Dear Friends,
Throughout the enormous challenges of the past year, artists and cultural organizations across Vermont have counted on the Vermont Arts Council.
Since April of 2020, we
- Reached two-thirds of Vermont towns with COVID relief
- Delivered critical aid to 181 devastated cultural organizations and more than 400 artists.
- Conferred five times the number of grants we typically award in a year.
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Launched a strategic action plan, CreateVT, to strengthen and empower Vermont's vibrant creative economy.
And we learned a great deal. We spent hours listening, hearing the stories of artists, theater directors, musicians and gallery owners whose livelihoods vanished overnight. We joined painful and courageous conversations about racial divides in our communities.
I’ve been awed by the incredible creativity that Vermont artists and community arts organizations summoned in response to the pandemic. Re-inventing themselves, they found new ways to keep us connected through the arts – staging concerts on hotel balconies and in truck beds, taking performances to front porches and parking lots, commissioning virtual plays and curating online poetry slams and film festivals.
Across our state, the arts sector is still struggling to recover. With your support, Vermont’s arts community will continue to entertain, provoke and inspire, and will emerge this summer stronger than ever, ready to help us to shape Vermont’s future with courage and compassion, together.
With thanks,
