Enhancing Performing Arts Accessibility to Diverse Youth

Access to tech and creative industry employment

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

The Hollywood Arts Collective began with a needs survey that drew feedback from 1,800 artists and 131 arts organizations. Along with affordable housing, another need reported was for quality, affordable presentation space. These findings mirror the views of the 5,000+ clients served annually in our LA office: that although most citizens rely on the arts, managing a life within it is deeply challenging. The Hollywood Arts Collective was designed in response, creating a stake in the ground where low-income arts workers can afford to live and work in a creative space that can nurture new talent in the community. The Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Theater, coupled with our other partner in the project, the LA County High School for the Arts, is our response to the need to increase the diversity of the creative workforce. It is a place where we can provide young creative talent with tools to explore their interests, develop their skills, and take steps toward meaningful career paths.

The Hollywood Arts Collective is the largest affordable housing project for artists in the State of California. It consists of two buildings: the Cicely Tyson Residential Building, now home to 151 artists and their families; and the Rita Moreno Arts Building, which will house the Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Theater, LA Contemporary Exhibitions, a satellite campus for the LA County High School for the Arts, and the Phil and Monica Rosenthal Training Center. Still under construction, the 71-seat Glorya Kaufman Theater is our future center for affordable and accessible rehearsal space for residents of the Cicely Tyson Building, local artists in LA and many of the nonprofit theater, music, dance and film partners that make LA’s entertainment sector flourish. The theater will be flexible with accordion seating, retractable soundproofing and state-of-the-art equipment to accommodate productions or screenings. This grant will help us underwrite the new position of Theater Manager, making possible our intention to subsidize use of the space twice weekly by youth-serving nonprofits. The Manager will coordinate uses with community partners and begin engagement at least six months prior to opening. Recruitment for prospective partners across both uses has been underway for the past year, exceeding 20 candidate organizations, led by Fund Western Council member, retired USC Professor of Dance, and Founding Director of the Los Angeles Dance Foundation, Bonnie Oda Homsey.

The Hollywood Arts Collective will be a permanent resource of affordability, excellence and aspiration for current and future performing arts and entertainment workers, right in the center of LA’s creative economy, for both their housing and creativity. This grant will allow the Theater the one-time opportunity to open its doors to diverse young talent from the very start. In the long run, a strong start with deep affordability for youth programming and discounted rents for the nonprofit performing arts community will position the Theater to build the kind of support it will need to keep those doors wide open, far into the future.

The success of the Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Theater will be measured by attendance across the two primary uses, the nonprofit production companies reporting their attendance, but also the participation and outcomes reported to us by the youth-serving organizations receiving the deeper subsidies. Longer-term we hope to inspire an integration of services and programming across the participants in the Hollywood Arts Collective community, namely the three primary resident partners of the Rita Moreno Arts Building, as well as the volunteer pool of potential participants and mentors residing in the Cicely Tyson Residential Building next door. It is our intention to encourage that sense of community mission and commitment in the truest sense of this "collective."