Art News Alert: Urgent Arts Advocacy Appeal

Dear Friends & Colleagues

Your Alliance for Arts and Culture in Vancouver, BC is launching a Creativity Counts: Restore Arts Funding Now campaign as our contribution to the groundswell of arts community protest against the devastating cuts in provincial arts funding this past fall.

There are six simple requests:

1) Forward this message to everyone on all of your email lists -- professional and personal. The government needs to hear from everyone who cares -- working artists (professional and amateur), media people, audience members, arts board members, and their friends, colleagues and neighbours.

2) Go to www.creativitycounts.ca and send an email message to the Premier and your own MLA. We have created an auto-letter tool for your use.

3) Review our Advocacy Toolkit and use and adapt it in your personal advocacy efforts. It contains a wealth of information, accurate statistics, case studies in the damage these cuts are doing to our communities, and ideas for action.

4) If you are an arts or community event manager and have an event coming up, donate some advertising space in your program to this campaign. Contact me a communications@allianceforarts.com and I can send you working files and other periodicals which can be adapted to any format.

5) Consider featuring the Creativity Counts logo (design courtesy of our friends at Hamazki Wong Marketing Group) as a hotlink button on your own website and social media pages. Email me at communications@allianceforarts.com and I will provide you with the button’s html code and some accompanying text.

6) Volunteer to distribute buttons, postcards and bookmarks at local arts venues and collect donations for the Alliance Advocacy Fund. Email communications@allianceforarts.com to express your interest and I will get back to you.

7) Donate to the Alliance’s Advocacy Fund. Buttons and postcards and bookmarks and lobbying and organizing meetings all cost money. Your support will keep this campaign going. There is a PayPal link at www.creativitycounts.ca.

What do we hope to achieve with your help?

We have only a few more weeks in which to influence discussions and decisions around the budget that will be brought down in early March. A relentless drumbeat of protests, letters, emails and community-based activism will ensure that the decision makers in Victoria hear our message loud and clear right up to the last moment.

Creativity Counts. Restore Arts Funding Now.

Y’rs,
KDM

Kevin Dale McKeown
Director of Communications
Alliance for Arts and Culture
604.681.3535 (215)
communications@allianceforarts.com