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Trust-Based Funding Works. So Why Are Artists Still Living in Precarity?

How do you make a living as an artist today? For too many, the answer is: you can't, at least not without juggling multiple jobs or relying on personal or generational wealth.

For emergent artists, the path into a sustainable career has rarely felt narrower. In the wake of the pandemic, amid a prolonged cost-of-living crisis and years of declining public investment, artists are facing increasingly difficult decisions and being pushed out of the industry. If we want a thriving cultural life, we must face an uncomfortable truth: our current funding model is failing creatives.

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For over three decades, the Arts Foundation in the U.K. has supported artists at pivotal moments in their careers. Alumni, including choreographer Sir Wayne McGregor, novelist Ali Smith, theater director Rufus Norris, writer Alice Birch, filmmaker Asif Kapadia and painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, were supported not through tightly prescribed outcomes, but through trust: time, freedom and belief in the value of their practice and work. Many have since gone on to shape Britain’s cultural life in profound ways. Year after year, we have seen that when artists are given resources without strings attached, they take risks, deepen their practice and create work that resonates far beyond the studio. This principle of trust remains largely absent from the funding landscape that artists must navigate.

American organizations have spent years building an evidence base for this principle, and the results are unambiguous. While proof of concept alone doesn’t drive change, the economic and moral case for acting on it is just as urgent in the U.K., where artists and creatives sit at the heart of the creative economy, worth over £124 billion a year according to government figures. Yet too many are asked to generate public cultural value while their own financial security remains fragile.

In the United States, guaranteed income programs for artists have been independently evaluated with striking results. Springboard for the Arts, based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, runs one of the most established guaranteed income pilots for artists in the country. The program launched in 2021 alongside the City of St. Paul’s People’s Prosperity Pilot and has since expanded to reach 100 artists across Minnesota, 50 in Otter Tail County and 50 in the Frogtown/Rondo neighborhoods, sustained over five years.........

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