Make money doing the work you believe in
What We Owe Teaching Artists: The Profession We Refuse to Build
The arts sector's largest workforce has no profession underneath it. No credentialing, no portable benefits, no career pathway that a twenty-five-year-old can look at and say: I can build a life in this.
This one is personal. My wife built a teaching artist program from scratch. I watched what it cost. And then I moved into philanthropy and still didn't prioritize changing the conditions.
The essay names organizations in the Bronx doing the work, a teaching artist with twelve years and two graduate degrees who left because the system wasn't built to keep her, and the $125 million initiative that proved a better model was possible and then ended.
It also proposes something that doesn't exist yet: a Master of Arts in Teaching specifically in teaching artistry, not just arts education.