approach diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Seismic changes like these require our approach in planning and policymaking to change too. In testimony, I will talk through the 5 objectives outlined in the CreateNYC Action Plan. I want to examine what has accomplished— what was accomplished under each objective, where we still need to focus, and what we're doing in the present day to achieve real meaningful change.

The 2019 CreateNYC Action Plan was our effort to streamline the density and complexity of the original plan while still maintaining its core priorities. I remember working with Derek Wang, my colleague next me, and others writing out hundreds of Post-it notes and index cards to distill the original plan into something more manageable and effective. Ultimately, we boiled the 2017 plan's 180 pages into 5 broad objectives.

Objective 1 was increase equitable funding and support for culture, especially in historically underserved communities. This objective gave the agency a mandate to look into our funding practices with a lens towards equity. Since FY18, more than $21.7 million of CDF funding has been allocated to groups in underserved neighborhoods. An admissions fee arrangement with the Met Museum announced in 2019 provided an additional $2.8 million distributed to 175 groups across both the CDF and CIG.

The latter example shows how a broad mandate could give the agency room to respond to new opportunities, ones that couldn't be anticipated by the plan but could still be harnessed to achieve its objectives. Thanks to the budget increases for DCLA following the release of the plan, we were also able to increase funding across the CDF and target the smaller CIGs for increased operating subsidies.

The FY26 CDF distributed $74.3 million to 1,171 cultural groups. The year the plan was released, the CDF provided just over $40 million to 950 groups. Last year, the agency also added 5 members to the cultural institutions group in each of the 5 boroughs, the largest such expansion since the 1970s. This objective also committed to increase funding for individual artists.

While the strategies named included grant programs under the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment and our own regrant partnerships with the Borough Arts Council, this is an area of the plan that lacked much substance and consequently has lacked much impact. It is a priority for me as Commissioner. Another strategy was exploring more flexible and multi-year support. Starting in FY23, the agency did expand multi-year support to all eligible CDF grantees.

This year, 602 CDF groups were in a multi-year cycle, more than half of the grantee pool. We also created new ways to educate potential grantees on the process, including a virtual application seminar. Our recently released racial equity plan takes these strategies further with the goal of giving people back their time. In it, we commit to conducting a review of all application and reporting requirements to simplify processes.

We also commit to significantly expanding the ways we conduct outreach, something you rightly pushed for during our budget hearings earlier this year, Deputy Speaker Williams. Finally, this objective outlines strategies to improve cultural access for historically marginalized groups of artists, audiences, and cultural workers. For this, the agency launched the CreateNYC Disability Forward Fund and Language Access Fund. Together, these programs have provided more than 700 grants totaling over $7 million to organizations serving these communities.

It also calls out our partnership with the council to administer initiatives like the Cultural Immigrant Initiative and Coalition of Theaters of Color and the launch of library's Culture Pass program. To date, Culture Pass has provided more than 568,000 free reservations to cultural institutions. institutions for New Yorkers. Another program called out in the plan, IDNYC, has provided 806,000 free cultural memberships.

Objective 2 in the CreateNYC Action Plan was cultivate inclusive practices in the cultural sector. I want to take a moment to recognize former Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl for heralding DEI within the cultural workforce as one of his primary policy agencies, which was not always an easy effort. One of the signature outcomes of this CreateNYC objective was requiring members of the CIG to adopt formal DEI plans.

Earlier this year, DCLA's CIG team and myself had nearly 30 calls with members of the CIG to learn about the progress they've made on their plans in lieu of final reports. They have done critical work, from audits of hiring practices and anti-oppression trainings for staff and board to hiring senior-level diversity officers officers and creating new pipeline programs for workers from diverse backgrounds.

It's clear that when DEI is prioritized consistently and over time, we see results. We continue to see obstacles for cultural workers to advance into mid-career and leadership roles within institutions, and consequently, the Racial Equity Plan explicitly focuses goals on this part of the workforce. The REP, Racial Equity Plan, recommits us to the CUNY Cultural Corps, which has placed over 1,100 CUNY students in paid internships at dozens of cultural institutions.

Thank you. institutions since it was first launched. While it was launched before 2017, the Cultural Corps was able to receive long-term baseline funding thanks to CreateNYC.

Objective 3 from the action plan is to strengthen connections between the cultural sector and government. It names new funding programs, partnerships like a summit on immigration that I was proud to organize, and office hours with the commissioner, a series of direct engagements with the commissioner launched for CreateNYC that I revived when I started as Commissioner earlier this year.

CreateNYC has also spurred the creation of the city's Office of Nightlife. The office has opened new pathways to support— for support and collaboration between our nightlife and DIY arts venues and city government. From ending the March Task Force to increasing safety through Narcan trainings, ONL has been a transformative conduit between a previously overlooked sector in our city and local officials.

Since starting in 2018, the office has resolved hundreds of quality of life and venue safety cases and helped to save places like Lot Radio in Brooklyn from shuttering. Another development that has reshaped our work in this area is the NYC Create in Place program. Launched in 2024, Create in Place built on this model and puts several key recommendations from CreateNYC and focuses on helping cultural organizations to navigate real estate challenges.

It supports CreateNYC's citywide coordination goals by working with over a dozen city agencies, including DCP, SBS, EDC, and MoMA to address real estate regulatory and other challenges. Since its launch, the initiative has supported more than 100 creative small businesses and nonprofit arts organizations across all 5 boroughs and reached more than 800 people. When crises— when crises strike, like the fire that tore through dozens of artists and creative workspaces in Red Hook last year, Create+ Play served as a crucial connector between those affected and the resources that can help them recover.

In Red Hook, we secured space to triage damaged artworks and equipment and secured 75 artists and small businesses SBA loans for recovery. Through Create in Place, we've recently been working closely with DCP to make sure that the cultural community, including the 37 DCLA grantees operating in the area, is involved at the ground floor of the South of Prospect rezoning effort in Brooklyn.

During the pandemic, DCLA's primary focus was on emergency response and recovery. The pandemic forged new networks, advocacy groups, and mutual aid efforts that have reshaped how the cultural sector organizes and how we share information. Culture at 3, members of which are present in the room today, has become an indispensable forum for communicating with the sector. I've joined the calls to meet with participants and take questions.

We've also connected other agencies like COGE and MOERJ to share information about their programs.

The 4th objective of the action plan was to address the city's affordability crisis for the cultural sector. The Affordable Real Estate for Artists, or AREA program, was one strategy named here. The program, supported with $10 million in capital funds, supported the creation of 165 units of affordable workspace in city-funded capital projects before it was later sunset. We were also able to secure ArtBuild 5,000 square— 50,000, excuse me, square feet in the Brooklyn Army Terminal, giving more than 100 working artists access to long-term long-term affordable workspace.

Another strategy was to include cultural organizations in city-led development projects to provide affordable long-term space. From the Brownsville Arts Center and Apartments to the People's Theater Project in Inwood to Indie Space's new facility on Manhattan's West Side to Casa Belongo in El Barrio, this is an area that has produced exciting new opportunities for culture to be integrated into the fabric of our city in sustainable affordable spaces.

However, the affordability crisis remains the most pressing and layered challenge facing the field today, and it is my explicit mandate to use all levers available to DCLA to address this.

The final objective of the action plan was to provide high-quality arts education for all NYC school students. This is as important a commitment as it is difficult to distill into a few indicators. The Arts Office is advancing equity by developing sequential pre-K to 12 arts pathways across all 5 arts disciplines: dance, music, theater, visual arts, and media arts.

They've increased arts education funding across NYC Public Schools and the Arts Office from $516 million in FY24 to approximately $563 million in FY25. The City Council plays an important role in this, providing nearly $4 million in grants to 223 schools in all City Council districts for additional arts education services in the most recent school year. While we celebrate this work of the DOE Arts Office, we are eager to collaborate with the DOE to go farther for our students.

DCLA supports arts education in public schools in a myriad of ways. In FY24, 369 CDF grantees implemented projects that included an education program that served K-12 students. 148 organizations received CASA designations from the City Council, which we're proud to administer on your behalf. And through Materials for the Arts, we are the largest provider of free art supplies to the public school systems.

MFTA also offers 300 field trip— free field trips to Title I schools each year. In the CIG, the public science institutions are a pillar of science education in our schools through programs like the council-funded Urban Advantage. New York Hall of Science in Queens is co-located with the Universal Pre-K Center and advised on the creation of 3 other public education facilities. in the borough.

As much as our city has changed in the past decade, many of the conditions and challenges have remained consistent. The cost of living crisis was already devastating our city before the pandemic. In the 10 years since CreateNYC, it's only gotten worse. Addressing this crisis for our cultural community is my mandate and laser focus under this administration. Just last month, Mayor Mamdani and I joined with local arts councils, to announce that we are doubling grant awards to artists from $5,000 to up to $10,000, the first increase in nearly 20 years.

We were able to move forward based on conversations with working artists that we've been having and begin to address an overlooked goal of CreateNYC. We've also launched partnerships like the TDF Ticket for Teens program, a free Met Museum membership for SNAP recipients, and the Met Opera Opera for All initiative to make sure that all New Yorkers can afford to participate in our city's cultural life.

In our racial equity plan, we commit to creating baseline indicators for CDF, exploring general operating and expanding multi-year support for organizations, and greater data transparency. We will soon roll out an enhanced NYC open dataset that includes key information like EINs and geographic information, allowing researchers and advocates to better analyze our funding patterns. Our record-setting budget allocation of $323 million for FY27 adopted by Mayor Mamdani and the City Council is a step toward escaping the scarcity mindset that often forces important reforms to be put on the back burner.

This includes a $10 million cultural stability fund aimed at addressing the financial precarity our sector faces due to the affordability crisis. The plan was big, a valiant attempt to make sure that the many New Yorkers who took the time to contribute to the process were heard and reflected in the final result. The 1,000+ artists, cultural workers, and residents we've engaged since I became commissioner, from Latinx arts groups to literary orgs to artists across the boroughs to nightlife workers and so many more, have reaffirmed how important it is for us in city leadership to listen to the concerns, ideas, feedback, and community solutions.

The goal is to continue these sessions with an ongoing forum and to synthesize and share the learnings. Being in conversations with our constituents is great, but it is only meaningful when it leads to material changes. We are committed to both. We look forward to sharing what we learned from our listening sessions, where we've been collecting notes, transcripts, ideas, and feedback to identify patterns and priorities across the city.

We would also love to work together with the council to organize sessions to hear directly from constituents in your district. Thank you for the time to testify today. I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you.

Thank you, Commissioner. I'm going to toss it to my colleagues. I know, um, some of them have to go. Council Member Stevens. Hi, good afternoon. Um, I have a couple of questions I'm going to ask, but I just wanted to just make a couple of statements even around some of the testimony, even around like the CASA designations and things like that.

It's always really frustrating because we only get 15 CASAs. I have 55 schools in my district. So even when that's like kind of listed as something that you guys are doing in collaboration with the council. It's very frustrating because we have to do the CASAs because it is— arts is not a priority in a lot of our schools, and especially our smaller schools, right?

I have 55 schools because a lot of my schools were cut up and they're smaller schools. And so I think even in that whole analysis and talking about what is the pathway for pre-K to 12, that's not here. And I think that that has not been a priority for anyone, and we really need to talk about that because— Thank you. that has been a struggle.

I'm going to go into some questions around workforce diversity because this is something I'm always asking, especially when I'm in the space with the SIGs and saying, how are we promoting diversity in leadership and not just in staff? Because so often we have a lot of people of color who are, you know, doing the day-to-day work but not at the management level, and that's really important.

So, DSD, DCLA announced an expanding workforce survey in 2022, later reporting a COVID-related delay. What is— was this completed? If so, what are the results? If not, what comparable evidence does DCLA use to assess workforce changes? Yeah, this was not completed because of the COVID delay. It's something that we have been talking about, but to be candid, given the climate from the federal government, that kind of data collection feels even harder than it did when we first did it in 2019.

Even then, data safety was a big concern, and we took a lot of precautions to have it done by a third party where we didn't get the data. And now it's like even scarier for folks to self-identify. So we're kind of thinking through like how we do that in a responsible way that keeps our cultural workforce safe.

We have data from places like Museums Moving Forward or other folks that have been doing this research on a broader, not just New York level, and what they're finding is exactly what you're saying. And what I also know anecdotally is that, yes, that pipeline from mid-career into leadership really needs attention. And it's something that we've committed to working on in our racial equity plan that was just recently released.

Can you talk about what that will look like? Because I think that I hear all of, like, yes, the federal government is watching, all those things, but that still doesn't mean that a diverse city like New York shouldn't have that reflective in their workforce. And so I know you just mentioned the racial equity plan. What have you identified that you're going to be working on to address that?

Yeah, absolutely. And I absolutely agree. It is so essential. And honestly, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for diversity programs in arts and culture. I— we have named that we will be looking into this particular kind of training for workers from that mid-level career into senior leadership and board governance. And that's something that a lot of cultural organizations do in small scale.

We're looking into, like, can we support that to grow those programs? Are there new programs that might need to be created? We know from starting the CUNY Cultural Corps and having it be permanent how incredibly impactful that's been to allow a pipeline into these jobs. So, we're looking to, like, think through what we do to that scale for that mid-level worker into those leadership And you said CUNY Corps, is that what you just said?

CUNY Cultural Corps, a paid internship program. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I know I was talking to the Deputy Speaker and we've heard this mentioned, but we don't have a lot of information about what this program is and what it entails. And could you talk a little bit about this program? Yeah, it was started, I believe, in 2017.

It is a partnership with CUNY where CUNY places undergraduate students in paid internships at cultural organizations across the city, either 1 year or 1 semester. And to date, there's been 1,100 CUNY Cultural Corps students, and they really are— I mean, I've worked at a number of organizations. 1,100. So how many have you seen go to the executive track or leadership track?

How many from that 1,100? I don't have that data. So are you guys not tracking that? No. So, all right, so we have a program that you, you just cited as being a place where you— that can bring diversity, but you're not tracking how that diversity is being dispersed amongst the 1,100 young people that have went through the program?

Well, yes, I mean, each institution is tracking their own, um— But wouldn't you do that if this is a program you just talked about? Maybe that's something we should do, right? Yeah, we could look into it for sure. And I know anecdotally that a lot of them have been hired and, you know, are finishing university. And then go into a career in the arts, they'll have a different relationship.

But shouldn't we be at a place where it's not anecdotally and we're actually tracking? Because if you can track that there was 1,100 young people that went through this program, then, like, why are we not tracking their progress? Because isn't that the point of the program? In part, yes. Yes. And I believe that CUNY is starting to undergo a survey right now, a research study around what are the impacts of the internship program.

When was this program started? 2017. So this program has been going on since 2017. It's 2026, almost 9 years later, and we don't— we're not tracking these young people to see the impact of the work? I, I— we have anecdotal data. We have data from CUNY. We have data from cultural organizations. But the Department of Cultural Affairs has not done a comprehensive study.

Well, maybe we should, right? If this is a program we're toting and saying that this is this is helping with diversity, we should actually be tracking it and using it to do that work. Would you like me to continue? Yes. Okay. What evidence shows that diversity initiative changes permanent hiring or promotional or retention for institute practices? So do you have any evidence to show that diversity is actually happening in these institutions, like, other than anecdotal?

We have what has been submitted to us in the CIG reports that come every year and the CDF reports. So we do understand the kind of practices and new initiatives that have been put in place in organizations across the city. And we rely on their hiring surveys to tell us. How many CICs have required to submit an equity plan and how many submitted them and how many provider provided the required progress reports?

All 34. Now there's 39, but when the reports were required, there were 34 SIGs. All of them submitted— reported annually and just submitted final reports, either in writing or with meetings directly with me. Among the institutions, how many met the measurable goals due in the last reporting period, and how many missed them, and how many could How many could not have their assessments done?

They each had, you know, they created their own goals that they measured against. And I think we saw a lot of patterns again around like the pipeline in. People felt very confident that they were meeting those goals. They felt much less— I'm sorry, you just said they created their own goals? Yes, because the cultural organizations are very different organization to organization.

So you guys don't help with like having general goals to guide that, or? We did. Yeah, we put out a list. And we had many, many meetings and convenings to talk through, like, what does this look like? But if you're an organization that has 7 employees versus, I don't know, 2,000, it's different, right? And we do rely on them to be the experts of their own organizations to come up with that plan.

But we had a lot of things that were requirements around workforce development, around board development, around access to New Yorkers for their work. And they created their own goals based on that, around disability, around racial equity. So we learned a lot in the final reports. A lot of— What did you learn? We learned that board governance is still something that a lot of the organizations struggle with, and board development in terms of racial equity and equity.

That's all nonprofits across the board. But what are you guys doing specifically to help with that? Yeah, I mean, I'm 6 months in, so really looking forward to working on that pipeline once again. Like, so we're not losing those mid-career workers. We lose so many right now. And that in board governance, we're thinking about what kind of resources can we do to support organizations that are working on board development more thoroughly.

Yeah, I think that's a great place for DCLA to help. I think, again, that's a problem across all sectors where folks are not understanding that the importance of having a diverse board is important. And then when you look at boards, even when they are led by minorities, their board is typically not reflective of the folks that are doing the work.

And so I think that there's definitely work that needs to be done there. Are there any other trends that you saw from this information that they gave? I think, I mean, in a positive trend, and I was around at Cultural Affairs when we launched this initiative, and I will say it was not easy, right? It took a lot of work to convince everybody that this was like a good thing to do to get a board-adopted plan.

And these all had to be board adopted. And because of the length of time and the kind of consistency that was required of them, they now all, many of them have like board committees on DEI. There's a report out in every board meeting. There's like some of the dance companies, it takes that long to kind of build your next generation of dancers.

And now you're seeing the result of it. So I think what's been, a pattern that's been good to see is that long-term and dedicated focus actually leads to that generational change that we're only really seeing now, I would argue. What accountability measures that you guys apply to these institutions, especially because they're making their own goals, to ensure that they're not missing any of their equity goals or commitments or things like that?

Yeah, I mean, we definitely are in regular conversation with the organizations, the SIGs, For the CDF, it's part of the application process. So part of the questions that you're answering are around diversity and your commitment to it and what it looks like for you and around your board composition and what governance looks like. That's part of how you're reviewed for grant funding.

So basically, it's just more around like if you're gonna get the grant funding, like that's accountability. Like if you're not meeting these requirements, your grant could be pulled. Yeah, and it does, it comes up The action plan living wage strategy lists no actions online. Has DCLA implemented it? If so, can you identify the policy, workers covered, and the results?

Candidly, I think this is a huge area for growth for the agency and improvement on making an impact in this. It's definitely really important for us under this administration and under Deputy Mayor of Economic Justice Julie Su. This is a very important area that we'll be spending a lot more time on, and cultural workers in general and artists especially.

But you're right, there were no strategies attached to it, and I think as a result, it's the kind of lightest impact that came out of it, and it's absolutely a priority for us. What evidence shows whether cultural workers' wages, benefits, and job security have improved since 2017, and when what impact can DCLA attribute to CreateNYC? I honestly don't know that we can say that they have improved.

I think we've lived through COVID, which exposed how exactly financially precarious these organizations are, how many workers had to kind of make it through that moment. And it's a struggle, right? The cost of the affordability crisis is real, and I don't know that workers are experiencing a better time today than they were when this plan came out, truthfully.

I think that's why we've seen a lot of cultural workers unionize over the past 10 years, which is amazing. But it is absolutely an area that needs to be deeper— deeply considered. I just want to say, I don't think we should be at a point where we're still blaming Culver for stuff. Like, I think that we're past that.

And I think, like, yes, I know we've been talking about affordable city, but I think we need to move from like this is what the problem is and actually fix it. And just— we just can't keep saying we want an affordable city. We have to start to create policy that drives that. So thank you, Deputy Speaker, for the additional time.

And that's it. That's all.

Thank you, Chair, Deputy Speaker. I just have a quick question. I know we all are very much aware of how many vacancies we see in storefronts across the City of New York. that includes nonprofits and cultural spaces. So I wanted to know how many affordable cultural spaces has CreateNYC helped create or preserve since 2017? I know you're only 6 months in, but would love if you could expound on that, and how many were lost over the same period of time?

Yeah. Through CreateNYC, DCLA, Built and secured 165 units of affordable space, workspace for artists in particular. I am not sure how much was lost in that time period. I think the social impact of the arts study that's coming out does a very good job at showing how many— showing that kind of difference of nonprofits in the city 10 years ago from now.

Okay, but it would be good to know if we could have a follow-up on that. Okay. If that information could be provided. Yeah, it's a big— we didn't lose any. All of the ones that Department of Cultural Affairs developed are still running, up and running. And Space— but SpaceWorks was functioning in the beginning of the plan and has since sunsetted.

So that's also why the Affordable Real Estate for Artists program kind of sunsetted as well. But affordable space and affordable workspace for artists is also a really big priority for us. And we're really looking into taking an all-of-government approach approach to understand how we do this on a year-round level. Do you guys have an actual plan for that?

It's coming soon. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Chair.

Thank you. Just some overall questions. What are CreateNYC's 3 most consequential achievements since 2017, and what evidence demonstrates their impact? Yeah. I would say— well, I really do think that the plan kind of transformed the way DCLA worked in terms of that really deep public engagement, having those office hours with the commissioners, the town halls, the borough workshops, the public poll, the— it just like transformed, really opened the doors between DCLA and the people that we serve.

And that has actually been transformative, that kind of accountability direct to constituent. I would say the funding transformations have been really significant. The CDF reforms, and the way that we think about SIAP funding or, you know, adding additional funds to target neighborhoods that are under-resourced. And then also like the Disability Forward Fund, the Language Access Fund, and just in general, the cultural plan allowed the Department of Cultural Affairs to really transform its argument away from just the economic argument into that social impact neighborhood level. justification for what we do, right?

That we started to be able to say with proof that arts and culture have these like really meaningful and profound impacts on the social well-being of people. So we're able to start to move resources more on that neighborhood level and less, less only geared towards what art can do for tourism. So in, in a lot of ways, it like totally transformed how we think about our work and then how we're able to build policies outside of that.

And then I would say the DEI work was really significant and transformative, and it is not something that before the CreateNYC plan was part of this agency's purview, and now it really is kind of core to how we work with the cultural organizations, that it's a really big part of how they kind of have to be accountable to the city.

Which major commitments remain unfulfilled? I think the ones that we were just talking about in terms of living wages for cultural workers and artists, I think there was— I do think that the piece of the plan, that was the lightest piece of the plan, and workers and artists are still struggling against this affordability crisis today. That's something we absolutely have to address.

I think we have a lot of work to do with our colleagues in the DOE to continue to move arts education forward into think about maybe new or deeper ways that the cultural field can collaborate with schools, although they do a lot already. And in general, just the kind of all-of-government approach. I think what we learned from the plan is like DCLA alone, right, the policies that come out of our office are not going to wholesale change the conditions for workers in New York City that'll positively impact cultural workers and artists, that that's an all-of-government approach.

So I think also in these areas where we're looking into that kind of inner-city coordination, there's a lot more there to think about how culture is at the table across city government. It's not just DCLA holding it, but all of us together holding that work, and that cultural inclusion is, is part of other agencies' priorities.

Okay, um, the committee understands that the commissioner, as you also mentioned, has been on a listening tour getting feedback from the cultural community about, among other things, the city's cultural plan. What has DCLA learned from that tour? And then in connection with a potential update of the plan, will DCLA provide a full written accounting showing what from existing plan was completed, modified, abandoned, or never attempted?

Yeah, well, the listening tour has been great so far. After this week, we're going to Staten Island this week. We would have been to all 5 boroughs, 15 of them total, and we've learned, I think, like To no one's surprise, the biggest issue everyone's facing is access to affordable space and then being able to stay in space.

So, for artists, that's workspace. For cultural organizations, it's their anchor spaces in their neighborhoods. We're learning about how difficult it is to have consistent support for artists and workers around, like, I mean, yeah, space and affordability. It's really, really big. And for artists, it's also about health insurance and access to just the kind of basics to make a great quality of life here in the city.

And in terms of reporting, we are currently— all of these listening sessions, we transcribe them, we take notes, we have recordings. We're synthesizing all of that information and we'll put out those findings. We're still determining what that will look like and are happy to work with you as we determine that. Okay.

The charter makes DCLA responsible for implementing implementing and overseeing the plan. Who currently tracks implementation across agencies, and what staff and budget support that work? Yeah. We report out through our CreateNYC website, of course, through the MMR, and Derek actually holds a lot of the work for the agency. So I'll let you put some more color onto that.

Yeah. So the plan is updated biannually, so every 2 years. upload the latest action plan item updates on our main website. And then the key indicator, we also just updated the website as well. So you could see exactly what we've accomplished throughout the years. And yeah, and who tracks that? Is that you? I'm sorry, could you repeat?

Who tracks that? Who tracks that work? So who updates? It's a team effort. It's a commission unit, you know, the chief of staff. We all work together to make sure. So is there a specific staff assigned to advance CreateNYC, or is it— it's a hodgepodge of people having to take on this task in addition to all their other responsibilities?

Because like, what is your title? I'm Special Projects Manager. So I did work with Díaz on the creation of— But like, CreateNYC isn't your only thing. Correct. No, Derek is in the CIG unit. But I will say, like, over these 10 years, so much of the CreateNYC plan has been institutionalized and so much of its work comes out of every single unit.

It's kind of a lens that everyone takes to approach their work. So, the CDF reforms, that lives within the CDF unit, right? And how to think about equitable funding or percent for art when they're commissioning artists. What does equity look like geographically? Also, who the artists are, what community engagement is. So, at this point, it really is spread out as part of everybody's job, and the data tracking is also a team effort, and Derek kind of brings it all together and spearheads it for us.

Okay. And I know you mentioned that you publish the progress reports that are due every 2 years after submission of the original plan, but we had trouble actually finding some of those reports online. So just wanted to know and get clarity if you submitted the reports for 2023 and 2025 cycles to both the mayor and We have absolutely put them on the website and published them, but we will look in to make sure that we are fully in compliance, and moving forward, we'll be definitely submitting them to the mayor and the speaker.

Yeah, I think it's supposed to be submitted to the mayor and the speaker, correct? Is that what the chart— yeah, the charter stipulates that it's supposed to be submitted to both the mayor and the speaker, and I don't think we received that. Okay. Well, we will definitely send them to you. Okay. The CreateNYC key indicators page promises updates at the close of each fiscal year, but its tables generally stop at FY 2022.

So were subsequent years' data collected but not published or not collected? Again, who is responsible, and when will the missing data be published? Yeah. As I've said before, During the weekend, we uploaded some new numbers. So you'll find numbers— That's so convenient because you knew you were coming to the hearing. You'll find numbers from FY23 to FY26.

Not acceptable, but we appreciate it nonetheless. That's why hearings are important. Holds people accountable. I would also say— Because I don't know if we had this hearing if you would have rushed to put those things online. I'm just saying. But we appreciate it. I would say just during the different administration, there's also a lot of staff turnover as well.

So, you know, that's interesting. Yes, I did read the article with the former commissioner talking about how politics definitely get in the way of a lot of these plans. But I will also just follow that up to say that we are really committed to data transparency and put that in our racial equity plan. So we really are.

See, every hero we meet, we talk about missing data. We miss missing data. I understand. I understand. Okay.

DCLA's Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission webpage still lists former officeholders as ex officio members and several other members on the public roster who appear to no longer be involved. So who currently serves on the commission? What are their appointment and term dates? And when did the commission last meet? Yeah, we're currently in the process of appointing new members to that commission to be up and running in the next month or so.

Okay, so can you help us understand why the information is inaccurate online? That— I don't know that they are officially not serving. They are still in their seats. They— we just have not appointed new members since the administration change. Okay. And again, a section in the charter, 2505, assigns the Commission policy coordination and research functions. What CreateNYC findings or recommendations did the Commission produce, and what action did DCLA take in response?

The commission was very involved. They not only in giving their own feedback, but in organizing various public engagements with their own communities to have input into the plan from like the first meetings through the final reports. So it's hard to point to exactly the areas where they contributed, but their thinking, ideas, and desires are kind of all over the plan.

Okay, which communities remain least served by city cultural funding? How does DCLA identify them, and how much have those disparities narrowed since 2017? Yeah, I mean, and part of the racial equity plan we just released, we have like committed to establishing baseline metrics so that we can start really analyzing that information ourselves moving forward. I would say for sure the disability community was such a priority when we were making this plan and will be again, but that is definitely an area that needs more attention from us.

And then I think as you heard from Social Impact of the Arts, there are definitely some like great neighborhood trends that can be pulled from the past 10 years around those civic clusters in particular and how more neighborhoods have become civic clusters, so like more resilient, more dense in cultural life. But there has also been a widening of disparities.

So that is absolutely something that needs to be addressed. Okay. Yeah, it would be helpful if like the agency itself like had a cadre of communities that you can point to, you know, because I think that would demonstrate that you're actually making assessments. And I'm not saying that you aren't, but you didn't really list, like, specific communities that I'm sure, like, anecdotally we could say, you know, you know where you're funding, you know where the organizations are doing their work.

I know that I just looked at the list of all the organizations receiving CDF funding. I feel like even from the data that you currently collect, I would hope that there is an assessment on what communities are underserved. Yeah. Even boroughs, you know. I know Queens loves to say oftentimes that we don't get our fair share of cultural funding.

So, and that's just a whole borough, but I feel like a whole borough is as large as a city, as we just described. So like really getting more granular into like neighborhood communities, it would be interesting interesting to kind of have a better sense from DCLA, like, your focus. Yeah, because that I think would make me feel more comfortable that you're actually like looking at what communities are truly underserved by cultural funding versus this sort of macro approach.

Unless you have more information, I'm willing to hear it. It doesn't sound like you do. We are, we are, I mean, I said already, like, we are We're spending this year, as we committed in our racial equity plan, to really do that deep dive and establish those metrics for ourselves to be able to provide to you that more granular information to hold ourselves accountable to moving forward.

And we know where, where we fund, but I do kind of think that's the tip of the iceberg, right? There's so much more we need to understand in order to know the depth of funding, the consistency of that investment, and what the impacts of that are. beyond just organization to organization. So, we are, like, very much looking into this and understanding what, like, baseline data we should build to track over time, which I do think is probably something that the original cultural plan could have done a little bit better, is put those in from the beginning so that we're able to track ourselves internally and understand the impact of our work more clearly.

Do you have a timeline for that work? End of 2027. FY 2027 is our goal. Okay.

Does DCLA's revised racial equity plan commit to changing who receives funding, or does it just make process commitments or maybe metric commitments to assess? If so, what allocation targets and deadlines apply? Yeah, we, we do make process recommendations and goals for ourselves. We— the processes are peer-reviewed, so we don't have in, you know, we won't say that an outcome— we won't predict an outcome for the panel.

But we have put forth a series of process changes that we hope to look into based on public feedback and what we know is just more equitable, looking into general operating support, looking into rethinking multiyear and what that looks like for our organizations. And again, like streamlining our application processes and doing much more outreach and multilingual outreach to get more organizations in the door, and also increasing our depth of relationship with the borough arts councils, which will help us reach not only individual artists but also those grassroots arts organizations that are smaller than what DCLA would award to on their own.

What evidence shows increased cultural participation among residents of historically underserved neighborhoods? Yeah, we have— we do collect this information from the CIG, which we can share afterwards, but I thought that the numbers around cultural access that came out of the cultural plan were like pretty staggering, like the IDNYC 800 plus thousand memberships. The Culture Pass, over 150,000.

I'm trying to find it. Where's Culture Pass? Oh, oh gosh. Over 560,000 passes reserved to date of Culture Pass. And Culture Pass, of course, is through the library. So those are all New Yorkers. And same with IDNYC. Those are all New York City residents. that 805,000 of them that received 1-year memberships at at least 1 cultural organization.

So that is like a dramatic shift in access. What measurable gains have disabled artists and cultural workers made in employment, funding, and leadership, not only physical access to facilities? Yeah. The Disability Forward Fund is given to CDF applicants. And same with the language access fund. And so, so to date, there's been about 600 grants totaling over $6 million for that.

And that's access, but that's also funding for disabled artists to be able to perform or, or present their work in spaces or to do outreach to disabled communities. Okay, just a few more questions.

So the charter calls for an interagency coordination plan. Was that plan created? Is it written? Are you able to share it? I believe that the response to that plan was really— can be found in Create in Place, this newish program that was launched in 2024 that specifically responds to cultural organizations of all sizes, particularly very, very small ones that are at risk of losing their space.

And there is a really large interagency task that meets monthly around issues of space, real estate, and cultural access. And I'm happy to share more information about that. Yeah, I think, I mean, I don't have like the charter language in front of me, but I think it was more comprehensive than like a Create in Place program. It was more so around like how do you embed cultural arts within all the various city agencies?

Yeah, DCLA was supposed to create an interagency coordination plan around that. Okay. So I don't— sounds like maybe you don't have it. Is that fair to say? I think that's fair to say. Okay. What formal process ensures cultural infrastructure is considered in housing, economic development, and neighborhood planning decisions? Where has that process changed outcomes? I think this just goes back to, like, some of the interagency coordination plan, like, I can think about my neighborhood plan.

We had to force arts and culture into the conversation, and I think this is an opportunity for sister agencies to better collaborate with one another. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, and it's been a big focus of all of my meetings with other agencies and are really kind of putting a lot of work internally into how we do that so it's not advocates needing to spend all of their time advocating on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level and when rezonings come out.

I think what we see in Gowanus is so amazing. I just went to their open studios this week to see affordable artist studios built into all new developments as a requirement, and the community benefits agreements they were able to negotiate is a very good model for us moving forward. And Create in Place does a lot of this work, so now we're working in the South of Prospect rezoning very early on to get cultural organizations in the door from the beginning in order to do a lot of that work of, you know, cultural inclusion.

Okay. What cross-agency commitments has DCLA been able to advance? What specific governance changes would resolve, I think, the many barriers when I speak to different cultural institutions, and not even just cultural institutions, even bids, you know, bids produce art. And a lot of times they share frustrations around how DOT manages their, what is it, their plazas that they often have to maintain.

But it's, you know, it's in partnership with DOT as almost like a contractor. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the amazing thing about this city is that there is art all over city government. And I also think that that is the opportunity for us to come together to streamline how we work and make it consistent for organizations and individuals trying to access from site to site.

And it is something that we have been talking about internally too. What are the best ways to kind of start to think about these processes? But our public art team meets with the DOT arts and parks arts teams quite regularly and are in touch and are kind of navigating that on a case-by-case basis. But similarly, I think there's an opportunity to go one notch further and streamline as policy.

Okay.

What standard does DCLA and New York City public schools use to assess the goal of high-quality arts education for every public school student? And how has arts education access gaps between affluent and historically underserved school communities changed since 2017? Hold on one second. So that is, of course, a question for our colleagues at the DOE. Our relationship to the DOE— to schools is through funding cultural organizations that do programs after school, in school, or more recently are co-locating or working as providers themselves. which is very exciting.

But the NYCPS Arts Office is advancing equity, right? They're developing sequential pre-K to 12 art pathways and are increasing system-wide investment in arts education from FY 2014, that was $516 million, and FY 25, that was $563 million. So they have been increasing their funding and digging more deeply into creating sequential arts education. But again, that is a question for our colleagues in the DOE around assessment.

Yeah, what is that relationship? Because I know you guys, like, you created the plan, as in DCLA, and like you even mentioned in your testimony that, you know, one of the final objectives was to provide high-quality arts education for all New York City school students. it's New York City Public Schools that essentially has to administer that. Yeah.

But you all are within, like, New York City government. I view it, like, as sister-brother agencies. And so what is your relationship and engagement? Like, is there regular meetings? Like, how are you working with New York City Public Schools? Because I feel like though that information, of course, should rest with them, because you all created the I think that— I think it should give you some level of hierarchy to hold various other agencies accountable for delivering on what was the plan.

So just, it would be helpful to understand, like, what is DCLA's relationship with New York City Public Schools in advancing this objective? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've met with the chancellor a few times, and I meet with the head of the DOE Arts pretty frequently and are ramping up our collaborations together for both what we do with our cultural organizations, but also how we can be more collaborative or helpful or supportive in arts ed in public schools.

So that is definitely something that is, is happening between us. But you're right that the arts education in public schools is held by the DOE, and they are state standards. So we are a little bit— Yeah, I mean, we also have mayoral control, so the administration does wield a ton of power to sort of make certain decisions around school policy, even within the CEC board.

Like, the mayor has share positions on the CEC board, so I think that there's still an opportunity if the administration as a whole is committed to it. Definitely. that they do have some certain inherent powers by way of like mayoral control to make decisions within New York City public schools. Yeah, absolutely. And we are, of course, committed to increasing the quality of arts education in public schools.

Yeah, when I was at the press conference, a reporter had asked— you were there too— a reporter had asked what the commitment was for arts and culture in New York City public schools, and the chancellor did not answer the question. I love Chancellor Samuels, but he did not answer the question. So I think it still is a big question around like how New York City public schools schools is ensuring arts education, supporting arts teachers and people who are providing, like, services outside of what New York City public schools is providing.

So I think that is a very audacious place for you all to be in because— did not answer the question. And I think based off of what I'm hearing, it still is a big concern for many schools and many principals trying to provide robust arts education to their students and not really having the resources to do it.

So, especially in certain schools. Okay.

The last question is, what changes to funding allocations, institutional arrangements, or city priorities is DCLA prepared to propose to fulfill CreateNYC's original vision? Yeah. Well, yes, we are in the process of doing this, these public engagements and collecting information and feedback from folks all over the city, different parts of the field, and also just New Yorkers that are participating in the cultural life to distill those top priorities and using lessons learned from that first plan really come up with what is like measurable priorities for us to implement for this administration.

Okay. And in that vein, will the next plan include dedicated funding, named agency responsibilities, measurable targets, enforceable deadlines? If not, how will it avoid repeating all the same accountability gaps? And then lastly, like, from a visionary perspective, what concrete outcomes should New Yorkers expect by 2030? And when and where will DCLA publish progress against those commitments? Well, we are certainly committed to releasing our findings and priorities from that.

I'm not sure that that will be a full-blown plan, but it will be a direction that the public can see that they have participated in and put forth for us. And we are, you know, we'll be sharing that in the upcoming months with more detail. Thank you.

We have been joined by Councilmember Maloney, and then Councilmember Marte had a question. he wanted me to ask. Part of CreateNYC is the She Built New York City initiative to create public monuments that honor women's history. I have one coming to my district. One of the planned monuments will honor Elizabeth Jennings Graham, a Black woman who in 1854 successfully fought segregation in public transportation in New York City after being kicked off a streetcar a few blocks from here on Pearl and Chatham Streets.

Despite her story taking place here in Lower Manhattan, She Built New York City Decided to place her monument outside Grand Central, and her history took place in Lower Manhattan. In 2022, Community Board 5 passed a resolution criticizing this location, arguing it would be inappropriate to honor her in a neighborhood that had no relevance to her. At the same time, Community Board 1 passed a resolution requesting that the monument be placed here in Lower Manhattan.

Why is DCLA still moving forward with placing the monument by Grand Central, and why is it not being placed where her history actually took place? Thank you for that question, Councilmember Marte. We are actually— our public art team is currently looking into new locations in Lower Manhattan and heard that feedback loud and clear. So stay tuned for more, and we can get in touch with Councilmember Marte's office.

Okay. And he is saying that please do, because they're saying DOT is currently working on a redesign of Chatham Square, right where Elizabeth Jennings Graham was kicked off the streetcar. So wanted to know if DCLA has been having any conversations with DOT about including the monument as part of the redesign. Okay. We will absolutely be in touch with Councilmember Marte after this.

Okay. Do you have any questions, Councilmember Maloney? Okay. All right. Thank you so much, Commissioner. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Okay.

I will now call Arden Armbruster from the Independent Budget Office as an expert witness. Because of the special nature of this testimony, I will lightly waive time limits because we have a lot of people here. So hopefully you won't be longer than— okay, thank you. Okay, great.

Good afternoon, Deputy Speaker Williams and members of the Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries, and International Relations. My name is Arden Armbruster, and I'm a lead budget and policy analyst at the New York City Independent Budget Office, IBO. IBO is a government agency whose mission is to enhance understanding of New York City's budget, public policy, and economy through independent analysis.

Thank you. analysis. We appreciate the opportunity to testify at today's hearing on the city's cultural plan, CreateNYC. The first objective of the CreateNYC action plan is to increase equitable funding and support for culture, especially in historically underserved communities. Given that the vast majority of cultural organizations that receive support from DCLA do so through the CDF grant program, The CDF has been a key lever in DCLA's ability to realize the goals of CreateNYC and this first objective in particular.

Today, IBO will share top-level findings from 2 reports in a forthcoming series about CDF grantees. The first report was published today. This series is intended to support the Council, the Administration, and the cultural sector in understanding the current state of the CDF as the City considers the future of CreateNYC and cultural policy in New York City. If members of the committee are interested in discussing the report in more detail, IBO can coordinate with your staff for a walkthrough of the findings.

IBO used application and award data from the fiscal year 2025 grant cycle to understand characteristics of CDF grantees: how large they are, how reliant they are on government funding, which communities they serve, where they're based, and where they plan CDF programs. IBO found that the CDF funds many small nonprofits. Half of grantees had budgets under $500,000 and 2 or fewer full-time employees. 2/3 of grantees serve the historically underserved communities discussed in CreateNYC.

Specifically, these are grantees whose mission's name and/or whose proposed CDF projects intentionally serve people of color, people with disabilities, and people whose primary language is not English. Grantees serving people of color and/or people whose primary language is not English had smaller budgets on average than grantees that did not indicate serving these communities. IBO also found that the smaller the grantee was, the more reliant they tended to be on government funding, particularly from city sources.

The smallest grantees, with budgets under $100,000, received half of their revenue from the government. Whereas the largest CDF grantees with budgets of $3 million or more received around 10% of their funding from government. City funds, largely from the CDF, were the largest source of government funding for grantees. Substantial city support for small grantees also means that changes at the city level can be especially impactful for these grantees, many of which also serve underserved communities.

Small grantees may also be more susceptible to affordability concerns, and may struggle to navigate government processes with limited staff capacity. This speaks to the Action Plan objectives to address the affordability crisis and strengthen the connections between the cultural sector and government. Another aim of CreateNYC is to improve cultural access, one component of which is geographic proximity. Because grantees provide programs at their headquarters and across the city, IBO looked at both where grantees are based and where they plan CDF programs.

IBO found that 60% of grantees were based in Manhattan and 63% of funding went to those grantees. While Manhattan-based organizations do plan CDF programs outside of Manhattan, they do not do so at higher rates than grantees based in some of the other boroughs. For example, 43% of Manhattan grantees plan CDF programs outside of Manhattan, while 48% of Brooklyn grantees planned CDF programs outside of Brooklyn.

Additionally, some grantees from outside of Manhattan planned programs in Manhattan. Across all grantees, 74% planned CDF programs in Manhattan. Whereas grantees' planned programs may differ from where programs ultimately occurred. IBO is currently analyzing CDF program location data as part of this series. Still, these initial findings suggest that planned CDF programs are not equitably distributed across the 5 boroughs.

In summary, because most cultural organizations receiving DCLA support do so through the CDF, CreateNYC's goals to improve cultural equity and access hinge on CDF grantees and the programs they provide. IBO found that many of the nonprofits funded by the CDF are responsive to underserved communities, but these same grantees are often small and reliant on government funding for a considerable portion of their income.

This means that city policies can have an outsized impact on them, positively and negatively, a dynamic with direct implications for the city's ability to meet any cultural equity goals it sets in the future. IBO encourages anyone interested in these findings to visit our website to read the next report in this series, sign up for IBO's newsletter, and follow us on social media to be notified when the next reports are published.

We are also hosting a webinar on cultural policy and public administration this Thursday at 2:00 p.m., with details and registration on our website. Thank you again for the opportunity to testify today, and I'm happy to take any questions you might have.

I have a few. I have paper somewhere. I have 50 million papers. Okay. Can you explain how your report differs from the reporting required by Local 15 of 2024, which the council passed to require reporting by DCLA, including on the CDF? Sure. So my recollection is Local Law 15 was reporting on not just the CDF, but also the CIG and other aspects of DCLA's funding and grantmaking.

So I will say one major difference is our report is looking specifically at the CDF. The Local Law 15 reports that I've seen online are sort of PDFs. There's some text at the top and then tables of sort of each individual organization. That's quite different from the way we approached this analysis, which is really like a statistical analysis looking at trends within the grantees themselves.

One thing that I like to say when I talk about my work is it can be really difficult to come to some kind of conclusion when you're just looking at mountains and mountains of data. And so it can be hard to know, looking at a table of the grantee name, where they're based, and how much money they got, any of these kinds of trends, geographic funding levels, So what we've done in this report is really try to break out those trends, not only by funding amounts and geographies, but other characteristics like some of the demographic characteristics that are specified in Local Law 15 around organizations that serve specifically people of color, people with disabilities, and immigrants.

And if the council were to pass legislation legislation requiring another cultural plan or other cultural policies, what do you think would be most important for us to keep in mind from your testimony today? Great question. Um, I, I think actually one thing that was coming to mind, um, with the commissioner's testimony was, um, it was very exciting to hear that, uh, EINs are going to be included in open data moving forward.

Um, the laughter is because I really love EINs. But I mention that because for a couple of reasons. One, it allows for sort of more targeted planning. It allows us to connect information about the grantees to other public sources of information. And to the point earlier about sort of intergovernmental collaboration, the biggest users of open data are actually other government employees.

So I have used the DCLA open datasets before. So I would say data access and transparency is certainly something that IBO is always excited about. The other couple of things I would mention are 2 things. So one is the geographic distribution of grantees and programs. So I mentioned that 43% of Manhattan-based organizations were planning programs outside of Manhattan, that means that 57% of Manhattan grantees were not.

And because 60% of the grantees are based in Manhattan, that sort of inevitably skews programming toward Manhattan. And there is a— there are a lot of cultural institutions in Manhattan. There's a lot of cultural infrastructure in Manhattan, enough so that organizations in other boroughs are coming into Manhattan to produce their CDF programs. The flip side of that is the organizations outside of Manhattan.

So for example, the Bronx, 70% of CDF grantees in the Bronx are only planning CDF programs in the Bronx. So there's an opportunity there if the council and the administration are interested in thinking, rethinking the geographic distribution of programs. We do now have a little bit more information about how different grantees based in different places plan their CDF programs.

And then the other thing I would just say quickly is about grantee size. A lot of these grantees are very small organizations. I think half of them have 2 or fewer full-time employees. And many of the organizations that serve the underserved communities that the council and the administration are interested in expanding access to are also very small organizations.

So any plan around improving those sort of questions of access access will involve small organizations and therefore should be mindful of the limited capacity and ability to navigate complex government processes that they have.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, thanks. Okay, the next panel that I'll call, and I'll read some other things, but you If you can make your way up to the next panel, right? Gonzalo, Mauricio, and Gregorio. And so we'll open it up for public testimony. I remind members of the public that this is a formal government proceeding and that decorum shall be observed at all times.

As such, members of the public shall remain silent at all times. The witness table is reserved for people who wish to testify. No video recording or photography is allowed from the witness table. Further, members of the public may not present audio or video recordings as testimony, but may submit transcripts of such recordings to the sergeant-at-arms for inclusion in the hearing record.

If you wish to speak at today's hearing, please fill out an appearance card with the sergeant-at-arms if you have not already done so, and wait to be recognized. When recognized, you have 2 minutes to speak on today's hearing topic, What's Next for CreateNYC, or on the resolutions we are hearing. If you have a written statement or additional written testimony you wish to submit for the record, please provide a copy of that testimony. to the Sergeant at Arms.

And we have our first panel already assembled. And yeah, we should start with the resolution. Mix it up a little bit because we've been CreateNYC crazy. That's right.

Thank you so much, um, for the opportunity, uh, to speak here. Good afternoon, Deputy Speaker Dr. Williams. Happy congratulations on your doctorate. Councilmember Farah Lewis and the other members of the City Council who are certainly online. My name is Gregorio Mayers. I'm the founder and CEO of Panama 507 Roundtable Group, a public policy think tank advancing the civic, cultural, and economic interests of Panamanian community in New York.

I'm here to encourage you to pass Resolution 625, and declare October Reggaetón Heritage Month in New York City. Right. I come to this as a personal story. I grew up in the country of Panama in a generation shaped by Black music, Latino music. In our community, that music arrived from everywhere, from James Brown and the Jackson 5 when they visited Panama, to Bob Marley's music, playing in our homes.

These were part of the Panamanian story. Our parents carried that sound with them and it became part of how we understood ourselves. Then the younger generation took what we heard from— what they heard from their parents and made it their own. They put their own experiences into the words and they translated these words into Spanish. That is how African American rhythm and Caribbean rhythm inherited from our parents became voice of our own.

That personal story also is part of a larger story, which is the resolution, which the resolution puts into public record. As resolution recites, reggaetón began in the Afro-Caribbean community in Panama among descendants of migrant workers who built the canal. They came about late 1895, 1900. Canal was built, finished in 1914. 80,000 came from the Caribbean. In the early '80s, 1980s, artists in that community, including Renato El General, meaning the general, began adapting Jamaican dancehall into Spanish.

That is reggae en español, the foundation of what the world now calls reggaetón. It gave a community that faced discrimination and marginalization a way to speak its identity out loud. And New York is part of this story. The resolution notes that in 1985, Elgin et al. moved to Brooklyn and enrolled at Medgar Evers College, and that he worked with the local Caribbean producers and immersed himself in the city's dance hall.

And hip-hop scenes. Well, interesting enough, I was a freshman that same year at the same institution, right? He was, I guess, in the performing arts. I went on to law school afterwards, but same year. All right. Panama 507 Roundtable knows what it means to bring history to the open. We led the community effort to secure the Little Panama Wade Street co-naming, and we did it by working directly with the council, On September 24th, we unveiled Little Panama Way on Franklin Avenue.

Our community, cultural leaders, elected officials stood together. We're grateful to the council that participated and with the partnership with Crystal Hudson, which was her district, Sandy Nurse, who was born in Panama, right in my same community, and Farrah Lewis. Farrell, thank you for your leadership. I also ask the council to reconsider 2 Panamanian artists in its legislation.

First, Renato Adler, which you do have him on there, a Panamanian reggaetón legend and one of the most influential of that era for the younger generation. Second, Reggae Sam, who I recommend the council includes as reggaetón artist. Reggae Sam is also the artist Who released the song, the song for Little Panama Way Streetway, co-naming Franklin Avenue, which again were led by Councilmember Crystal Hudson and the Panamanian-born Sandy Nurse and Farrah Lewis.

This is really exciting time that we are here doing this, and it's really historic. The New York Times has quoted that reggaetón did start in Panama as well, in New York Times. So this month, Reggaetón, we would love to have it, this history passed on. It'll be an honor for artists and musicians and producers behind this music scene.

It will encourage programming that tells the story, including the Afro-Panamanian pioneers, and it will teach each new generation that Panama, Puerto Rico, and New York built something that now reaches every corner of the world. On behalf of the 55,000 Panamanians who are registered voters living in the 5 boroughs, I ask that you recognize this legacy and to pass this resolution this October as we culminate Hispanic Heritage Month.

Panama 507 Roundtable Group stands ready to help with community engagement, testimony, and the cultural voices who carry this history. Thank you very much, and thanks to the leadership again of Councilmember Lewis for moving forward with this legislation. Thank you.

Good morning, Deputy Speaker Williams and members of the committee. My name is Mauricio Delfín, and I co-direct the Culture and Arts Policy Institute with Gonzalo Casals. My testimony continues the testimonies on CreateNYC and makes one argument. The city's next step regarding cultural plans should be to separate what DCLA can deliver on its own from what many actors must agree on and deliver together.

CreateNYC, the city's first legally mandated cultural plan, was shaped by more than 188,000 New Yorkers and addressed the full range of the city's cultural life. Yet DCLA was its primary implementer and sole reporter, and those reports stopped being published after 2019. we have discussed. The lesson from CreateNYC, we believe, is that an agency plan and a sector-wide agenda are different instruments, and it was asked to be both.

An agency plan depends on one agency's budget, staff, and capacity. A sector-wide agenda depends on many actors: DCLA and other city agencies, the council, nonprofit and civic organizations, philanthropy, the private sector, partners in education and health, artists, and communities. So when DCLA reporting stopped, no other actor had the mandate or data to keep the work visible. We therefore propose that the city develop 2 instruments, one for each role.

One, a capacity building plan for DCLA, and 2, a shared agenda for cultural policy in New York City. The capacity building plan should begin with an assessment of DCLA today with civic participation built in, how the agency collects data, evaluates its programs, and reports to the public. The assessment would identify the agency's capacity gaps and tell the council what to fund to close them.

That capacity will let the agency evaluate the programs it funds today, so funding decisions rest on evidence of what works. A shared agenda for cultural policy convened by DCLA and the council is a set of policy priorities these actors agree on, with mechanisms to carry them out, such as shared indicators and regular public reporting. It also requires standing spaces for them to meet, divide responsibilities, and review progress.

Each actor would be accountable for its part, and reporting would show who is delivering so the work continues when what falters or an administration changes. We urge the committee to require DCLA to develop a capacity building plan, starting with an assessment of its current capacity, and to support a shared agenda for cultural policy in New York City.

Thank you.

Buenas tardes. I appreciate the Latino panel here. Thank you, Deputy Speaker Williams and members of the committee. My name is Gonzalo Casals, and I'm co-director of the Culture and Arts Policy Institute along with Mauricio. Mauricio proposed a shared agenda for cultural policy. I wanted to speak about its purpose, placing culture at the core of every aspect of civic life.

Culture's public impact is well documented, as our friend Cecilia Pino mentioned, and agencies across city government own it. Yet CREA NYC rested only on an agency with about 0.25% of the city budget. A shared agenda that treats culture as public infrastructure owed to every neighborhood, like parks, schools, and libraries, will do 3 things. First, it builds cultural impact into services the city already provides.

In Massachusetts, doctors and social workers prescribe cultural programs the way they refer patients to a nutritionist. Providers wrote more than 1,900 prescriptions in 4 years. New York's public hospitals could do the same. Second, it builds understanding and with it advocates across city government. Since 2015, the city's Public Artists in Residency program has embedded 24 artists in 15 agencies, but it remains a residency.

Great program, but it's not policy. As a citywide policy, it would bring city workers, artists, cultural workers together in every agency, multiplying innovation, improving services, and strengthening cultural advocates. The difference of just an artist doing a project and just thinking policy-wise. And third, it brings new funding. When culture serves an agency mission, that agency has a reason to pay for it.

Massachusetts designed its programs to pay cultural organizations for the health benefits they provide. Here, that means health, education, and social services dollars working for culture as new funds, not a share of DCLA's budget. According to our friends at IBO, in fiscal year 2022, more than 2 dozen city agencies and offices beyond DCLA and the public libraries paid cultural nonprofits at least $89 million.

That is double the $39 million more than the DCLA awarded in competitive grants. that year. The city does not track that spending, and no plans connect that. A shared agenda would put that money to work on purpose. The city would know what it spends on culture and what that spending achieves. Agencies would buy cultural services toward priorities they set together rather than contract by contract.

Cultural organizations would gain a public market beyond DCLA they can plan around, and New Yorkers would find Culture built into the services they expect. The few expect it: arts-based diversion programs instead of detention, creative aging and standards to service to combat isolation, and abort elections outreach to new voters through cultural organizations. To state a few, Create NYC asked one agency to carry the city's cultural life.

What comes next should ask the whole city to carry it. Thank you.

You're welcome. So, for Mauricio, you said CreateNYC was asked to be both an agency plan and sector-wide agenda. Can you explain the difference and why the city needs both? Sure. Thank you for the question. The capacity building plan for DCLA is addressing specifically how DCLA— what the conditions are for DCLA to operate and deliver on all the objectives that we have been talking this morning.

So, it has to do with really digging into what are those things that the department or the agency requires to be able to report, to be able to assess. Assessment is big, as we've seen. Data collection and data sharing. But aside from publishing a large dataset like the one that was shared or communicated today, which is amazing.

This is something that needs to happen daily, and it really needs a coordinated effort, as you also have pointed out. That's one part of the capacity building that we haven't only talked about it here, it's been talked many, many times through different hearings. What are those things that DCLA requires to do the job today, right? That is one discrete kind of investment.

The shared agenda piece has to do with what the ecosystem looks like right now in the city. There's more networks working together, more coalitions, and we are in the capacity to coordinate better intentionally. That requires the kind of infrastructure that the council and the city could convene, could actually make happen. So we think that before a plan, we should create the conditions for that plan to actually be held by many and be able to be distributed in a way that we can all participate in uplifting and continuing its objectives. holding ourselves accountable for the assessment and the outputs that plan could deliver.

Yeah, you mentioned the council's role. So do you have a sense of what a shared agenda could be between, you know, the council's role and DCLA? Yes, of course. I think that one of the advantages of thinking about it as a shared agenda is that the mandates of the different institutions and actors in the system allow us to dig deep into very specific dimensions.

For example, the councils and the way that council members come from a specific borough or neighborhood allows us to have a conversation at a neighborhood level like the SIAB team has recommended. There's a lot more nuance in that work. We would be talking about resourcing neighborhoods and communities rather than just acting through a patronage model, put it like that way, where you fund an artist or an organization. which is also important, but our conversation and the repertoire for action would expand.

DCLA's mandate and what they're doing with the programs they have, as you said, there's an executive prerogative. With the council, it's of a different sort. We can talk about Tsukasa and all these different ways of articulation. It allows us to represent that complexity and operationalize our actions through coordination. A lot of the criticisms that come up is how we work in silos.

This is a way of attending that problem. If you may, The same way that you build evaluation in any plan, you could build oversight in that plan. Just all of us think together what oversight would look like so nobody's surprised when questions are asked. And I'll add one more thing. It's interesting because also in the last years, the capacity of organizations to produce research has increased in a way, filling the gaps of the research that doesn't exist.

So there's a lot of high specialization in each organization that brought together to the table to attend shared problems would be very beneficial. Thank you.

Um, Gonzalo, you mentioned the Public Artist-in-Residence as a residency. What would it look like as a citywide policy? Um, I think that would be helpful to, to understand, like, how can we make this a policy versus just sort of a residency as it is? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's a great program. I think should be doing more of that and invest much more on artists.

But again, that was the first step that the Blasio administration took 12 years ago into embedding culture in every aspect of city life. But it's just one artist doing a project, discrete project here and there. We need to think about cross-sector immediately for many reasons. One is, I'm gonna be self-serving, but that's the way we're gonna be able to bring new funds to the system. 2 is we have this incredible, as Syab said, this incredible infrastructure of cultural organizations that could be doing so much more if we all plan in a way that with coordination and intention.

I think in a way what we're trying to do is we're trying to put a square peg through a hole. The way we distribute resources cultural resources for cultural organizations in the city of New York is through a patronage model, right? It looks like we're in the 19th century. It's true. The Department of Health spends more money on the South Bronx because there are higher asthma rates.

Why we cannot spend more money in culture knowing that it has all this incredible impact? that we just learned, you know, from our friends in SIAP, right? So make the policy, make it not just a residency of an artist, but let's cultural policy how it can affect other policies across the city.

Okay, and final loaded question. So as CreateNYC reached its 10-year mark in 2027, how should the council use this moment? And if this committee could take one step to move things forward, what should it be? You know, there's a few things. One is I always say that government has a lot of power because of funding, but also has a power of convening, right?

And that power of convening comes with a responsibility of leadership, right? We all feel in this sector that we're a little unfocused. because we don't have that agenda that we're talking about. How the council and the city administration can say, this is what we see, this is what we hear from our constituencies, this is what we're going to focus on.

Each of us from our organizations, our roles, our missions, the resources that we have, we could all be plugging into that. I'll just add that I think we need to create as well everything that Gonzalo said, but for that to rest on a capacity that can deliver. We can talk about all these things, but if institutional capacity is not able to really assess and provide the knowledge that we need to operationalize, that will be a failure in that next step.

And if you allow me 30 seconds more, right, the other thing that we're seeing is we have been talking about how arts and culture can serve, you know, the city. We also are an object. of policy. And one of the things that we're seeing is, and I hinted a little bit, is when big development comes to a neighborhood, we make sure that we provide fire safety, libraries, schools, parks, but we left arts and culture to the market, right?

Because we're private partners on that. We're not planning, you know, for the long term. We're not planning for the long term creation of those cultural assets that Sayap has mentioned that are important to a neighborhood. And when changes come, we're not even thinking about how we root them, right? Kensington is one of the examples of neighborhoods that are being under rezoning.

You mentioned, you know, in Queens too. Go Queens, get the money. If it's not for advocates like you, right, you know, there's nothing codified that looks at where are the cultural organizations that are there, what are the cultural assets that need to be anchored there, and how do we attract new ones as we're going through redevelopment. Yeah, I'm wondering if that's a bill, because I remember the council passed a law that requires racial impact statements on rezonings.

So I'm thinking about, you know, we have environmental impact. I mean, to your point, there are checklist of things that we have to do when we do neighborhood plans. And I don't think arts and culture is institutionalized in the same way. So maybe that is an opportunity to— The only— we have a— sorry to interrupt. I'm excited.

We had a policy recommendation that really looks at how we start looking at arts and culture assets as community amenities in the environmental impact. And the only way that arts and culture enter now through that process is if, you know, there's a big brick-and-mortar landmark building, right? So that says a lot about— Yeah, a part of why I entered for ours is because we had JCAL, JPAC, and King Manor in the study map.

So we sort of had to talk about it because we had these sort of 3 cultural brick-and-mortar locations that were within the study map. So that's definitely a good point.

Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you. Every time you come, I'm like, I need to have a separate meeting. So I'm going to try to make that happen so I can, like, sit down and talk to you. Talk to your staff. Yes. Okay. Thank you so much. Okay. Lucy is online in London, and she can't stay long, so we're going to call her after this panel.

This is the entire note, and this is what it said. Hi, Lucy, joining us from London. You love us so much that you are Zooming in from Big Ben. I, I couldn't miss it. I had to come over here for work, but I'm coming back on Wednesday. Thank you very much for, for hearing, uh, my testimony. I really, really appreciate it.

Uh, Chair Williams, Council Members Maloney, Lewis, Stevens. My name is Lucy Sexton, she/her. I lead New Yorkers for Culture and Arts.

CreateNYC identified many problems and proposed solutions. It also inspired the People's Cultural Plan, which identified and proposed solutions to further challenges. I thank the many people who worked on both those plans. CreateNYC included disability access, inclusion, and equity throughout the plan, articulating the importance of including cultural workers with disabilities in decision-making capacities like grant panels and capital projects.

It also created the Disability Forward Fund. Both of these ideas should be revisited. The data on what they achieved and didn't achieve should be released, and we should most importantly get disabled artists and activists back at the table for real change. One current initiative the city could support right now is the Cultural Accessibility NYC project to research and build an accessibility hub which would provide low-cost equipment and services, allowing cultural organizations of every size to increase accessibility for artists and audiences.

CreateNYC also proposed a citizens council and created a Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission. Neither is active today. We propose that the City Council pass legislation to make a cultural advisory group a permanent feature, one that would meet with DCLA on a biannual basis to discuss concerns and to see what can be done to address them. CreateNYC called for quality arts education for every student, yet we still do not have a dedicated art teacher in every New York City public school.

CreateNYC emphasized equity. Here are some concrete actions to take toward that goal. In serving embattled immigrant artists, the city can help those communities be aware of and receive info on the council's cultural immigrant initiative. Trusted messengers like the Asian American Arts Alliance should be funded to do this work. In serving Black and other organizations of color, which are at great risk of cultural erasure due to federal attacks, the Council should increase funding to the Coalition of Theaters of Color.

Finally, queer art is mentioned but not meaningfully addressed in the plan. The Council's LGBTQIA+ Caucus has advanced a trans artist microgrant program, and they call for a $5 million fund for queer art. In this time of attack on queer and trans art, the city should step in to proudly support these artists. The People's Cultural Plan went further and addressed affordability and support for artists and culture workers.

These should be included. Healthcare for arts workers is in crisis. Many were recently dumped from the essential plan due to federal cuts. City Council should advance the proposal from Freelancers Union to create a pilot program providing portable health benefits for teaching artists. To address— oh, in terms of affordable workspace for artists, philanthropic support has been withdrawn for a longstanding subsidy program that made subsidies so you'd get affordable rehearsal space for the dance and theater artists.

That has dried up. The city should step in with simple subsidies distributed through the art service organizations that have already been doing this work. To address affordable housing, the city can and should at no cost pass legislation guaranteeing that the city's human rights law not be used to ban artist preference housing. This would provide a pathway for nonprofit housing projects to increase the number of affordable apartments for the city's cultural workforce, many of whom are living at or near the poverty line.

To increase the amount of affordable cultural space, For organizations, the city should look at the New York State Art Space Act, which proposed tax breaks for developers who offer cultural nonprofits below-market rates on 20-year leases. Finally, I want to lift up this idea of cultural civic infrastructure, which you've just been speaking about. As the city looks at its new housing initiatives, it should do an environmental scan not only of the neighborhood schools and hospitals, but of its cultural spaces and arts organizations. that will serve the new residents.

As you heard from Mark and Susan, the researchers, data shows that robust cultural assets make for happier, healthier, better educated, and more connected communities. So let's build them. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Lucy. You answered all the questions we had. But if you could submit your testimony, though, because you had some really substantive solutions here. And if you could also share— I don't think I've ever seen the People's Culture Plan, so if you could send that to me too, that'd be great. Thank you so much. Get some rest.

We're ahead, right? They're ahead. So yeah, it's nighttime here. Yes. Okay, so get some rest. I appreciate you.

Okay, um, turning back to the folks who are here with us in person, I will call Lisa Gold, DJ McDonald, Judith Insel, Kimberly Olson, and Cindy Vanden Bosch. And if I said this wrong, correct me. And this is like— I'm just saying this as everyone assembles. When we've reached out to the Ledge folks about the portable insurance, I feel like we were told we can draft the bill, correct?

So if you have some legislative workarounds, I'm open because we've been having internal conversations and it does feel like we're preempted or we're not able to, to do it from a city perspective. But if you have some suggestions, I'm open to figuring out how to finagle our internal ledge process. So— Okay, thank you. Whoever wants to start, eeny meeny miny moe.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair Dr. Natasha Williams and any other esteemed city council members. My name is Judith Insell, and as the executive director of the Bronx Arts Ensemble, I am advocating for the next iteration of CreateNYC to be developed as a true 3 to 5 year strategic plan, including budgetary information. For years, I have longed for a citywide strategic plan for arts and culture.

The next CreateNYC should be a strategic plan to help all arts institutions particularly small and mid-sized organizations move into more sustainable and elevated service of arts and culture programs to all New Yorkers. I would also advocate that this new plan present the real need for arts and culture funding to finally reach 1% in the New York City budget.

I believe that setting aside at least this amount of funding in the New York City budget is the only way to successfully execute a new plan for arts and culture in New York City. Today we have heard testimony from experts citing that cultural assets in communities literally help improve the physical lives of citizens in lower and moderate income neighborhoods.

My community, Bronx-based organization, needs to have a supportive citywide plan in place to help us supply the underserved communities of the Bronx to live better and shine brighter. New York City is a special place that needs support from a very thoughtful strategic plan for arts and culture in New York. The next iteration of CreateNYC must strive to be a strategic plan that is executed with intention in order to keep pace with the ever-evolving landscape of arts and culture in New York City.

Thank you very much.

Okay. Good afternoon, Chair Williams, members of the council. Thank you so much for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Lisa Gold, and I'm the executive director of the Asian American Arts Alliance, or A4 for short, for 40— for more than 40 years, um, A4 has worked to ensure greater representation, equity, and opportunities for Asian American and Pacific Islanders artists and cultural organizations across all of the disciplines.

And I'm really appreciative of you for holding this hearing today on Create NYC because I really do believe that the intentions of the plan were well-meaning, but as we've all heard, um, the execution fell way short of expectations. And what is truly needed to ensure equitable equity and inclusion in the city's cultural sector, which was obviously the first issue that the plan sought to address.

So we, we work with a community of artists and arts organizations who receive far less than their equitable share of funding. There are no AAPI-led or serving CIGs, and from the CDF data last year, which I had to pull myself, It shows that only 5% of organizations who received those CDF grants were AAPI-led and serving. We are 18% of the city population.

And of those who did receive grants, the average grant amount was 28% less than the average. So I think that DCA should be analyzing and releasing this data so that we can track and ensure accountability to ensure that underserved communities, which you brought up again, thank you, um, are actually, uh, being, being, getting their fair share and, and getting the resources that they need.

Um, and I also want to point out that I, I think that the local arts council should also be held to the same standard so we can assure that individual artists are being treated equitably in the distribution of city, um, city-funded grants. So the economic impact of the arts you know, and, and all of the other health measures is undeniable, as we've heard earlier.

And yet not all of our communities are benefiting from the city's economic and other development strategies. For example, Manhattan's Chinatown does not have a single black box theater or public performance space or rehearsal space. And yet the city has managed to find nearly $4 billion to invest in the jail. So I ask that the community— that the commission truly engage with communities, especially the members of the AAPC AAPI community, 1.5 million of us, to truly ensure equitable and inclusive arts and culture.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Deputy Speaker Williams and members of the City Council staff. My name is Kimberly Olson. I'm here testifying on behalf of the New York City Arts and Education Roundtable regarding Strategy 5 in CreateNYC, provide a high-quality arts education for all New York City students. While CREATE-NYC offers a strong framework, it's quite troubling to me to see that the last publicly recorded actions for Strategy 5 date back to 2022.

To your point earlier, Deputy Speaker, across the CREATE-NYC materials, there lacks actually a shared baseline definition of what we actually mean when we say high-quality sequential arts education. While there are buzzwords and terms thrown around like culturally responsive pedagogy, certified arts teachers, Without actually a clear shared definition, it's near impossible for us to measure what real progress has taken place.

What we do know is that arts education relies on a strong partnership. Last year— last school year alone, over 900 cultural organizations partnered with New York City public schools, serving 84% of schools. Partnership here is key. But as I think you can see, that partnership needs work between DCLA and New York City public schools. To build on this momentum, we urge the city to focus on 4 critical actions.

First, close the certified arts teacher gap. Currently, 69% of middle school— or 8th grade students are failing to meet arts requirements set by the state, largely because their schools lack a certified arts teacher. Applying the lessons learned from the 2018-2019 Staten Island pilot that helped bring more certified arts teachers into our system, leveraging the PE Works model, and and also using the baseline funding for arts education can help our city close the gap and ensure that students receive sequential arts instruction.

Second, help reconnect schools with local arts partners. Since CreateNYC launched, the city actually discontinued both the Arts and Cultural Education Services Guide and the annual Arts Services Fair, leaving schools without a clear roadmap to cultural partners. We applaud you, Deputy Speaker, for hosting an upcoming CASA fair and urged the city to expand this model to at least one fair per district.

We are happy to help. To help bridge this gap as well, the roundtable is launching a platform called Creative Compass in late '26, early '27, that's going to be a searchable arts partner database. However, we need clear collaboration with New York City Public Schools, with DOE, and with the council to make it a success. Third, we ask that you modernize cost of funding and contracting timelines.

The cost of programming is a model initiative, but grant amounts remain static since its inception while the cost of living, living and the cost of delivering programs have skyrocketed. With award letters being released as late as March, it leaves little time for program delivery that's only a fraction of the school year. Moving to quarterly award letters and increasing grant sizes not only helps put teaching artists to work, but also helps deliver free programming to families starting earlier in the school year.

And last but not least, just improving data transparency. In 2025, the Independent Budget Office reported that 72% of schools have at least one CDF-funded program. Requiring grantees who are working in schools to include school DBN in their final reports will yield important data to help identify potential arts deserts and guide equitable funding allocations. Thank you.

Good afternoon. Deputy Speaker, staff members, and all my friends, colleagues, and fellow art advocates. DJ McDonald speaking. Visual description: pale-faced male, shaved head and face, dark-rimmed glasses with blue arms, wearing a black bag over my shoulder over a blue jacket with under— over a white t-shirt with, uh, Culture for All outlined in red. Um, thank you for allowing me to testify.

Uh, you may know me from the Dance Parade, which will, for the 21st year minus 2 virtual ones during the pandemic, will fill the streets of Manhattan and the whole of Tompkins Square Park on May 15th with the dancers of all 5 boroughs and beyond. Representing the colorful diversity of cultures that constitute the dance community of our city.

Our work goes on year-round through the community engagement program in city schools, senior centers, recreation centers, and parks. I want to thank the Deputy Speaker, Chair and Committee members, and staff. I also appear today as the Steering Committee Chair of the Cultural Accessibility New York City, or CANIC, project currently completing its initial research and planning phase and hoping to publish its findings and recommendations for furthering disability justice and cultural access for artists, culture workers, and audiences across New York City's cultural landscape.

At least 3 of my colleagues and advisors working on this initiative also plan to testify in the course of this hearing. We hope to demonstrate that equitable access looms large in the shadow of the CreateNYC plan and its subsequent action plan. Here I want to pause and thank the Deputy Speaker for raising these aspects of the plan directly with the Commissioner during this hearing.

CANIC believes that if we collectively, with the help of this and other committees, the Council at Large, the Department of Cultural Affairs, and other offices of the administration, our own arts organizations, and philanthropic partners. If we can address the promises that fell through the original plan and action plan, We can together try to reach their goals and recommendations and make disability justice and equity among the first and not the last considerations in approaching the possibilities inherent in the vast wealth of our city's cultural landscape and heritage.

As a dancer aging as fast as nature makes necessary, this is as much affordable space will make this a more livable, colorful, and vibrant city we love for ourselves as well as many of our fellow New Yorkers as possible. Thank you. Good afternoon, Deputy Speaker Nantasha Williams, as well as other members of the City Council staff and those that are here today.

My name is Cindy Vanden Bosch, and I am the president of Turnstile Tours and Studio. I have over 20 years of experience working to advance accessibility in the cultural and tourism fields in New York City, and I've also worked for disability service providers through the years. I'm delivering my testimony today from the perspective of a non-disabled cultural accessibility practitioner, researcher, and planner.

I'm currently the lead consultant on this research and planning project for cultural Accessibility NYC, and we are taking an evidence-based and collaborative approach and are seeking to take collective action to advance the city's arts and culture sector towards experiential equity for and with disabled workers, artists, and audiences. I'm currently working alongside a team of researchers and steering committee of artists, cultural access workers, and advocates, most of whom have lived experience with disability, to gather quantitative and qualitative data on the state of the city's cultural accessibility infrastructure to inform strategies to address systemic barriers and aggregate resources to better support organizations' accessibility capacity building efforts.

This research seeks to build on past efforts, including the cultural plan and all the hard work that many, many disability advocates and cultural accessibility experts invested in. And we also seek to build on seek to create— we're conducting a landscape analysis, literature review, and a survey which is live through the end of the week targeting cultural workers about organizational structures and needs, as well as focus groups with deaf and disabled artists, disability service providers, and cultural workers.

We welcome the city to engage with this project. We need the city to engage with this project. As we've been doing this research, you know, we've thought to ourselves, What would it mean if we could actually gain access to some of the data that the Department of Cultural Affairs actually has in its applications? I will also say that since my time is short, a priority from our perspective is this question around nothing about us without us, the disability rights mantra.

You know, Simi Linton and Kevin Gottkin from the Disability Arts NYC Task Force who mobilized so many people to work on the cultural plan, they're not here today and they need to be at the table. as do other leaders in disability arts and cultural accessibility. How can we integrate accessibility into the way that organizations carry out their work?

And what's going on with the Disability Forward Fund that was designed to increase equity inclusion of artists, cultural workers, and audiences with disabilities? We're asked today to comment on where we go from here, but we don't even know We know that there were some funds distributed, but how were they distributed across the objective areas? There were multiple different objectives for that fund, and there's no sort of public sense of how those funds have been used.

And last but not least, I think this is for all New Yorkers. We do want to— I'm excited to hear that there will be more data that's available, but for example, on the CDF application, it asks thousands of organizations What are your specific strategies and policies to make programs accessible to people with disabilities? Outline your practices that go beyond ADA compliance.

Imagine what we could learn if we all took a step back and there was actually analysis that was done. Why is it that we don't have researchers in-house at the Department of Cultural Affairs as the County of LA has? They actually are able to do that analysis. Is it a capacity building issue? Is there a way that there can be partnerships that are formed with organizations that are in and of these communities that can support analysis so that we know what has been accomplished.

And we're not starting from scratch. We need to build on the hard work that's been done on this cultural plan and understand what has been accomplished and where do we go from here. Thank you.

Thank you. I'm happy to engage around the plan. I don't know where you all are in your your assessment and your planning, if you're near completion and you want to brief members and figure out how to actualize it and, you know, connect it to policy or, you know, I'm happy to engage with the plan. I didn't know about it.

This was the first time. So thank you for educating me. And, you know, let me know how I can be helpful in the plan. Thank you. And asking clearly some follow-up questions to DCLA around the Disability Forward. funds. I think one thing that's been challenging is actually just sort of getting the ear of, you know, having the opportunity to meet with elected officials as well as with the many different actors, because accessible cultural accessibility touches many different agencies, and it's a fragmented landscape that it's hard for organizations to navigate.

And so if we could do some kind of listening session that would bring together these different agencies, that includes the Department of Cultural Affairs, something like a roundtable, so that people can actually hear from disabled artists, audience members that represent different constituencies within New York City, as well as cultural access, you know, people that have disability expertise that have been working on this for decades.

Yeah, I would encourage you to reach out to Chair Shahana Hanif. So the speaker actually separated out a committee, and so we literally have a disability committee. So I would encourage you to reach out to her. I'm happy to do joint hearings. Like, I'm— so I would say just reach out to us, like I said, because this is the first time that I heard of your organization.

Okay, we did reach out. Okay. And we have also met with the staff, with Councilmember Marte, and we have also reached out several times to the Commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs in the Okay. Well, yes, feel free to reach out to me, and I can try to help pull a meeting together. Because Gonzalo is right.

I always say we have the power to convene. We don't have a lot of powers, but we do— when we tell people to come meet, for the most part, we can get people to come together. So— It's true. And we'll be happy to forward you the formal proposal for roundtable we sent to Chair Sounds great. Thank you all so much.

Appreciate you.

Okay. We have Malik Jones. I feel like I'm saying that wrong. That's right. That was right? Oh, okay. Great. Rosalyn Barber. Christopher and Martha Neighbors. Oh, we have Snug Harbor here. Shoutouts to Staten Island. While they come up, Regina just passed me a note that Mark, like the testifying expert, lost his jacket with his wallet and he wants to know if— Okay, did anybody pick up a jacket?

Mr. Mark lost his jacket. Did anybody— a raincoat? Dark gray raincoat. Oh, is this it? You see what happens when you ask questions? Things get found. There you go. Lost and now found. Thank you. All right, to this awesome panel. Is that your jacket? Crisis averted. Yay. Okay. We're such a friendly crowd. We are. I think you can do this.

Great.

Good afternoon, Chair Dr. Williams and members of the Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries, and International Intergroup Relations. Thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Chris Gorman. I'm Vice President of Public Affairs at the Museum of the City of New York, and I'm honored to speak on behalf of Stephanie Hill Wilchfort, the museum's Renée Menchel Director and Chair of the Cultural and Institutions Group, who could not be here today.

I'm here to provide testimony on behalf of the CIG, a coalition of 39 cultural organizations located in all 5 boroughs, including zoos, gardens, museums, and performing arts organizations. Our institutions have been partners in CreateNYC since it launched in 2017. 9 years later, I want to share some of the ways our institutions execute on the goals of CreateNYC and to offer the CIG as a partner of the city in developing future cultural plans for a new era.

On a personal note, my daughter was born in October of 2017, and I'm grateful she arrived in a city where culture and museums are supported and championed and continue to be, thanks to you and your committee members, Dr. Williams. The goal of CreateNYC was to build a more inclusive, equitable, and resilient cultural ecosystem, and to examine how cultural equity can be advanced through government policy.

As public institutions, the CIGs have worked under the longstanding mission to ensure culture is affordable and accessible. Our institutions welcome over 4 million visits— free visits each year and serve as safe public spaces for people of all ages. Each of our institutions expands its reach through partnerships with city agencies and community-based organizations to provide a host of services that complement our core missions.

Such as implementing the IDNYC program and serving as vaccination sites, voting sites, and cooling centers. Our institutions have 15,700 full- and part-time employees, including 5,800 union staff. CIGs also employ approximately 6,000 per diem staff members, including teaching artists, musicians, explainers, educators, and other professionals. We train the city's cultural workforce. And we draw cultural workers and creative industries to New York.

The CIG is essential to the city's economic prosperity and should continue to be integrated into the city's economic development strategy in both workforce development and attracting talent. The CIG's educational resources for New York City students make New York a leader in museum education. For example, in the last year at the Museum of the City of New York, we welcomed over 15,000 students on over 700 field trips.

Each field trip is offered in English and Spanish or with bilingual support, and all of our exhibitions offer feature labels in English and Spanish. Public and charter schools in East Harlem visit for free. Much like our peers across the CIG, our institutions also serve as essential partners for our public schools. Public support is critical in order to— for our institutions to execute their missions and to deliver high-quality educational experiences experiences for New Yorkers.

We are deeply grateful for the City Council and the Mamdani administration's historic commitment to culture in fiscal year '27. Thank you again for the opportunity to testify as allies in helping the city execute key initiatives. We look forward to strengthening our partnership and exploring new areas of collaboration to ensure that cultural workers can afford to live here, every child gets arts education, and every New Yorker is welcomed into our institutions.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Dr. Williams and council staff. Thank you so much for the shout-out to Staten Island. We do appreciate that. I am Martha Nabors, Executive Vice President of Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden, a culture park and member of the Cultural Institutions Group located in Council District 49 on Staten Island. I'm here today on behalf of Jessica Vidore, President and CEO and Vice Chair for Staten Island of the Cultural Institutions Group.

CreateNYC was instrumental in building a more inclusive and equitable cultural sector. Snug Harbor is encouraged to see Council and the Department of Cultural Affairs revisiting the plan. Progress has been made towards its objectives, there is still much work to do to ensure that all New Yorkers can have access to culture and that artists and cultural workers can build sustainable lives in our city.

Inspired by the original plan, Snug Harbor has revamped recruitment, hiring, and promotion, building a more diverse staff and board of directors, and screens all of our programs for inclusion and accessibility. We address affordability through artist residencies and free and deeply discounted rental fees for artists, cultural organizations, and community groups. Since the 2019 action plan was released, visitorship has increased 30%.

This work is ongoing, as our goal is a more culturally connected and thriving Staten Island. The creative sector in New York City is facing major challenges. Cultural workers earn 23% less than the national average when adjusted for the high cost of living in New York City. Rising insurance costs in a gig economy make healthcare unattainable for many.

Housing and workspace is unaffordable for most of our artists and young people. New York City's resident artist population is declining. Artists and young people are leaving our city for better quality of life elsewhere. New York's creative ecosystem is inseparable from our civic identity. Arts and culture generates over $110 billion annually and employs over 325,000 New Yorkers. Our sector is a key driver for tourism, which generates an additional $74 billion in economic impact.

New York City does not work without a vibrant cultural sector. To stem the creative brain drain and ensure a vibrant cultural sector, the city must take action. CreateNYC has largely sat on a shelf over the last 6 or 7 years. A revitalized plan, well executed, would lead to a more sustainable, diverse, inclusive, and equitable cultural sector as originally envisioned.

Snug Harbor applauds City Council, the administration, and the Department of Cultural Affairs for your collective commitment to a healthy and vibrant cultural sector. We are eager to partner with you to ensure that Staten Island plays a role in making our city the center of creativity and innovation that we all know it should be. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Chair and members of the committee. My name is Malik Jones. I'm the Chief People Officer officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. We believe culture is critical to democracy. This means it must be accessible, affordable, and reflective of all New Yorkers. CreateNYC solidified the city's commitment to this issue, shaped a clear set of policy goals, and historic investments in culture are steps in continuing this work.

At Lincoln Center, this has meant a few things. One, affordable access to art. Since 2022, Lincoln Center Presents free and choose-what-you-pay model has helped bring nearly 3 million people to our campus. This approach welcomes more people and reflects our commitment to centering the arts in everyday life, ensuring extraordinary artistic experiences remain within reach for all. Next, art spaces as civic spaces.

In 2028, we'll be excited to open the re-envisioned Amsterdam Avenue from the library to Damarash Park to a new performance park designed with over 7,200 insights from community members. We've also strengthened our relationships in the neighborhood, hosting community board meetings, collaborating with nearby NYCHA neighbors, and engaging surrounding schools. And centered inclusive practices. Our work benefits from the broad range of perspectives and experiences that our management team and our employees bring to this work.

We're also investing in the next generation through expanded recruitment, including participating in New York City at Work and summer youth employment through the Access Ambassadors program. As the city plans for the next iteration, we need the cultural plan to evolve into New York City's operationalization— how's that— of culture as essential infrastructure. We must, one, leverage every tool and create new mechanisms so New Yorkers can afford to live, create, and present in our city.

We must connect every New Yorker to culture in a way that is attainable and accessible and deploy a cross-agency effort that incorporates culture in all aspects to build healthier, more connected, and resilient communities. We offer more details in our written submission, but in closing, without bold solutions, we risk losing our city's identity. Together, we believe we can be part of the solution.

And we thank you again for your time.

Good afternoon, Deputy Speaker Dr. Williams, council members, and staff. I'm Rosalind Barber. I'm the administrative chief of staff at the Public Theater. Thank you for this opportunity to testify. Every year, the Public serves over 100,000 New Yorkers with free programming, including Shakespeare in the Park, our mobile unit performances in the 5 boroughs, and free classes for seniors, youth, immigrants, and more.

CreateNYC has helped us do that work with greater focus because a clear plan makes a more— makes us a more effective partner with the city. Here are a few examples of what that looks like. In the CreateNYC plan, it called for supporting the cultural life of low-income communities and derived research from the CEAP study to help identify those communities.

We used that same research, having read the cultural plan, to help us identify where we would take our mobile unit performances. So it really helped galvanize that idea, picking up from the research that already existed to allow us to focus our efforts in a way that made sense in the context of the cultural plan. So with that, we've renewed our focus in going to places like Brownsville Rec, St.

Mary's Park, Roy Wilkins Park, Faber Fieldhouse, and many other locations across the city, all of the performances being free with no RSVP required. It's also why we partner with libraries in all 5 boroughs to distribute our free Shakespeare in the Park tickets. Second, the cultural— the CreateNYC plan required a board-adopted EDI or DEI plan, and while the public was already in the process of creating that and had a committee, this again was a really galvanizing force that helped us when we were having conversations with our board explain the necessity to have these plans.

And since then, we've revised our plan to center anti-racism. We still have work to do, but having this plan has made us better, and it's also sort of ensured that we're having this conversation with our board and with our staff in a really thoughtful way. What makes this work is clarity. When the city states its expectations clearly, we know what we're accountable for and we can hold the city accountable as well.

That shared accountability creates dialogue and shared purpose and it improves our work. So we hope that there will be a revitalized and intentional— I feel like that was a word that previous folks used— commitment to this plan. where we can all join together and be a force amplifier in this important work.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, and it's nice to hear the SIGs embrace the plan. I was a lobbyist when the plan came out, and some of my cultural institutions were freaking out. So it's nice to hear that there has been progress and like a sincere adaptation of many of the goals, and you all kind of like doing your own thing based off of what the city sort of required, but it seems based off of the testimony that it also has been like a commitment of the institutions and boards themselves.

So that's really wonderful to hear. We love the 6. Thank you so much for testifying. Okay. Okay.

The next panel we have is Randy Berry. Oh, hi, Randy. Esther Robinson. And Daniel Arnau. I feel so cool because like when I used to say some of these names, I didn't know who you guys were, but like now I know. Like, hey, becoming acclimated. It's almost been a full year. Somebody just referred to us as the space folks.

Yeah, the space folks. Good afternoon. My name is Daniel Arno. I'm here on behalf of the Entertainment Community Fund and our Housing Development Corporation. We are a human service organization that provides support, including affordable housing, to everyone in the performing arts and entertainment community. I'm here with Esther and Randy to discuss CreateNYC's Objective 4, which is focused on the affordability crisis, real estate, and our cultural community.

Arts and culture are New York City's greatest asset. Arts workers are the engine of our creative community and strengthen communities. Yet, New York City's resident artist population is declining for the first time in decades. This situation is driven by the affordability crisis, the high cost of real estate, and rising cost of living. Arts and culture are a public good.

They require strong infrastructure and intentional city planning. A critical question for us is how do we preserve and create long-term affordable artist workspace and artist housing? To start, city-led developments can explicitly include cultural facilities and affordable housing for artists. These priorities should be built into the initial planning, RFP process, and include DCLA as a partner from the outset.

For affordable Artist workspace within mixed-use affordable housing developments. The city should create a streamlined and dedicated pathway that enables arts organizations to partner with developers, access capital funding for the fit-out of these facilities. This would help deliver cultural spaces more quickly while reducing risks, costs, and uncertainty for stakeholders. On the housing front, we need more affordable housing for all New Yorkers. workers, and we also need dedicated programs to design— that are designed to address the unique needs of our community.

New York needs a little bit of artist housing everywhere. One mechanism to achieve this is an artist preference in affordable housing, and we do support legislation introduced that would allow the city to establish an artist preference without violating the Human Rights Law. Thank you. Good afternoon, Deputy Speaker and members of the committee. My name is Randy Berry, and I'm the executive director of Indie Space.

We are a community organizer and a grassroots service organization for low-income artists, cultural workers, and small-budget organizations. We provide them with funding, professional development, and real estate expertise. We believe culture should be treated as a public good and essential social infrastructure, not an amenity. Thank you. Cultural spaces help create connected, healthy communities, yet the people and organizations that sustain our cultural life are increasingly being priced out of the city.

We urge the city to enhance CreateMIC by, first, you've heard this before today, integrating cultural assets into city planning. This is critical. Cultural space should be considered essential infrastructure alongside housing, schools, parks and incorporated into neighborhood planning from the beginning, not something that we try to accommodate after development decisions have already been made. Second, create pathways to permanent affordable cultural space.

Explore creative land trusts, the use of city-owned properties, and a dedicated acquisition fund that allows arts organizations to act quickly enough to actually compete in the real estate market. Third, incentivize cultural space in new development. Create density bonuses for developers that are providing free or deeply affordable space, and refine community facility definitions so that small cultural organizations can compete for these opportunities.

Including cultural space in a building is only meaningful if artists can actually afford to use it. Fourth, streamline the process for creating cultural space in affordable housing developments. The process of financing and building out cultural space can be complicated and very slow. Through HPD and other relevant agencies, simplifying the capital process and allowing organizations and developers to work and fundraise in tandem for cultural space buildouts.

At Indie Space, we work every day to fill the gaps that existing systems leave behind, but artists cannot be expected to solve a systemic affordability crisis through creativity and resilience alone. We need public policies that make cultural space possible, affordable, and permanent. New York's cultural life is one of its greatest public assets, and the city's cultural plan must help ensure that the people who create that culture actually have a future here.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Deputy Speaker Williams and members of the committee. I'm Esther Robinson. I'm the executive director of ArtBuilt. At the Brooklyn Army Terminal, we operate about 50,000 square feet of affordable workspace for more than 120 artists and creative businesses created through the city's area initiative in 2016 and 2017, as mentioned earlier. ArtBuild remains the largest nonprofit long-term affordable creative workspace built in New York City in the past 30 years.

That's a long time. And we— It's a lot. Oh, it is. It is. Not from Southeast Queens. We want more in Southeast Queens. I'm with you on that. There should be more art belts everywhere. And we've seen what stable production space makes possible. These businesses hire, they train, they export, and they build lives in this city. So I want to focus on something often missing from cultural planning: where culture is made, right?

Behind our theaters, films, fashion, dance, and visual arts are workplaces, skilled trades, small businesses, and entire networks of production. The next CreateNYC must make cultural production an economic priority. Every borough and every council district needs places where goods and cultural work are made at scale. These are working places, not simply cultural amenities. The city needs to deliberately plan for, invest in, and build the spaces where this work happens, and we need to build for generations, not development or political cycles.

ArtBuild shows what city-owned space plus nonprofit operation can accomplish, but short leases are undermining financing and long-term investment in a very big way. The next plan needs to commit to leases of at least 20 years for publicly owned cultural production space. Our written testimony also proposes a permanent cultural production infrastructure fund, and measures to track whether production space is actually growing.

We don't even know what our loss rate is or what our growth rate is. The opportunity is bigger than any single project. We can build a citywide network of places where New Yorkers make things, build businesses, and invest in their neighborhoods across generations. Let's build a New York where the next generation doesn't just inherit a cultural legacy, but where every New Yorker inherits the means to create the greatest cultural capital in the world.

Thank you.

Thank you. And similar to what I had mentioned about the insurance, we've gotten a lot of pushback around the preference for artists in housing. And so if you have a legal workaround that you want to offer for us to sort pushback internally, I am all ears. Because I actually tried to— I'm working on a culture package of bills, and I actually tried to, like, get that to be one of the bills.

But we've gotten a ton of pushback with the human rights law, with the court case that happened around preferential housing. I don't know if many of you know, like, we can't really use preference for people who live in certain communities, which was something that I knew. So, Not for now. Just, I mean, you can share it now, but I'm just saying, like, if you have specific things you want to use to share for me to push back, because we've been told that it is, you know, very, very concerned about how that law sort of is in conflict with some other laws and court case decisions.

Yeah, I would just say, yeah, we're aware of the litigation and the Democrats demographic concerns, but we would love to hear more about what, what you're hearing and brief your office on workarounds. Yeah, just, just quickly that, you know, that the preference would go to, you know, white artists, um, and not artists of color, and, um, you know, and not being able to have like substantive pushback around that.

So that, that's been like largely the issue, but we can talk offline. I just want to share that it is something that I've tried to prioritize as well as the portable insurance. But, you know, when you deal with lawyers and they're looking at the charter, they're looking at the city's responsibilities versus mayor preemption, state preemption, curtailment. I mean, we get so kind of constrained with the legislation that we can introduce and pass.

So, yeah, I'm open to any suggestions or workarounds to address some of the issues that have been I just wanted to thank you for your perseverance. One of the things that unites everybody in this room is we tend to do impossible things all the time. And we are so grateful that you've joined our ranks in trying to do impossible things all the time.

I'm trying. That's why I'm like, help me. If you have some suggestions on what I can kind of go back and say, that would be helpful. Thank you so much for your testimony. And the last thing I was going to say is I read this book about cultural land trust in Canada. I don't know how that would apply here, but it's something that I, you know, read about and I was thinking a lot about because we do have CLTs.

They're not necessarily focused on culture, but, you know, New York City does have a CLT ecosystem, so. I just got back from a conference in Helsinki specifically around creative land trusts. And I'll tell you, there was 11 countries and 26 cities represented, and we're behind. We're really, really behind. Okay, so yes, share more, because I only read that one article, and that was about an area in Canada.

So clearly there's more cities and countries that have this. There's incredible work happening, and it all roots from city participation and connection to nonprofit organizations that are delivering space. In every case that's been successful, it started with adaptive reuse that was donated by the city. So you capitalize an organization with a big property, and then they're able to operate it at scale at low cost for a lot of people.

And in these other countries, they're talking about— we focus on 99-year leases. They have 999-year leases. It's a 1,000-year lease in— Wow. in England. Yeah. That's amazing. There's a lot to be done with collaboration. Wow. Thank you. I always appreciate being informed in these hearings because you all are the experts. So thank you so much.

Okay. Next up, we have Deeksha King— I'm saying this wrong— from the National Queer Theatre. How do you pronounce that? Oh, I have Kang and Adam, but is that how you say your name? Yeah. Kang? Kang. Kang. Okay, and Adam and Lindsay Malakel. Did I say that right? It's close. No, what is it? It's Maliekol. Oh my, that was not close.

Maliekol. That was Maliekol. Lindsay Maliekol. That was correct? Mali Ekel? It was. Okay, great. Thank you, Deputy Speaker Williams. My name is Diksha Gore, and I'm the Executive Director of TDF. I'm proud to be here on behalf of the 1.3 million audience members TDF served last year, including New Yorkers from all 51 council districts. TDF's work is driven by a core belief that when people experience art, They and their communities are better for it.

Arts participation reduces loneliness and depression, and it increases civic-mindedness, including our propensity to vote, volunteer, and donate. That's why our programs connect communities to the theater at every level, through the TKTS booth and our membership programs, through our education programs and community partnerships. and through our physical accessibility work. In August of this year, TDF partnered with city and cultural institutions, including the Department of Cultural Affairs, on Tickets for Teens, giving away 2,000 free theater tickets to New York City's high schoolers along with a free TDF membership unlocking deeply discounted access to the arts.

Over 23,000 students signed up in 5 days and purchased or unlocked over 5,000 admissions, highlighting our community's appetite for arts and culture. As you consider the next steps for CreateNYC and the city's cultural agenda, I urge you to continue to prioritize affordable— affordability and access to the arts for the audience. Many New Yorkers today believe that the arts are not for them.

The city has the opportunity in its next plan to dispel that myth. By making the arts affordable, accessible, and welcoming for all New Yorkers, we are investing in the artists and audiences of our future. And most importantly, we're building a more connected, more engaged, and healthier community for us all. As Tickets for Teens taught us, we have the best chance of success when we all bring our strengths to the table.

TDF stands ready to contribute. We sit at the center of a robust ecosystem of producers, cultural institutions, 150 neighborhood community organizations, schools, audiences, and government agencies. Together, we hope to lay the foundation for a joyful, healthy, and thriving future for New York and our cultural community. Thank you.

TDF is really amazing. Dear Speaker Williams, my name is Adam Odzis Rubin, and I'm the founder and artistic director of National Queer Theatre in Brooklyn. Thanks to DCLA's CDF support, NQT is surviving the anti-trans and anti-DEI attacks coming from the Trump administration. We have seen increased CDF support as a small organization, but we have not seen DCLA take deliberate action to support vulnerable LGBTQ communities.

When we consider the next phase of the CreateNYC plan, we must consider how this plan will protect and empower queer, trans, immigrant, and youth artists. With DCLA's recent announcement of a Cultural Stability Fund, we must recognize the instability of queer artists, of queer arts and culture organizations currently on the front lines of the Trump administration's attacks. Last year, the administration revoked our $20,000 NEA grant just 2 weeks before we started rehearsals for our annual Criminal Queerness Festival.

Now we are in federal lawsuit against the NEA, represented by the ACLU, looking to overturn their ban on funding programs that promote gender ideology. We need DCLA and the council's help to fight back. To support New York City's vibrant queer arts and culture, we recommend the following additions to the CreateNYC plan. Number 1, Baseline $5 million in federal— sorry, baseline $5 million in funding for queer arts organizations as outlined in the City Council's LGBTQIA+ Caucus's Pride in Policy Plan. 2, fund after-school programming for LGBTQ youth outside of school settings as an amendment for CASA or outside of CASA. 3, support the Trans Artist Microgrant Program.

Advocates have been fighting for an $800,000 initiative which would support 1,400 New York City trans artists with $500 microgrants. And lastly, continue prioritizing funding for small arts organizations. We are closest to our communities and can provide the most direct support to artists with the least bureaucracy. Thank you. Dear Speaker Williams, my name is Kang Medhiyanuwat. I am a Thai queer immigrant theater artist สวัสดีค่ะ and I'm an executive director of Thai Theatre Foundation, also the member of the artistic collective at National Queer Theatre.

My relationship with National Queer Theatre began when I directed a play called What You Are to Me as part of the Criminal Queerness Festival. It was one of my first directing gigs in New York City, and it changed the way I understand my place here as both queer artists and immigrant artists. I grew up in Thailand where censorship in art is real, so directing a work that explored queer censorship felt deeply personal to me.

As a queer immigrant artist, we often carry those experiences with like questioning whether this piece is too political, too queer, too cultural specific, or too simple, or even too difficult for some want to hear that, but working with National Queer Theatre taught me that those stories do not have to remain untold, and they have a space and the audience.

New York City has given me artistic freedom, and just importantly, New York City has given me friends. So that might sound funny and something to tell the city council, but I mean it seriously. For artists, friendship becomes community, community become collaboration, and someone invites you to a project and you introduce them to someone else, and then they form a project together.

And that network is often what keeps us growing when this career feels impossible. But community alone cannot pay the bills. Today I run a nonprofit called High Theatre Foundation. When even with public support, creating sustainable opportunity for artists is is still difficult. So I echo Adam's recommendation, and I would like to add like tiny things. Please make sure the CDR's funding reaches the smallest organization and the most vulnerable artists, especially queer artists whose works exist in intersection of immigration, race, culture, and identity.

Queer art should not have, have to survive only because individual organizations fight to make a room for it. We are not the risk to fund. We are the part that makes this city the cultural capital of the world. Thank you.

Hi, my name is Lindsay Molyakel. I'm the Vice President of Education and Public Engagement at the New 42, and we thank the New York City Council and Deputy Speaker Dr. Williams for your continued advocacy of cultural organizations like New 42, because resources like Create New York City Cultural Plan are essential to our work. We want to offer support for the future of CreateNYC, and more specifically, some key objectives and strategies that we hope will continue to be supported robustly as we move forward.

Objective 1 talks about support for culture in historically underserved communities. In 2022, we started a partnership with NYCHA specifically to invite families living in NYCHA housing to participate and attend live performing arts as a family. This program has grown quickly. This year we'll give away 2,000 free tickets, and through our partnership with TDF, we can help connect those families to more and more performing arts opportunities for free.

Our ticket allocations have been selling out in under an hour. In fact, the one that I did last week was 27 minutes. We know that there's a huge appetite in New York City families living and NYCHA are hungry to be invited to participate and attend in live performing arts, and we want the future of CreateNYC to help expand this kind of access for New York City families.

Also, the affordability crisis of the cultural community— you've talked about it a lot, but to bottom line it, we— the main reason our teaching artists are having to leave the field is because of the loss of health insurance. So that portable benefits, we are part of the working group, we are trying to make that work that can happen.

We are happy to collaborate as much as we can, but, you know, we invest a lot of our direct salary support to our artists who we're working with, and that's the thing that is kicking them out of making art and staying in New York. We'd also like to make sure that providing high-quality arts education for all New York City public school students stays at the forefront.

Kim Olson talked about it really wonderfully, and so I'm just sort of bringing up a lot of what she said. But one of the things that we want to talk about is that the research that we've been doing about what happens for kids who are getting to attend live performing arts is really exciting. And if we take kids out of our idea about what it means to provide cultural access for New York City, we're really losing a huge amount of impact for the city as a whole.

So we just want to thank you for reinvesting in this and reengaging. We are very, very appreciative. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate you all for coming to testify. This is always like a very spirited group, so I don't take that lightly because I've been to many hearings and some of them are very dry. So I appreciate you all for coming. Thank you so much for your testimony. The next panel is Eva Davis and Sherelle Dixon Oh, you know what?

I saw you and then I ain't put it together. My soror Cheryl and Nin Ninye. I'm saying this wrong. You have to correct me. Maybe I can't read it. White scope of oh yes, we've been emailing. Is she here or is she online? This person, Miss White. Maybe she was here and— oh, okay. I have to email her.

We've been emailing. I would have loved to meet her in person. Okay, very McGovrinda. Oh, Jerry. I can't read, you know. I have this whole doctorate and I can't read. Um, Scope of Work is a cool organization, by the way. I never heard of them. I recently heard of them. They created their own— I'm like talking to the people who do research— they did their own like report very similar to the Center for Urban Futures report, um, called like Scope of Work.

They have this whole— it's— I'm sad I missed her because I would have loved to— You looking them up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're— and it's like a young group of artists and sort of like gig workers of color. Anyway, they emailed me and I'm like, oh, this is cool. Sorry. To the wonderful panel here. Yeah, you can start.

Great.

Thank you so much. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, Sora, Deputy Speaker, Dr. Williams, my current and former council members, Osei and Hudson, in their absence. fellow members of the Committee of Cultural Affairs, Libraries, and International Relations. Thank you so much for having us. My name is Chevelle Dixon. I'm the founder and managing director of Pan-African Solutions Consulting, and I bring you greetings from the great island nation of Brooklyn.

In our 13-year existence, we are New York City MWBE and New York State MWBE. We also are a New City DOE vendor. We specialize in strategic planning and government technical assistance, nonprofit board advisory, through program implementation and third-party evaluations. Having worked in 60 countries and 16 within Africa, we amplify economic sovereignty collaborative opportunities and cultural engagement across the Black diaspora locally and globally.

In our work, we have observed 2 critical— well, 3 critical interconnected gaps across our neighborhoods. One, or firstly, nonprofit capacity constraints. Grassroots CBOs are on the ground, but they're stretched thin. They are operating in silos. They are constantly juggling direct services while struggling with compliance for board governance and strategic external relations and coordination constraints. Secondly, local and global cultural disconnect.

Neighborhoods are losing their local cultural essence, from vanishing steel pan yards in Brooklyn to underutilized youth library spaces. Our youth need workforce exposure and our aging population need engagement that bridges generational understanding. Furthermore, there's an opportunity to bridge local cultural with global assets such as the United Nations and international mission offices calling our very city home. Thirdly, cultural preservation and recognition.

There is an unaddressed gap in mapping and honoring our local cultural giants through a coordinated and transparent way of preserving our neighborhood histories through formal street cones, namings in arts and cultural assets such as murals and monuments. This also provides an opportunity to engage in 400,000— like they just said— NYCHA residents, 500,000 NYCHA residents where— sorry, I lost my place— residents to not only be culturally consumers.

We're always talking about them being cultural consumers. Let's not forget we are also cultural creators and contributors, as we all know. Hip-hop was founded in 1973 in NYCHA. We reviewed— us here at Pan-African Solutions, we reviewed the CreateNYC plan and identified structural policy gaps. DCLA funding is constrained strictly to nonprofits and individual artists for grants. It lacks a mechanism for mission-driven for-profit MWBE engagement firms to participate build capacity, and deliver specialized technical assistance.

Our call to action: as you reimagine CreateNYC, we urge this committee to establish dedicated funding streams modeling successful frameworks such as CitizensNYC, for example, neighborhood business grants, to enable for-profit MWBE engagement firms to partner directly with CBOs and city agencies. My follow-up request and In conclusion, Pan-African Solutions Consulting welcomes the opportunity to follow up with committee members to share our framework for nonprofit board governance, institutional strengthening, youth and aging civic engagement, NYCHA resident inclusion, and cultural sustainability.

I thank you for your time and your leadership.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair Deputy Speaker Dr. Nantasha Williams, It's good to see you again. To the City Council and all the support that you do for arts and culture across New York City, my name is Eva Mayabal Davis. I'm here as a project manager for the Latinx Arts Consortium, LXNY. We represent 55+ Latino-serving cultural organizations across New York City, ranging from artist collectives to a couple of CIGs.

Our mission is to foster knowledge sharing and change, as well as collective action towards systemic change. Several of our members were part of the multilingual, multiracial coalition of artists, cultural workers, and community organizers that published the People's Cultural Plan in May 2017, the initial response to CreateNYC. Nearly a decade later, New York City has made progress in several areas identified by that plan, Yet many of its central concerns remain unresolved, particularly for Latinx, Black, immigrant, Indigenous, and other historically under-resourced artists and cultural organizations.

CreateNYC includes language for equity throughout the plan. And in order to more effectively comment on that progress that has been made, and as many of my colleagues have also pointed out, We need to know more about the extent of those results since their inception. So I really thank you for pushing on, making sure that we better understand that data.

In response, I want to uplift 3 points. One is language access. Language access and funding was made available and proposed by CreateNYC. However, it's disbursements and funding is not clear. We cannot— we must support establishing partnerships with service communities with language needs that include translation services, live interpretation, captioning, all of the ways in which language works so that we can have English to another language and other mother languages into multi— into a multilingual dimension.

This is especially important as Mano speakers are currently being discriminated against through the federal administration. And we know that language is culture and deserves the nuance of human translators who are cultural workers. A second point, affordable cultural spaces. It's been addressed by many of my colleagues. What has been the impact of the subsidized rehearsal space to this point, which is now coming to an end.

The People's Cultural Plan identified displacement as one of the greatest threats to cultural life in New York City, arguing that artists cannot thrive when the communities that sustain their work are priced out of neighborhoods. For Latinx cultural organizations especially, these pressures threaten more than physical infrastructure. They jeopardize the community of cultural practices, intergenerational relationships, community-based artistic networks, and we call to community ownership and control of cultural spaces that remain largely unrealized at a systemic level.

And I was very happy to hear more of my colleagues' initiatives for community land trust. In addition, the— and as we've heard your follow-up on freelance cultural works frequently lacking access to healthcare, retirement benefits, paid leave, and predictable— and unpredictable employment. And today, many artists cannot afford the essential plan due to continued defunding. And so we urge you to continue to consult with us, the experts, on what it means to push forward in co-designing portable benefits for healthcare.

Thank you. Tanya? Okay.

Hi, I'm Gerry Mike Orenda, author of America's First Freedom Rider. In 2018, She Built New York asked residents to nominate and select a woman for— in each borough for statues. It seemed like a straightforward project, a layup in basketball terms. Then the pandemic came. 2 administrations changed hands. 3 years later, no progress has been made on any of the 4 new designs.

Where have all the statues gone? It's been 8 years. 2027 is around the corner. In 2019, a memorial to Mother Cabrini was put forth in Battery Park. It was dedicated in 2020. If the city leadership doesn't believe these heroic women deserve statues, it should just say so. Fumbling the ball looks bad on any court. If the city believes in the program, it should take the shot.

The Knicks finally did, but we're not waiting 53 years for the rock to drop. Deliver the promise. Thanks. I love all the basketball analogies. Very New York. I thought it was fitting. Yeah, it was very fitting. I will say the one in my district for Billie Holiday has been moving along. Like, they selected an artist, but I agree, I feel like they have been stalled.

And as you heard from my question from Councilman Momarte, he has issues. But I will say the one in my district, um, they— the status they selected an artist. I don't know what the next step is and the timeline for the next step, but they did select an artist to do the monument for the Billie Holiday one in my district.

So that's my little one update I have for you. Yeah, I appreciate it. That's interesting you should say that because the reason I'm here is, you know, I got involved— you talked about Chris Marte and moving the statue of Jennings statue from Grand Central to Community Board 1. And I was asked 3 years ago by Community Board 1, because I wrote a book about her, well, where do you think— where did this actually happen?

And so I looked at the old Sanborn fire maps, went down, and I said, well, given, you know, there's all kinds of buildings there now, I said, but it is down here in Community Board 1. I also then, because everybody was saying, nobody's getting any information out of Cultural Affairs. Well, what's going on with the program? Is there anything going on?

And nothing happened, so I put in a FOIL request and they sent something, and this was a year ago. I put in a FOIL request and they put in and said, oh, we need 60 days. The information is so voluminous, we can't get to it. Another 60 days, another 60 days. I think if I still kept asking, it would have been this November 20th where they said that maybe they would have something.

So I filed an Article 78 with them. I sent it, you know, certified mail. I never got the card back, but I finally did get an email from somebody in Cultural Affairs that said, you know, what can we help you with? And I said, well, what's going on? And they said, Nothing. There's nothing. There's nothing to report.

There's no information. There's nothing we can send you. So that's why I'm here. I said, well, if nothing's happened in 8 years, when are they going to start having it happen? So yeah, it sounds like I didn't get quite the story that I was told in the email. So I'm a little annoyed by that, to be quite frank.

Yeah, that is— that's a lack of government transparency because they have been doing things on it. I mean, clearly it is significantly delayed and people should be frustrated, but I know they are— like, I personally have been actively involved in conversations over the course of the last 2 years for the one, the Billie Holiday statue in my district.

So they should have provided a more robust update to you. So I will follow up with the commissioner. I appreciate that. On that. And we have your information. Regina, can we specifically follow up? Okay, okay, great. Okay, thank you so much. Well, I appreciate it. Thanks. Yeah, no worries.

Um, is there anyone on, um, Zoom that wishes to testify? I'm gonna have to read some language that I'll read right now, which is, uh, this concludes our in-person portion of the public testimony. If you are testifying remotely, please listen for your name to be called. Once your name is called, a member of our staff will unmute you.

You may then start your testimony once the sergeant-at-arms sets the clock and cues you to begin. And so we will start with Beth, followed by Amilcar. You may begin.

Good afternoon, and thank you to the committee for this opportunity to testify on CreateNYC. And I'll be echoing much of what has been already said. My name is Beth Privor. I'm a native New Yorker, a disabled person, and co-founder and executive director of Hands On Sign Interpreted Performances, which provides interpreting services to a variety of theaters across the city.

I've worked alongside the Deaf community for more than 42 years, and I hear their frustrations constantly. I need an interpreter. I called the theater. They didn't know what I meant. No one called back, or they just said no. A quick no gets everyone off the hook, and the deaf person is left to fight alone or give up or call me, which is what generally happens, and lands on me to say, I'm not sure what to tell you.

I was around for the development of Create NYC, which focused quite heavily on disability and access issues. I attended town hall meetings, and from the plan, the Disability Forward Fund was created, where I served on one of the first panels. Today, that fund is a little-understood add-on for accommodations with no review and no accountability. We must acknowledge that very little has changed in terms of arts access policy in New York City in the last 10 years.

The fund should return to its original purpose, with deaf and disabled people and access workers part of the decision-making. But money alone isn't the answer. A grant can pay for one interpreter one time, But it can't make inclusion a standard rather than a courtesy. The city can lead that change by building access into how it funds, plans, and measures culture.

Now I sit on the steering committee of Cultural Accessibility NYC, an initiative where once again we're reinventing the wheel to gather data on disability and access we couldn't get from DCLA. The city should be our partner, not leave us to do this alone. I'm asking for access reporting from city-funded cultural organizations, a plan to meet the city's goals, and above all, accountability.

As I'm nearing the end of my career and I've run out of patience and energy for serving— Thank you. Your time has expired. You can finish up. Thank you. You're welcome. I've run out of patience for energy for serving on committees without commitment. But perhaps naively, I still have hope. So maybe for the last time, I'll ask you to work with us, ask us, include us.

But finally, let's do something to make real and lasting change. Thank you.

And what organization are you from? I think I missed that, Beth. Hands On Sign and Interpretive Performances. We do sign language interpreted theater in the city. Okay, thank you. Um, next we have Amilcar. You may begin.

Hello, good afternoon, Chairwoman Williams, members of the council. My name is Amilcar Priestley. I'm here on behalf of the Afro-Latino Project and the Afro-Latino Festival, and I'm here also representing the Panamanian community here in New York. Thank you to Council Members Lewis and co-sponsors Farias and Sanchez for bringing Resolution 625A to the floor. Reggaetón is one of the most popular genres on earth currently.

Its story is often told as if it began in one place. The truth is much richer. In the late 1970s and '80s, Afro-Caribbean communities in Panama. Many descended from West Indian workers who built the canal began taking Jamaican reggae and putting it into Spanish. They called it reggae en español or plena. It traveled by cassette, by radio, by Diablo Rojo bus.

Artists such as El General, Renato, and many others carried that sound across borders. It was influenced in Brooklyn. permeated many of Brooklyn's most popular venues, and it was one of the seeds— excuse me— that germinated right here in Brooklyn. That sound also reached Puerto Rico, and I want to be clear, Puerto Rican artists took it, fused it with hip-hop, and built it into the global force that we now see today.

This resolution enhances the contributions of both, a shared Caribbean story. It also honors New York. The city's mix of dancehall, hip-hop, and Latin communities helped shape the genre. Reggaetón is part of who we are. It's not the only time that Puerto Rico and Panama have come together. Carlos Russell, who you'll be— you'll know, was one of the mentors of the Young Lords, as told by the famous Felipe Luciano.

So this continues that important line of shared cultural heritage and shared political history. For Panamanians, it's important for this resolution to pass. Many of our pioneers never received the credit or the rewards of the industry that they helped create. Thank you. Your time has expired. Our Hispanic communities have too often been overlooked, even at home. Recognition from the largest city in the country says that this history is important and it counts.

Heritage Month gives schools, artists, and community groups a moment each October to tell this full story. I respectfully urge the council to pass this resolution. Thank you once again.

Thank you. Um, we had some other folks registered, but I don't know if they're still on. Um, yeah, but Rachel, Hadmira, or Evelyn, not sure if you're listening or on, but, um, the following witnesses, as I just mentioned, were signed up. If you are online or at Are here in person, please raise your hand. I don't think they are.

So if there's anyone else present in the room who has not had the opportunity to testify but wishes to do so, please raise your hand. Seeing no one else wishes to testify, I would like to note that members of the public who are not able to testify can submit written testimony to testimony@council.nyc.gov within 72 hours of this hearing.

This hearing is adjourned. Thank you. Yay!