Lindsey Buller Maliekel testifies on NYCHA arts access and portable benefits

Hi, my name is Lindsay Molly Aikle.

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 Create NYC, and more specifically, some key objectives and strategies that we hope will continue to be supported robustly as we move forward.

Objective one 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 and New York City families living in NYCHA are hungry to be invited to participate and attend in live performing arts.

And we want the future of Create NYC 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 happen.

We are happy to collaborate as much as we can.

But 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 this city as a whole.

So we just want to thank you for reinvesting in this and reengaging.

We are very, very appreciative.