Voice Your Support for Arts & Culture

Here’s how you can help advocate to protect, support, and help allocate sustainable funding for arts and culture in our community

What You Can Do

Contact your Oregon elected officials.
Contact your local City or County Council members, testify and/or attend a council meeting:
Attend a member of Congress’s town hall meeting and voice your support for arts and culture funding for Oregon.
Sign up for RACC’s newsletter to stay up to date on opportunities to advocate for arts and culture.
Attend local school board meetings to advocate to fully fund arts education in our schools and promote a STEAM education.
Join the board of a local arts and culture organization.
Make annual or monthly donations to your favorite arts and culture organizations and be sure to show your support by attending events and performances. Donate to RACC.
Support organizations that participate in Arts for All, making arts and culture accessible for all in our community.

OUR PROCESS at RACC

Our advocacy and engagement at RACC works in partnership with the Oregon Cultural Advocacy Coalition. They set the arts and culture agenda for the State of Oregon and lobby on behalf of the entire arts and culture community. The creative pulse of Oregon is determined through a series of community engagements with arts partners throughout the state that determine the best agenda forward to create an arts and culture policy for the upcoming legislative session.

2023 Key Issues and Legislative Priorities identified:

$50 million in additional recovery funding for arts, culture, heritage, and humanities, distributed similarly to the CARES allocation of last cycle. We had advocated for this in 2022 and were not successful, largely because previous ARPA funds had not yet been distributed to the field. Some of our major venues are seeing ticket sales at 18% of what they were before the pandemic. The need is great. Oregon has more in its general fund than it has in awhile, so we will push this as our top priority.
$200 million to the Oregon Cultural Trust, spinning off $10-20 million a year for operations grants to the 1,400 Oregon nonprofits eligible for funding from the trust. We are asking lawmakers to make good on the original $200 million commitment they made to fund the Oregon Cultural Trust by asking for revenue from lottery bonds. We will work with county and tribal coalitions to distribute these funds, which will go into an account separate from current grant programs. This is our long-term vision for supporting the sector and it will move Oregon into the top rankings for state funding.
$10 million increase to grow grant funding at the Oregon Arts Commission.
Replacing Oregon Cultural Trust administrative cap with percentage of earnings.