Between 2020 and 2024, Los Angeles County allocated more than $46 million in relief and recovery funding for arts and culture, most in the form of grants to nonprofit organizations administered by the Department of Arts and Culture. This report documents where those funds came from and how they were administered.
In order to deliver funds as quickly as possible to the organizations and people who needed them most, the Department of Arts and Culture built multiple grant programs from scratch, creating mechanisms that would spread the funding as widely as possible with a focus on serving communities that had experienced the greatest impacts from the pandemic while also minimizing the burden of application and reporting requirements wherever feasible. This report places LA County’s relief and recovery efforts for arts and culture into the historical context of American relief and recovery from other economic crises.
While the US economy as a whole had largely recovered from the pandemic by late 2024, the arts and culture sector still struggles financially today. The nation’s rapid recovery was fueled in large part by a federal government response of $5 trillion in spending. Of that total, roughly $17 billion was distributed to nonprofit arts and cultural industries and independent artists and cultural workers across the US. Responses from government and philanthropy occurred simultaneously with myriad grassroots efforts by artists, cultural workers, and arts administrators who organized within and beyond their communities to advocate for and secure funding for the most vulnerable.
The pandemic also exposed weaknesses in the systems that fund arts and culture. This report concludes by recommending twelve reforms in four major categories, each of which can strengthen the arts and culture sector while helping to harden it against future emergencies:
- Reform systems for funding arts and culture
- Build robust arts and culture emergency response infrastructure
- Engage with larger systems beyond arts and culture
- Take the time to discover what worked