 My name is Saini Huli, and before we get started on this workshop, I would like us to collectively take a moment to acknowledge all indigenous and first people of the land and space in which we live and breathe. For our community at Highland College, we recognize that we are on occupied Duwamish, Coast Salish, Muckleshoot, and Puyallup lands, and we want to thank all relations and tribes today as we prepare to hold space as a community. We recognize that all of us are joining this conversation from different areas, so we want to invite you to reflect and thank indigenous and first peoples of the land and spaces in which you're coming from. P'laku'akalebu, thank you. Good morning, Highline, and welcome to the 23rd annual Unity Through Diversity, Reclaiming Education, Honoring Resilience, Day 3 of our programming. My name is Shannon Waits, and I'm the Director of Assessment and Placement at Highland College and a member of the Unity Week Committee. So, you know, as you know, the coronavirus has impacted our global community beyond description, and yet we're really grateful for this opportunity to continue with our programming and virtually connect with our Highline family, especially at this time. So thank you to everybody that has been on our Unity Week Committee, and especially to the Unity Week team right now that's holding it down on the back end of this presentation for us all. It is now my incredible honor to introduce our Unity Week panel today of folks from Seattle Independent Artist Sustainability Effort, or S-I-A-S-E. So established during the COVID-19 pandemic, Seattle Independent Artist Sustainability Effort is a horizontal coalition formed for and by artists to advance self-determination in our communities during these trying times. We recognize that the immediate and devastating impact of COVID-19 on artists is indicative of historic widespread systemic failure under capitalism to honor the role and intrinsic value of art in the lives of individuals and communities and equitably compensate for that labor. They also recognize the disparate experience of impact to artists and disparate access to information and relief resources in our communities as the result of long-standing inequities in broader systems of education, technology and creative industries and philanthropy nonprofit industrial complex. So S-I-A-S-E has come together as artists, cultural workers and community organizers to fill gaps in the service, access and resources for the most vulnerable among us. And through these efforts, they seek to facilitate holistic analysis and systemic change in our city towards a more equitable and community-rooted creative ecosystem that provides for us all. You are about to meet some incredible artists that I am incredible fan of in our Seattle area. So please join me in welcoming our incredible panel. Hi, everybody. It is very exciting to be here. I want to acknowledge how kind of awkward and surreal to have to do this virtually is. My name is Julie C. I'm a hip hop artist. We love participation and calling response and things like that. So not being able to see is a little strange. So if everyone could just like hit an F for me if you're paying attention right now in the chat box just so I know you're there and out there. There we go. There we go. Hey, thank you so much. I love it. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for being here. I'm going to just real briefly let the rest of us introduce each other real quickly or reintroduce themselves. And I guess I'll call on y'all in the order that I see on my screen here. First we have Kyle. Hey, I'm sorry. I didn't even give you a problem. Want to share your name and what is your artistry? What is your craft? And let's say one thing you're grateful for. All right. I'm Kyle Hartman. I use he, him pronouns. I work primarily in theater. I work for Intamon Theater. I'm their education programs coordinator. I am also working with a youth cohort of artistic leaders on unraveling and dissecting what inequities exist within the school district's curricular structure as well as in the system of youth arts within Seattle to determine pathways towards access for all youth. So most of my work is in theater. I love it. I think live storytelling is the best way to convey hope, resilience, and optimism for a better future. And one thing that I am grateful for is, I would say, the thing I'm grateful for is the cherry blossom tree that is outside of my window right now. Thank you, Kyle. Let's go to Ariel. Hey, everybody. My name's Ariel Bradley. I am an arts administrator and a theater director by trade. I currently am the executive director of Theater Puget Sound, which is an art service organization. We help support both independent artists and small and large sized organizations, theatrical, theoretically based organizations. And one thing I am grateful for is my family right now. If I have to be in a small house with some people, these are the people I want to be with. Beautiful. Next, we've got Poesia. Hi, everybody. My name is Poesia Mariarte. My other name, my real name is Maria Luisa Guillen-Valgovinos. I'm a visual hip hop artist, teaching artist. And my mediums are from poetry to painting. But my passion is rebelling against all systems of oppression, which is why I'm an artist. And so something that I'm really grateful for is community. And even though I've been in quarantine, it's been, I've been getting so much like more communication with like people I've been building with over the years. And then just like, it doesn't feel so lonely. And it doesn't feel like I'm just like at home all the time. I feel like really connected, even virtually, like through this. So I'm really grateful. We have this form of technology. Grateful for you, too. Mishad. My name is Mishad Savage. He can lay them. I'm from Seattle. I am a musical artist. I work as a vocalist, a guitarist, a composer, producer, and about a billion other things as time goes on. Yeah. What I am happy about today is that I am healthy and that I am able to participate in a conversation like this safely. And that we are able to have this dialogue. Thank you, Mishad. Then we have Matthew Lang. Hi there. My name is Matthew Lang. I use he, him pronouns. I am a theater artist and a teaching artist by trade. And I do a lot of work in the community already. I work as the lead organizer of the Transit Writers Union. I'm on the board of standing against foreclosures and evictions. And through that work, I'm currently convening a small business roundtable to talk about what relief looks like at the Seattle city level. And then with SAFE, we're working with the Green Light Project, which is a sex workers peer support group that is actually just came up with their own facility to bottle and package hand sanitizer to get out to sex workers and to unhoused population. Also been doing a lot of kind of behind the scenes work in the departments, the bathroom openings at the libraries, working on public spaces for unhoused folks during this crisis. So I'm bouncing all over the place. But it's interesting. I do a lot of, when Trump got elected, I realized that it was really important as a white man to step up and fight for the things that are maybe not, maybe aren't the priorities for my community personally. But when the COVID crisis hit, me as an artist, this is my community and this is my first community and this is my home. So I found a really easy home with the folks at Seattle Independent Artists Sustainability effort because it's so close to my heart. Thank you, Matthew. Matthew had us all out in solidarity with Transit Writers Union in front of Seattle City Hall this morning. So shots out to that, socially distanced direct action. Last but not least, we have the legendary Laurie Goldstein. Hi, I'm Laurie Goldstein. She heard they're them all good. I am a cellist and composer. I work with a lot of different kinds of musicians and other kinds of artists and sometimes writers, different kinds of people, all kinds of media. Feeling very grateful for working with all these fabulous people and having something so new because I've been mostly sort of functioning in a kind of artist to artist level, like not so much as part of an organization. I've been sort of in this kind of network of artists all over the world really. So nice to have such a new project and sort of develop like this extremely new skill set during this time where it feels like so many things are being taken away, hopefully temporarily, and then nice to have something so new coming in. Thank you so much. So I'm going to share now this screen. Please forgive in advance if we have some technical challenges, but looks like everything is going all right right now. I'm going to pull up the chat box so I can see all two. Oh, wait, I shouldn't do that, huh? Never mind. This is one of the interpreters speaking. I'm unable to switch with my team because it says the host has stopped my video. Is it possible to allow the interpreters to start and stop their video? Check on that and get that fixed. All right, thank you for that. Gratitude to the interpreters to really appreciate Elv's presence and to highlight for having us. All right, so I wanted to start with this question, but I'm realizing I might have a challenge here because I don't know if I can see Elv's. Maybe one of my panelists could answer. I would love if y'all would drop the answer to what is art, what is your interpretation of art? Do y'all recognize this photo? I can't see you chatting at the same time as I'm showing this to you. I see it, I recognize it. Is any of the participants want to pop in and talk about, maybe drop some answer into the chat box about what is your conception of art and can my co-panelists see that chat box? Y'all want to read some of the answers real quick? Totally. Got one response from Laura saying expression. Expression, so. Another question from Hemssey Ig, expression or the application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form, such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. Wow. That was deep. A plus. I like what Alicia Valencia said, Ronis, that really resonates with me. What was that one, Maggie? Ronis. Ronis, ooh, I love that one. I love that one, let's leave that one, I love that one as well. For the purposes of this presentation, I would like y'all to hold space for the definition of art being just simply social designation, just a word, a name of what we inherently as people are do in our creative aspects of ourselves and souls. What is community? Let's hear some answers to that. In the chat box, anybody got a good one for that? Oh, I figured out how to read the chat box. OK, cool. Connection and support is one I've seen. Support system, for the purposes of this conversation, I would love for y'all to hold space to the concept that community is all these things, you're people, yes. Community is accountability. What is rebellion? Plesia, do you want to talk about this background picture I took it from your social media post? So the background is Commander Ramona. That was one of the lead commanders of the Sapatista movement in Chiapas. And so she was one of the women that pretty much established the woman's revolutionary law within that movement and pushed for a lot of changes, not only in political movements for women, but also in society in general. So she's the spirit of the Sapatista movement. She passed away from cancer about 20 years ago. But she's very known within the movement as one of the persons that has always advocated for women's rights and indigenous women's rights more specifically. Oh, thank you. I love Laura's answer in the chat box, too. So to speak up and fight back when injustice acts, when injustice, injustice acts happen. Rebellion is action or words that undermine the group or authority. Word. Ooh, faith. That's a pretty dope one. Could I have, Matthew, maybe you want to read this? This is a quote I wanted to set context for the framing of this discussion when we talk about our crazy nonlinear combination and galvanization and what we're about to talk about today. So Matthew, could you read the first part of this, please? What do I get to see reading? Oh, this guy right here. I finally got it side by side. For artists, community and rebellion are deeply linked. Art is social, historical, and contextual. And our historical context offers deviance, rebellion. Or universal, if sometimes denied, admiration of wild-eyed, libertine radicals, or at least of impetuous, brutally honest, nonconformists amounts to a set of shared values. These shared values make us a community. Again, this is a wonderful thing. It's worth embracing, reproducing, and celebrating. Art continues to hold potential and to point away forward. Michelle, do you want to hit part two? Sure. When artists act consistent with these values, they present a threat to all the deadly, banal powers of conformity, order, and commodity reproduction. It is our shared values, like the shared values of other radical groupings, that empower us. Organized workers are a threat because they share the value of unity. It is through solidarity and recognition of collective power that unions have made wounds in the flesh of their opponents. Similarly, it is through the shared values of creativity, deviance, and honesty that artists can bring our enemies. And we do have enemies. Yes, we do. If that was like in a live room, I would ask all y'all to make a ooh sound or something like that. But on a more positive tip, by the way, that quote is from Zine that came out of Columbus, Ohio, but it's super dope. And I can drop a link to the PDF for y'all after the presentation, but it's a zine called Art Scab. To shift things to a more positive light, though, for a second, could some of y'all drop what is something you already do to care for yourself, community, friends, or family into the chat box? What is an act of care you're currently engaged in or that you do on a regular panelist? Y'all could pop in too. Video call. So presence, virtually, remotely. That's dope. We have someone in the Q&A that says smiling. Smiling. I like it. Exercise. Cooking. See, cook for my family. Stephanie says, I'm sharing love with male calls. Video snuggling with animals. Just telling people I love them. More cooking and meal food, right? I have my feed the people shirt on today. Food is care. Praying. Praying is care. Make sure to connect with my friends best as I can. Dope. So, oh, wearing a mask to protect. Yes, health is care. Caring of the health of others is care. Reading and yoga. Social distance. I appreciate all these answers. And I love the breadth of y'all's answers too. Jimmy says, reaching out to loved ones. Health, painting rocks and leaving them, creating. So these are all examples that I would say examples of mutual aid, right? Could I have the regular? Laurie, are you down to read about this mutual aid screen? Yes. Let me just put this thing. Mutual aid is the practice of caring for one another. From each according to their abilities to each according to need. It is not transactional nor hierarchical nor shaming, but instead life affirming and reciprocal. It is not charity nor saviorism nor a shelter for capital. It is an assertion of self-determination and collective power. If y'all feel that definition or rather the distinction between mutual aid and charity, could you guys hit some Fs in the chat box real quickly? If that's a distinction that's understood, Herb Felt? Yeah, there we go. All right. Thank you all for being participatory with me. This is helping me a lot because I can't see your faces. I wanted to set a context to give a definition for mutual aid because early in March, COVID-19 mutual aid popped up on Instagram and Facebook. At the time, I think I wasn't even connected to, didn't know who was behind it. This was the first post, the one on the left. The one on the right off top was following the very same day. Let's take a minute to check that out. But actually, let's look a little bit more specifically. A mutual aid inherently is about community, is about care, is about, and it is because of that, interesting that people to serve and help themselves and each other inherently radical. On this account, I think this post was from maybe a week later talking about public health, but talking about it in a way that was framing health in contrast with militarized force, enforcement. I urge everybody right now, pick up your phone, follow this account if you're not already following. It grew so rapidly in the next few weeks through March, I believe that now it's something at 15K followers. Oh, this slide is out of order, okay. Poesia, do you want to speak a little bit about COVID-19 mutual aid solidarity network? Yeah, so this solidarity network is based on a non-hierarchal model of organizing. So there's no centralization, if that makes sense. So there's no one person that directs the direction of this work that we're doing. So there's different groups that are working groups within this network. And so my participation is mostly through the fund distribution. So developing an ethical way of giving money to our communities that are replicating capitalist or settler colonial notions of money and access to money and resources. So one of the most important things to this work is recognizing that people are actively resisting what is happening in terms of the oppression from the capitalist class. So some of the first communities that we gave money to was people that are resisting inside the prisons across Washington. And then we gave 15 families $500 and we gave 15 other families from the Tacoma Detention Center $500. So that's a total of 30 families that are currently experiencing a member of their family in custody or in prison. And so a lot of us have been building with people and communities. So we kind of know who knows who's in those movements. So the first network we gave money to was La Resistencia, which is an organization, which is a community-led, prisoner-led organization that is working towards dismantling the Tacoma Detention Center. And then last week, we gave $22,000 to farm workers from the community to community that will be distributed to 45 families up in Whatcom County. And we have distributed food to pretty much like 13,000 families. And majority of those food donations have been volunteers that have been giving food out of their own pockets. So in the general pool of money, we have fundraised at this point like almost $230,000. And so it's important for me to voice that a lot of the people that are doing this work are autonomous anarchists or radicals who have been also very critical of the nonprofit industrial complex and the need to be savers to our communities. We don't work within that logic. We know that there's an urgent need for money. And the government has failed to provide resources and money to some of these communities. So we know it's like band-aid work. It's temporary. But what we're looking towards building is long-term movements that are able to work outside of these systems and outside of the nonprofit, outside of state agencies. And so at the core of mutual aid is understanding that our survival is in our link. If I'm not doing well, then my community is not doing well. So not thinking as an individual, but that even when we go out in public wearing a face mask, we're not just doing it for our own health. We're doing it for the wellness of our communities, too. So this work is not at all for us to get a gold medal. It's because the necessity is there. And so we have fundraised $75,000 that will be given to undocumented peoples. And so all this money is the community's money. This is money that people trusted us with to make sure we have an anti-capitalist approach to distribution of money resources. But from my perspective and doing this work is like what we need is reparations at a national level in order to address the economic inequality within poor Black and Brown and working class peoples. And so mutual aid is building a strong core of network. And on Friday, we're going to see even more the work that is being done by workers that are about to go on strike. And so us being in community, we have to support all those workers going on strike because it's part of our mutual aid work. Because without those workers, we wouldn't be able to eat. And without farm workers having access to health care or face mask or protection, we're also unsafe. Because so we have to rethink the way we think of public wellness and community wellness outside of a privatization of the health care system and more towards a community-centered health care system that prioritizes the people that are the most disenfranchised. So yeah, I don't any questions. I can go into, I'll post a link on the chat where you can go to the social media to find out more information. Like I mentioned, it's a network so that we don't have a spokesperson. And there are so many ways you can get involved. So I will send that. And if you're interested in getting involved, I encourage you to find a core group of people and start brainstorming and thinking what your community needs in order to survive during this pandemic. Thank you so much for that super thorough breakdown and also perfect segue. At the time that this account I mentioned before come up and started putting up these posts, I kind of through that process realized this is some of my folks that I organize with and have historically in my community doing this work. And so what I did is connected with workers organizing group, which at the time was creating a toolkit as a resource for workers of all ages. This is the portion that we created that Poesia helped to for artists and cultural workers. And I'll drop a link. I'm sorry that I don't have it on hand. But I'll drop a link to this toolkit into the webinar chat later. It's been super useful. But it also allowed a framing for a collective analysis of what is organizing for cultural work. For the most part, we do not have a very clear situation of like a boss, a factory in this old model. And so I'm not going to have us read through all this now, but we'll provide links to you after this discussion of the entire toolkit. But this brings us to CASE. CASE started many starts, hard to say. But I pinpointed, from my perspective as a facilitator, starting in March 17th, 2020, which is a little bit over a month ago, in recognition. And this is before there was actually the official stay order from our governor. In recognition, though, about how this day and the social distancing and the impending reality of COVID, the impact that I was going to have on artist communities that really rely heavily on physical gathering spaces to supplement income and to do the work that we do, my coalition, Seattle Artist Coalition for Equitable Development, called together a meeting because we started to care about folks that were organizing and that included COVID-19 mutual solidarity. It included the Seattle Artist Relief Fund, which was one of the first relief funds that was out there and available and dispersing money to community prior to a lot of the other resources out there for anybody. And it was start and led by artists themselves and trusted artists of color inside our community. But it also included the folks that are on this call now in different veins of that. So I would like to ask you out if you would be down to pop in and share. I guess I'll start with, yeah, how you came to this meeting and what is your inspiration in this work as an artist to organize as artists? Matthew, you want to start? Sure. Yeah, I came to this work by invitation of Julie C, actually. And I have long really felt the inequity in the arts community as an actor, as a theater artist, even as a director. And feeling like no matter what I'm doing, I am the low man on the totem pole. I don't have any actual say in what is going on at the organization level or for any of the movement that's happening in the artistic community. So what CASE brought for me was forum for us to grow power so that the choices aren't all in the hands of these white, generally upper class folks that are arts administrators who really shape the arts in Seattle. And they're the ones who take from all the money at the end of the day. I know some theaters or other large arts organizations, their executive director might be taking home half a million to a million dollars in a year. And their artists are scraping by. So it's things like that that make me really irk me and make me really see that there's inequities in the system, as well as recognizing that a lot of those arts administrators are just straight up white. And that's not the way it should be. And something that I am personally really committed to do is, as a white man, move through the white spaces that I'm allowed in because of that inherent privilege and break them up from the inside because they're inherently evil institutions when you come and come to it. Because it's keeping the status quo for a small amount of people who have power, who have wealth, who have access, and keeping people who really have a lot to say, a lot to bring to the artistic community and a lot to share and grow with out of it. So that's why I'm happy to be here. And that's why that's what really fires me up about this project. Well, thank you. And Michelle and Laura, you came to us by way of Eric, Eric, who was also organizing, I believe y'all were in conversations about the freelancers coalition. And so if y'all want to talk a little bit about that background briefly. Yeah, I can talk about that. I've been talking for a long time with a lot of musicians, but I think that, I mean, I've been working in Seattle for a long time and been a professional musician for a long time and have just seen this kind of, you know, slow and steady decline of, in sort of how artists were paid and artists were treated and regarded and having sort of access to decision-making and just being even sort of like recognized as a sort of viable, valuable entity. And they're being this kind of like rise of all these kind of like intermediaries, you know, sort of taking like the power and voice and the artists just sort of disappearing. So I am lucky enough, I get to travel a lot. And as I tour, I tend to be most often in like artists' run spaces and artists' run situation that sort of was just like the world that voice liked functioning in. So I had a chance to see the way a lot of things work in other places and the various ways people have come together to make things. And I've always kind of seen that privilege as also an obligation to sort of try to pass that on. And I don't have any kind of like prescription for it but I've just seen it work a lot of places in a lot of ways. I think also that's helped me have some perspective on how things happen here and ways that it could happen. And I've seen a lot of musicians, I meet the ideal most with musicians being a musician myself that there's this kind of like people sort of settle into this situation, the conditions that they're in. And so I'd been sort of feeling partly just a need to bring up the discussion and have it be a really active discussion and sort of reframing of like, what's going on here? Like, does it really need to be this way? Is it okay this way? And that's been sort of groundwork. And that turned out to be then really great groundwork for being in this situation that we're all in which is this crazy crisis where none of us have a way to function the way we've functioned our whole lives as artists. So in this chaos, there's been sort of all this talk and all this action and this chance for these lovely bridges to get built very quickly and very efficiently. So I hope then with the union is to have a chance to really, you know, focus on sort of plant the seed and really, really tend to it and see what we can do to really develop solid community and kind of frame these questions and develop some really strong ideas and plans together out of this, you know, kind of mostly really crappy situation. Thank you so much. And we're gonna get to the facts to it a little bit later on. And finally, the other leg, Ariel and Kyle who have joined us, the present namesake of SACE right now comes from their efforts, which actually started prior to this meeting. If y'all wanna share a little bit about that and how you came to that effort. Yeah, so when the order from Governor Inslee to basically shut down any large gatherings of 50 people or more working in theater and working in the arts, I in the span of 48 hours saw probably like 90 to 95% of my friends and colleagues lose their jobs and their main sources of income. And it lit a fire in me. I'm not very much an angry person, but I was very much an angry person in that situation because at that time, there was no immediate reaction or work being done to figure out how we're gonna get by. So I've only been in Seattle for about three years. So I turned towards the grassroots method of organizing and just reached out to friends and colleagues on social media and said, hey, let's just meet and let's talk through this situation. Let's figure out how we're gonna, what we can do to support our fellow artists, our community. I had no idea what could be done. So I just started off with the question of, let's meet and let's figure it out. Over the course of like the week after the social distancing order sort of like went into effect, during one of those Zoom meetings, I was introduced to Julie, who then brought me to that initial Cypher meeting. But prior to that, we were looking at ways in which we could support the community led efforts. So the key things we were thinking about were like documentation of impact, ways to support the Seattle Artists Relief Fund and like get money in that direction because in that first two weeks, we saw millions of dollars being like directed towards the Seattle Foundation, the Small Business Association of like South Lake Union and like basically like all of this like major, major amount of finances were directed at these institutions that were not necessarily transparent or even like held accountable to the independent artists that live and work in Seattle, specifically like low income individuals, like artists of color, like there was no recognition for the like the ground level work that gets done that like truly creates what arts in Seattle is and gives Seattle like its reputation for being an artistic hub. So I was frustrated and the way to like deal with that frustration was to gather in community and during that first Cypher meeting, I sort of like found my place with the CS and with the folks that are on this panel right now and I personally could not be more grateful for that. Like what? Ariel, do you want to share, add to that, anything? Sure, yeah, I am sometimes a little bit the odd duck in the room because I am such a, I'm so focused in arts administration and so, and I am in this weird paradox of being part of a structure that requires me to think in certain ways, but also our organization is directly intended to support independent artists and the same with Kyle, like things started rolling out and I just saw most of our members lose jobs, lose contracts, lose everything and it was full stop. So, which is I think the thing that we aren't hearing in the media is that it wasn't a slow trickle, it wasn't that folks couldn't do a show, it was that these artists immediately lost income without any kind of repercussion and the freelance unemployment piece has been slow to establish. So, there also wasn't any kind of recourse in terms of like meeting the need that wasn't immediate because of the loss of that income. So, for me being a part of this, it's just I'm deeply inspired by this group of people, I'm glad to have a place and really it's for me just how am I able to affect change from the inside out because I do have this positional power that I am in, but also I'm one of the few 80s of color in the city. So, there's a balance that I'm trying to draw of, like I know there are some rooms I'm just not invited in and that's a reality that I have. So, how can I still affect that change and get involved because of the position I hold? Word, thank y'all so much. So, yeah, just so y'all know, we did this is a relatively new iteration of these efforts to summarize is what this slide is. Bosia and I's relationship really comes back and then the connection to the COVID-19 autonomous work really goes back to HIPAA occupies to decolonize days which emerged from Occupy Seattle. It was autonomous but in solidarity to Occupy Seattle which really flowed into a trajectory of work around equitable development in Seattle that was Seattle-aste, but combining with the labor analysis that Laurie and Michelle and Eric are bringing and this mutual aid and direct support and advocacy that Ariel and Kyle were bringing, it was just a very powerful pocket of folks. And so that is from there, that's how we get to say. We decided to combine, folded the old Seattle-aste social media into this effort because the alignment was already there and the attachment to name was never very important. And it really comes down to a lot of trust, trust that is stemming from shared values. I'm gonna go ahead and skip this page because we're a little short on time. This is on our website which we'll drop in the chat box but I do wanna read, Pussy, if you're down to read like the value statement, that would be dope. Yeah, so we embrace the value statement established through collective process by the broader Seattle COVID-19 mutual aid solidarity network which holds, we aim to cultivate a politics of international solidarity and local mutual aid within a creative resilient multi-generational horizon of decolonial, anti-capitalist, feminist, queer, disability and sex worker liberation. We are building community power, decentralized control and autonomy. Thank you so much. So a few things that, a few initiatives and I'll go through this part pretty quickly so that there's really time for Q and A. As Kyle was talking about resource navigation, compiling Kyle and his squad was already doing a lot of that as was Northwest Folklife and documenting impact which got channeled into an open letter to advocate for what type of funding is going to be the most accessible for artists. Does anybody wanna speak on that real quickly? From the team, from the team? I'm happy to speak on that. Matthew, you go. Sure, so as we were documenting all this information and it became very clear that the need was so high and we knew that the need wasn't being met in direct assistance that needed to go out, out the door immediately. As was being said earlier, a lot of the grants and stuff that's gonna be funneled through nonprofits, like we might not see that for months, it might be years, who knows if we ever see it. So Ijumo, Aluo, Gabe and Ebony whose last names I forget, I don't remember. They put together this GoFundMe, which was the Seattle Artists Relief Fund amid COVID-19 and the goal of that fund was to raise as much money as they could and once they started raising the money to start taking applications for direct cash assistance for artists in need, independent artists in need. So the fund looks like it's raised about $522, $523,000 now on this page. I know that they probably have raised another 50 to 100K through just people emailing and getting in touch with Langston outside of this, but what the reality is, is that last I talked to Ijumo, they had about 1,200 applications that they weren't able to fill and then they had at that point, two or 300 people on a waiting list once they were able to get to the million dollars. Now, the gap in funding when we sent out our open letter was about $600,000. So that gap has lessened by about $100,000 since we sent out the open letter, which is a really good move in the right direction, but still we're having a really hard time getting folks to prioritize individual artists and cash relief in the now, as we're looking at these more big picture things that might need to happen in the future. So that's one of our current struggles and that's something that we wanna be upfront about. We feel like it's been a very successful effort to get that cash into folks hands and it has truly helped many, many artists from losing their homes, being able to feed themselves, get their grocery, their pharmaceuticals, everything. But as with many cases it comes in capitalism, there are just gaps that people are falling through the cracks of and figuring out how to fill those gaps is one of our number one goals. How did you have anything to add to that? You look like you were gonna... Oh no, that was awesome. That was great. Beautiful. All right, so in addition to that, direct advocacy for our trusted community members, organizing, intersecting, rabble rousing, just finding any opportunity that we can to intervene on to bolster the community rooted solutions, the ones that are originating from folks that we know share values, but also to intervene on some of the other approaches, I should say. And finally, I worded, okay, so I made this last night at like, Michelle and I was like midnight, so creating a bureaucracy to interact with bureaucracies is how it came out. But what is meant by that is the establishment of facts. In my realm of experience, all the cultural organizing work I've done has been very community oriented, very organic, autonomous, horizontal, but realizing that there was opportunity now to create some solid systemic change and to have a new team really enthused and experienced in this arena. One of the projects of SASE that's the most exciting to me right now is the establishment of the Freelance Artist Consortium of Seattle. Michelle, do you want to read out this one? Sure, the Freelance Artist Consortium of Seattle is a grassroots union created by cultural workers from a wide range of disciplines, media and genres, including performers, writers, visual and media artists, technicians and technicians in and around Seattle. In accordance with SASE slash Seattle ACE, we are working towards that equitable, resilient and sustainable arts ecosystem that includes fostering and strengthening solidarity and mutual support between artists, artists from spaces and organizations, nurturing solidarity with freelance laborers in other sectors locally and beyond, the sharing of resources and information, advocating, promoting and monitoring fair labor practices and wage equity, building self-representation and self-determination for cultural workers and securing meaningful artists' representation on arts-related governmental boards and commissions and building a youth-oriented, youth-steered arm of this effort. So the overall intent and purpose of this is to be able to establish more direct communication and interfacing ability between the different structures that we need to work with, which are designed to serve us and yet do not. That's sort of like the big overarching issue that FACTS focuses on. Thank you so much. We get the question a lot, people asking what's the difference between SASE and FACTS and the way that I like to break it down is SASE is the wind and water. I love how Poesia has said it before, the fluidity of cultural labor is actually a power, a point of power, a point of strength in artistry and culturally rooted activism. However, we do have to operate in a system that is not built to appreciate and understand that type of structure. So FACTS is the earth and metal elements to that wind and water. So this just ways to plug in and support. Again, I'm gonna compile some links for all of y'all or maybe during the break for what has been referenced, but definitely as Poesia said earlier, starting with yourself and your people, there's no, a lot of this work to be authentic is deeply intuitive. It has to do with starting within your reach, within your agency and within your heart and your soul, supporting your own creativity and not an artist around you, your community and family, chosen or birth, challenging systems, organizing, definitely free to connect to, oops, I knew that was gonna happen. Also connecting with us, if you are a creative, I would love to see if y'all would drop in a chat if you identify as an artist or express yourselves in ways that are generative. Go ahead and say something in the chat box or drop a link, I would love to check it out. We welcome you to sign up to be a member of FACTS and follow us social media, both say social media and the COVID-19 mutual aid solidarity network, social media. And of course, Friday is Mayday. So the final slide here is that. There's some exciting actions being planned that involve both safely dispersed forms of direct action as well as an online aspect of participation. And I hope you will follow the COVID-19 mutual aid account for more information as that becomes publicly available. How are we doing on time, everybody? My high-line facilitator, Shannon. Hello, I think we're doing good. How about we take a five-minute pause right now and give folks time to enter some questions into the Q&A and then come back, does that sound good? Sounds good. All right, so community, we'll just take five-minute break for you to get up, move around, maybe you need to get to class or work on some homework. Whatever it is, just take this pause and we'll resume at 1.20. Again, please enter some questions into the Q&A, into the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen and we are going to be listening to some music during our intermission from some incredible Seattle artists. So enjoy this pause and we'll be right back with you. All right, everybody, welcome back. Highline family and community, Seattle community and hey, maybe we even have folks outside of Seattle or the state. So we're gonna now start with some questions for our panelists and we have a couple of great questions but please feel free to submit more questions in the Q&A feature at the bottom of your screen. If you're having trouble accessing the Q&A feature, feel free to use the chat but we'll go ahead and start with our questions here and Bob, you can go ahead and stop sharing your screen there, awesome. All right, so the first question, this is for Kyle, I believe. Okay, so to the person that said that he is not an angry person but he got angry. Number one, what was the first thing that you did after you got upset? And number two, what were some obstacles you encountered to doing something about or like what got you upset? Yeah, totally. So I would say like the first thing that I did was I connected with community. I reached out to my friends who lost their jobs. I reached out to some family and but mainly like I just reached out to folks that I knew were struggling to find some sort of path through this chaos and established some like collective solidarity to like get through it all. So what I did and the first thing I did was I just posted on Facebook being like, let's congregate. Let's meet, let's talk, like basically have like sort of like a round table discussion about what we can do because a crisis like this is similar in ways to like a lot of the inequities that we face before COVID hit our global society. So there are oftentimes where we feel isolated and alone when we're not being forced to isolate and the only way to get through that is to connect with the folks that empower you and empower the community in which you surround yourself. And that was sort of like my saving grace was connecting with folks digitally via Zoom and being like, you know, let's like, what the fuck's happening? Like what is going on right now? What can we do? And people brought solid ideas. They were like, all right, let's reach out to community. Let's like, we see all this funding coming to Seattle Foundation. Let's start gathering like the impact, like the amount of impact that people are experiencing so that we can then present that and be like, cool, y'all are raising $13 million for Seattle Foundation right now. Like we've now documented like over $2 million worth of need and like please direct that money to the community led efforts that are getting that funding out like immediately because there's this bureaucratic like system that like involves a lot of red tape that is completely and utterly inequitable. It's people with connections, people that like a lot of these major relief like foundations that are in existence now are like, if you're an artist, you need to prove that like, say a musician, you need to prove that you have like three studio albums that have been released and like there's an access barrier there. It's like, okay, so a musician that's released three albums deserves funding more than a musician who is strictly gig based and works events, works at like house shows or at different venues throughout the city. Like there's a major discrepancy there. So it started with analyzing that and then connecting with community and that led us down the path to creating this open letter that sort of like, it was a plea to be like, we need funding, inequities have existed for so long and this crisis has perpetuated them. So that sort of helped alleviate some of my anger. And yeah, I forgot what the second part of that question was and I think I may have, oh, obstacles that I encountered. I'm a theater maker. The way that we do work is gathering in space together. Very difficult to do when you're in your bedroom and you have to connect with people on Zoom, but because we're in this digital age and thankful that this isn't happening in the 90s where we would be on like email or like snail mail connecting with each other. I'm really grateful that like the barriers that we would have faced sort of don't exist, but the barriers that we're currently facing are like the hierarchical structures of like the nonprofit industrial complex and like bureaucracy that is sort of dictating how relief happens. Yeah, so that's sort of like what we're all facing now but Michelle, do you have your hand up? So Lori and I have been in a conversation for months. I think probably since like in November or December, at least between like the two of us with our colleague Eric Padgett about these structural issues and reading reports that different local governmental organizations have put together which document these inequities and make it so very clear that the system was broken and in the context of suddenly having everything that I might have had been working on and investing in suddenly disappear without any further notice overnight like literally overnight, it took that anger and it made it, that anger then, something transformed in regards to how I related to the anger because the context was different. And what I found was that there was no longer a question of how do we go about it but simply what are we doing right now to address and mitigate this issue because there may have been certain measures which appeared to me to be like sort of like diplomatic ways of going about a remedying issue and inciting systemic change but due to the urgency and also the utter failure systematically and sort of catastrophically in regards to serving people in my industry it has immunized all of that into focus response which is the facts project. So I think it's the thing which I've been thinking about in context of sort of the whole COVID crisis is that there is a lot of stress on the system that was not robust to begin and therefore things are flexing and shifting and we get to shape that. That's a very rare opportunity. Thank you so much for that and thank you for that good question too. I don't know if you all noticed that we had a new person join us who was tied up a little bit earlier but I'm so happy that Marshall is here and Marshall you wanna just introduce yourself and then say how you came to this effort? Absolutely. What's going on everybody? First I wanna say thank you for putting your energy and effort behind the cause that we all feel so passionately about. My name is Marshall. I'm a musician and event organizer around town. I'm also a basketball coach and basically how I got to this Zoom meeting that I'm in now with you wonderful people is that like many of people I was ready to go on tour. We were headed to South by Southwest in Austin and we were gonna make a full loop around the nation a 50 day national tour and obviously we had to make the tragic decision to call it off and as a result you're kind of left scrambling hey where do I stand as a musician in this community and then we began to understand there was a larger conversation being had that was building procedures and structural power for years to come here in Seattle while COVID was happening and as an artist you're used to getting left out of conversations unfortunately you're used to giving your art for no money and something about it made me wanna speak up and say hey I don't think this is right I always haven't felt this is right and it was that statement on an Instagram story that led me to really understand what Julie was doing and she introduced me to the rest of the group and to be able to sit here on now probably 20 different Zoom calls and to be able to learn from people that really know what's going on and aren't just upset about what's happening has been a great learning experience for me and I'm just excited to be able to use my musical platform to uplift this cause and learn and hopefully be able to be a mouthpiece to the great work that's going on I've been really excited about it and it's one of the things that has been actually driving me to stay positive and involved during COVID cause I'm sad you know I'm used to playing I'm really somebody that plays a show a week if not more you know you might catch me at Mojams then Marmalade and then a show of my own so without having this sense of community it's been great to have something to rally around as Kyle spoke to earlier so much love to everybody Julie I hope that answers Well it was great Marcia you're also a really dope organizer and a youth service worker and we're all learning together but I do want you to go back to the conversation with venues that you Yeah absolutely true yeah cause you kind of grazed over it You know me I'm PRGQ but what's what you're telling about it So just to learn context I guess to those of you just a lot that there is also being organized a coalition of venues that you know is also an industry in need but historically hasn't had great relationships with artists and have been using in their messaging the plights of artists in ways that are not consistent with our understanding of their a lot of their ethics and so Marcia I don't know if you want to Absolutely so Julie C. just put my argument very succinctly and powerfully me I kind of just saw that this coalition had been formed saw the language around what the coalition was attempting to do to garner our support of the community really talking about how the artist was and as I've you know me like I said I've played probably over 200 shows in the past three years in Seattle so I've experienced the great ends of venues the not so great ends of venues I've experienced the whole spectrum and from my experience I know for a fact that artists need to be representing artists we can't have anybody else whether it be venues or whoever speaking on behalf of us and thinking that the money and the funds are gonna trickle down somehow to the artists from someone that's played 200 shows in Seattle and still you know struggles out here and has the moonlight as a basketball coach to support what I love I can tell you we can't trust someone else hoping we'll give us money we have to secure that directly from the state or direct whoever is administering funds we need to be a part of that conversation it needs to be a head straight to artists so that's what I said and there's some backlash it sparked a real big conversation and actually like I put on Twitter and like within a whole day there's already 4,000 views over a hundred engagements I'm just like oh goodness gracious and it was fun it was exciting and now I feel like I've just learned so much more about it and we've actually seen some attempt on that coalition side to understand what we have going on and you know we're working hard to make sure everybody involved in the situation including ourselves is accountable for that Thank you so much Yeah, yeah Are there any other questions? We got one from Martin Sandy about the organization since there's so many people have applied for assistance what criteria do you use for allocating the funds collected and I also just wanna say to the audience members don't be shy about posting questions cause we still got some time but we don't have any more questions after this one Yeah, so important distinction SACE is not a funds dispersing entity but Poesia do you wanna speak a little bit about the process for COVID-19 people's fund? Yeah, I just wanna say I gotta get out of here but thank you for all for being here and thank you for all your passion and I'll see you all around Thank you Matthew Yeah, so in regards to the money being distributed by the Mutual Aid COVID-19 group so the way we look at money is through an anti-capitalist approach so what's most valuable is community and the wellness of our community and so the first difficulty we had was accessing the money so GoFundMe gave us a really hard time being able to access the resources cause we had approved there was humans behind because there was such an influx of money so I think within a week we raised $100,000 and so some of the people that are on the GoFundMe I can't answer it, it's muted I'm sorry, I'm muted What are you up to? But so the first thing was developing a core team of people that had the same analysis and had the same principles, ethics and values around money and so we decided it was gonna be a woman-led decision-making process and it was gonna be led by Black and Brown and Native women and so that's the majority that's pretty much everybody and we do have like one white person or a white identified person that's like non-binary that is also part of the decision-making but their role is to hold the money and then they just, they're like our accountants so basically they write out the checks they have no decision-making they can put their opinion but because of the way capitalism works and we know that one of the groups that is the biggest disenfranchise are predominantly Black and Brown women when it comes to money and when it comes to just basic getting paid even if we're college educated Black and Brown women still get paid disproportionately less than either men of color or white women and so that's a fact like I'm not even gonna argue anybody it's like been shown over and over the reality of capitalism and how it's gendered and so the first discussion was like what do we all feel about money and so in this process we developed like our own like method of distributed money and so one of the things we all brought forth we wanted to support people that were resisting and people that were organizing that was a priority and one of the groups that is currently organizing and resisting are people that are in prison and so there is a vast need of money and resources a lot of those people don't have access to healthcare testing and are pretty much disregarded by society and this current pandemic and so we allocated $500 because we're like we can't just give people like $100 that's not really gonna like help them during a crisis so what's the most we can give people with so we're like 500 so that's our minimum is $500 because we know there's like a necessity and people aren't gonna ask for money unless they need it another thing a conversation was who's getting this in franchise who's not gonna get a stimulus check who's not getting like paid sickly who's not getting like cover their hours we all know is people that work in like agriculture, farm workers people that are working in low paid jobs and healthcare system either caretakers, nannies we also when we look at like the workforce like who's not gonna be able to file for unemployment which is like sex workers so we also did a gender race and class analysis to resource distribution by the government and who was getting left out so whoever's getting left out that's our priority to make sure they get access to that money and so we and another thing is language barrier so a lot of there's a lot of undocumented peoples that aren't getting supported by either the government or community or don't have access to resources because of the language so we establish a translation team of people and so those are all teams now there's a translation team pretty much for every language and we have like 12 languages so those folks are the ones that are translating our materials and then we're about to put live our online petition for money we do have live our online petition for food so right now you can still apply and ask for support for food and somebody will deliver food for you and your house but the funding distribution we've taken a little bit of more time in terms of like opening the general pool to develop an ethical like online like petition where people don't feel like that putting their name or putting their information is gonna put them at risk because a lot of undocumented communities are afraid to ask for money because they're afraid ICE is gonna get a hold of our paperwork and harass them so that was like a priority was all like okay who's who in communities working with undocumented people that we can trust with a big chunk of money that we know they will distribute that money and so that was our first priority was all like who's already doing the work how do we build with them and make sure that the communities they're working with are taken care of and then when we open the general pool it's all gonna be based on like are you on sex worker and undocumented but you don't have to like state all these things is mostly like there's like a question and answer but then like what's most important is like you're gonna have a space for people to share their lived experience how COVID-19 is impacting us and that's what's most important is hearing like people and like right now we have $230,000, $75,000 have already been allocated specifically to undocumented peoples but we still have like a large pool and we're about to do our second round of funding for people who have family members incarcerated and people in the detention center so even though we're gonna continue fundraising and thinking of creative ways and even if people don't get the first round of money you can still there's still gonna be possibilities of getting financial support but also like we also are realistic and know that $230,000 is not enough you know this money should be coming from the government because undocumented peoples peoples who work in different industries they still contribute taxes to our economy and are being neglected by the government that's why we're doing this work is because of necessity it's not because we're like just we have all this money and that's why people gave us all this money because they know how the capitalist system works and who's gonna be disenfranchised and I think what's most important when we're working with money is understanding that it's a piece of paper what's most important is making sure that people stay alive and people are fed and people know that there's a community that supports them if they are in a hardship situation whereas like the government isn't checking up on people the government isn't delivering food to people the government isn't giving masks to people like that's all us in community doing that work and so we also recognize our limitations and the fact that we are still currently living in a capitalist society and we're still seeing all the evil things that come with that which is like corporations got a big chunk of payout and workers we just got crumbs 100, 1200 check is nothing you know for the necessity that is needed in community so that's why we're also pushing for a huge change in the way the economy and the way money is being distributed in this country and then the way workers are being dehumanized on a daily every day so that these corporations can maintain their million dollar profit while the rest of us are starving and dying for a few crumbs. So well said. Yeah. Thank you so much for that answer. I think that all of your guys' answers really exemplify what it looks like when people who are most impacted or people who are at the center of whatever it is going on design what it looks like to care for one another rather than like you've spoken about bigger entities we know the government doesn't have us or nonprofits which you know are so far removed from the folks actually that are getting the money and so the way that you all have thought through you know both everything with Stacey but also with the COVID mutual aid stuff in terms of how things get distributed really shows the kind of thinking that all institutions should be doing but they don't unless they're really listening to and have people at the table that are valued who are impacted and who know or who are connected to communities most impacted too. So thank you for that. I wanna be cognizant of time and think we need to wrap up our Q&A session but before we do I wanted to give each one of our panelists an opportunity to tell us how to connect with you moving forward for our audience. This will be recorded and put up on our website next week. So you'll be able to access some of these resources but also you know there's some incredible work being done here and so if y'all wanna give a moment to say where to find you or where to connect to some of the efforts that you're doing that we haven't already shared that'd be great. I'm just gonna put I just always put my cell phone number, people can text me. I said I was gonna put a bunch of links and I didn't because I didn't quite know how to do that without changing the screen. And yeah if y'all have any follow-up questions just shoot me a text message. You're incredible. Thank you all so much for being here and sticking around. You can find me on the internet on all social media platforms. I'm at Michaud Savage and that is now in the chat. All right y'all can find me on pretty much anywhere at just Marshall and also my band, Marshall Law Band. Check this out, I run the majority of the social media so all you gotta do is shoot me a DM or comment there and I'm gonna get at you. Thank you again for having us and even these type of things we're learning as we're talking to y'all. So yeah it's helpful to you but it's definitely helpful to us too so thank you. I'll go ahead. No you can go, you're good. Okay so you can find my artist name Poesia Mariarte on Instagram and then just my website. I only just use Facebook to connect with family and friends but you can usually find me there with my big like name. So Maria Luisa Guillen Valdolinos but I'll post my Instagram and then just my website. I'm gonna post my email so you can all connect with me that way. One action item that I wanted to present to the attendees so one of the things that as a coalition that we're recognizing and facing as well is capacity and our ability to get things done while also maintaining our own livelihood and being able to function as humans in this world. So I understand that the majority of you are probably students at Highline Community College and you're probably enrolled in classes and have work and other things that you have going on so I just wanna reiterate that if you're feeling isolated or you're feeling like you're not able to actually engage in any community work, you can just start by simply sharing the efforts of our coalition's efforts and other community led and horizontal coalition efforts as well and it's just simply sharing the links, saying that you support the efforts of COVID-19 mutual aid network. Those are simple things that you can begin doing to stay engaged and stay involved in the work that's being done at this time. So it's sort of an action item and then you can also just hit us up if you wanna get involved. Like we're sharing all of our contact info so if you wanna join in, just let us know. Yeah. Oh, you muted again, Aria. Having issues with my controls. I just put my email in the chat so that's the best way to reach me. All right. Well, let me see, let me get my next steps here. So thank you panelists, thank you so much again. You know, it's weird being not together. So if you were here, we would be standing up, applauding, yelling, whatever it is to really thank you for being here today and thank you for everything that you do for our community, for the communities here in Seattle. So for our community of attendees in the chat feature, you'll find a link for our Unity Week survey. Your feedback is super critical in enhancing our programs and so we would greatly appreciate it if you would give us your feedback. Tomorrow is our final day of Unity Week, which kind of brings me some sadness because it's just been an inspiring week all around featuring Eileen Yoshina. So we've also included that Zoom link in our chat feature and her title for the presentation tomorrow is Revolution from the Inside Out, The Power of Educators of Color and Transforming Education. So it's gonna be a powerful presentation. So again, thank you so much. Thank you, Julie C. Thank you, Arielle, Misha, Kyle, all the other panelists. Thank you so much for being here today and have a great rest of your week.