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ArtHome’s CreativeMoney workshops and self-assessment tools help artists chart a course to financial literacy, viability and home ownership. Designed by and for active artists, CreativeMoney utilizes the proven expertise of a board of financial advisors and the real world experience of 21st century art making. CreativeMoney is both a primer on financial terms and practices, and an artist-centered methodology for building assets and equity through home ownership.
CreativeMoney addresses artists’ financial needs on artists’ terms. Our materials are plainspoken and accessible. Our self-assessment tools are built around real world artists’ budgets and refer directly to the working methods and career strategies common to each arts discipline.
Questions addressed at these workshops include: how solvent am I? How much should I be putting away each month for taxes, retirement, and investment? How can I rid myself of debt? How much do I invest in my art career? Can home-buying stabilize my art practice? How can I make home-buying a reality?
In participating cities, we assemble coalitions of local funders, lenders, community development
leaders and artists, which create artists' home-buying opportunities through the following three steps:
We research and disseminate information about available home-buying resources in each community, creating a road map by which local artists can pursue home ownership.
We establish working groups specific to each community whose goal is to expand existing home-buying programs for use by artists.
Together with the coalitions in each city, ArtHome designs and builds fundable, specialized home-buying programs for individual artists. These programs allow local and national lenders to offer unique mortgage products to the artists' market, and allow local arts funders to support their constituencies with down payment assistance. They offer new ways to support culture on a local level, create investment opportunities linked to tangible return, and match the knowledge and concerns of the community-development sector with the needs and economic impact of the arts.
The CreativeMoney curriculum and the prototype self-assessment tools will be designed during 2008 and put through review and revision with our Financial Advisory board. The self-assessment tools will start out as paper-based worksheets for the workshop period. After the workshop is completed they will then be revised and programming will begin on the interactive flash-based tool set.
The CreativeMoney curriculum will be work-shopped at four New York based arts organizations and two non- New York based multi-discipline sites in Spring/Summer 2008. The testing is timed to occur after taxes to ensure students are easily prepared to bring up-to-date financial data. We are currently in talks with a number of arts service organizations who work in the performance, film , visual arts and creative writing disciplines.
CreativeMoney will be available in class form in Fall/Winter 2008 and the interactive flash-based tool set will be available on-line (or for DVD purchase) in early 2009. The Local Home-buying initiatives are ongoing.
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