It’s Getting Better All the Time

Anecdotally speaking, support for creative professionals in Cleveland is currently the most robust I have seen in my 17 years of playing music professionally.  When I first started out in my early years as a freelance jazz/rock/roots music bassist and manager of musical acts, support services and funding for artists and small arts groups was limited.  The local foundations did a great job of supporting arts nonprofits and cultural institutions, and they still do to this day.  But in many cases those funding streams rarely reached the hands of the individual working artists, who in many cases needed revenue to support their overhead.

I would say that in the last few years or so the working, creative professional in NE Ohio has been provided with new avenues of support on several different levels.  The local foundations still support important programs of arts organizations, which in turn employ and engage many independent artists.  The Community Partnership for Arts and Culture has for the past decade worked tirelessly to improve the conditions for arts organizations and working artists in our area, namely by affecting public policy, creating and delivering the Artist as Entrepreneur Institute and most recently by operating two rounds of the Creative Workforce Fellowships, a publicly funded program in connection with Cuyahoga Arts and Culture that has delivered over $800,000 in grant money directly to working artists.       

This past week another level of support for the creative workforce was announced by the Noteworthy Federal Credit Union (NFCU), a nonprofit organization that provides musical instrument loans and financial products to the arts community.  NFCU rolled out its Creative Arts Project (CAP) loan recently, which is a loan meant to help artists, musicians, filmmakers and other creative professionals capitalize themselves in order to start or complete an artistic project.  This type of loan is needed by the arts community, as many artists can attest to the difficulty in convincing a bank or other lender to provide a loan with decent interest rates in order to fund a recording session, buy a Hasselblad camera, or purchase an embroidery machine.  While these items are crucial to the artist for the development of their arts project, convincing a lender of this is sometimes an exercise in futility.  NFCU, a member owned part of the arts community, understands this dilemma and works to help capitalize artists so that they are free to create their work.  They are also a humane lender that will work with the borrower to make sure that they keep their instruments, machinery or other arts equipment.  In their 50 year history, NFCU has never once had to repossess a musical instrument for which they were the lender.