Gonzalo Casals argues for culture as public infrastructure across city government

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, and I wanted to speak about his purpose, placing culture at the core of every aspect of civic life.

Culture's public impact is well documented, as our friend Saya mentioned, and agencies across the city government own it.

Yet, CRIENYC rested only on an agency with about 0.25% of the city budget.

A new agenda that treats culture as public infrastructure, owed to every neighborhood, like parks, schools, and libraries, will do three 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 four 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, right?

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, right?

The difference of, you know, 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 the ECLA's budget.

According to our friends at IBO, in fiscal year 2022, more than 2,000 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.

As 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 this LA they can plan around.

And New Yorkers would find culture built into the services they few expect.

Arts-based diversion programs instead of detention, creative aging and standards to service to combat isolation, and aborts.

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.