Twenty-five St. Paul artists will receive $500 a month for 18 months in an experiment meant to boost the city's creative workforce — and inspire copycats across the country.
Springboard for the Arts announced Monday one of the nation's first guaranteed-income programs aimed at artists, giving no-strings-attached cash payments to a randomly selected group of people in the Rondo and Frogtown neighborhoods.
Funded by the McKnight and Bush foundations, it's meant to work with St. Paul's People's Prosperity Pilot, launched by Mayor Melvin Carter last year, which is testing guaranteed income, an increasingly popular mode of providing direct, steady assistance to families in need.
"The day Mayor Carter announced that St. Paul was going to do a citywide pilot, we said, 'Whoa, we want to do that,' " said Laura Zabel, Springboard's executive director.
"Of course, our first priority is that this is direct, unrestricted support for artists," she said. But because it's connected to the city's work, "we'll be able to do some research and demonstrate the value of supporting the creative community in the context of this bigger policy work that's happening at the city and national level."
The pilot, which starts this month, comes at a critical moment. The arts and culture industries have been among the hardest hit by the pandemic. During the quarter that ended in September, the national unemployment rate averaged 8.5%, but 55% of dancers, 52% of actors and 27% of musicians were out of work, according to the National Endowment for the Arts.
Artists are nearly four times as likely to be self-employed as other workers, the NEA has found — about 34% of them compared with 9% of all workers.
Unlike most arts funding, which is competitive or tied to a project, this income can be used for anything. "Part of being an artist is so much volatility and so much uncertainty month to month," Zabel said. "A particularly interesting question that we want to investigate is: What does even baseline stability allow?"
