1. 2024 Webinar Series
  2. 2024 Webinar Series

Move the Money Series: Guaranteed Income

Tuesday, February 13, 2pm EST/11am PST

  • Sara Fenske Bahat, CEO, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
  • Ricardo Beaird, community development director, Springboard for the Arts
  • Kevin Dublin, educator, advocate, writer
  • Kasey Wiedrich, financial capability manager, Office of Financial Empowerment, City of Saint Paul

Grantmakers in the Arts believes that no worker – including artists – should be stuck in worries about basic economic survival. What are the models we can look to for examples to reconcile this? How are arts supporters working with policy makers to expand these models to serve more artists across cities and states? Join us on February 13 at 2pm EST/11am PST for a rich discussion about how funders can advocate and take action around safety nets and support for individual artists. We will be joined by Sara Fenske Bahat, CEO, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Ricardo Beaird, community development director, Springboard for the Arts; Kevin Dublin, educator, advocate, and writer; Kasey Wiedrich, financial capability manager, Office of Financial Empowerment, City of Saint Paul.

This 90-minute webinar will include breakout discussions between members on their support for artists’ safety nets as well as public policies that support artists and other workers. 

We look forward to seeing you there!

 

Live captioning will be available in English throughout the webinar. For additional accomodation requests, please contact GIA Senior Program Manager Sherylynn Sealy, at least three (3) business days prior to the event.

 

Webinar resources:

 

Presenters

Bahat

Sara Fenske Bahat, CEO, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Sara Fenske Bahat Sara is a connector, most at-home when bridging the creative arts, economics, and equitable design to shape our social and political landscape. As Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) CEO, Sara works collaboratively with the YBCA team to advance the organization as a dynamic home for artists, arts and culture, and social justice movement building. Prior to becoming CEO, Sara served as YBCA’s Board Chair. Under her leadership, YBCA navigated COVID-19 pandemic challenges (which resulted in the longest mass closure of cultural venues since World War II), received support from leading innovators for groundbreaking work at the intersection of arts and movement building, and launched the nation’s first dedicated guaranteed income program for artists. Most recently, Sara served as chair of the California College of the Arts (CCA) MBA in Design Strategy, a groundbreaking, multidisciplinary degree rooted in systems theory, foresight, and innovation. Sara has a community finance and economic development background. Before becoming an educator, she worked for New York City’s economic development agency and in banking, where she championed local government support for community banks, improved banking and savings products for immigrant households, and multi-state consumer protection settlements. Raised in a Milwaukee family steeped in advocacy for human, civil, and LGBTQ+ rights, Sara quickly developed a commitment to activism and social justice. A dedicated political fundraiser and mobilizer, she is passionate about driving civic engagement and hosted the Democratic National Committee’s first-ever Zoom fundraiser at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sara is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the London School of Economics. She is a 2022 Presidential Leadership Scholar, exploring the meaning of culture and cohesion in a country increasingly divided across wealth, ideology, and acknowledgment of historic and present inequity.

Beaird

Ricardo Beaird, community development director, Springboard for the Arts

Ricardo Beaird is a theater maker, teaching artist, and cheese curd enthusiast originally from Nashville, Tennessee. Their recent work is informed by the unfinished business of ghosts, dis/connection through the internet, and sometimes Beyoncé. In addition to performing with Pangea World Theater, Park Square Theatre, Red Eye Theater and Ten Thousand Things Theater, Beaird is a Core Artist with Full Circle Theatre, advisory council member with the queer-led theater collective Lightning Rod, and an Artist Council member for the 2021 Northern Spark Arts Festival. Ricardo brings deep experience in collective visioning, workshop facilitation, and community organizing. They currently serve as Community Development Director for Springboard for the Arts.

Dublin

Kevin Dublin, educator, advocate, writer

Kevin Dublin is an educator, advocate, and writer of poetry, prose, scripts, and code from Smithfield, NC. Currently Director of the Elder Writing Project, a community-based outreach program of the Litquake Foundation that brings creative writing and storytelling workshops to retirement communities across San Francisco and Oakland as well as a coding instructor and advisor at the low-cost, custom-paced coding bootcamp Kickstart Coding in Oakland. Kevin is committed to helping nurture emerging writers and developers of all ages. He has a long history of volunteering and working with young writers as well during his tenure developing curriculum and teaching at Duke University’s Young Writers Camp, through Social Advocates for Youth (SAY) San Diego, at public and private grade schools throughout the bay area, and volunteering with 826 Valencia. He also serves on the board of the bay area reading series Quiet Lightning. Kevin is a Writers Studio Ralph Dickey Scholar and has received fellowships, grants, and awards from the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI), Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and the North Carolina Poetry Society. He is author of the chapbook How to Fall in Love in San Diego and his words have recently appeared or forthcoming in The San Franciscan, Syzygy Magazine, Cincinnati Review, North Carolina Literary Review, & more. Kevin holds a BA & BFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, MA from East Carolina University, as well as an MFA from San Diego State.

Wiedrich

Kasey Wiedrich, financial capability manager, Office of Financial Empowerment, City of Saint Paul

Kasey Wiedrich (she/her) is the Financial Capability Manager with the City of Saint Paul’s Office of Financial Empowerment. In her role, she manages the City’s guaranteed income programs, financial health initiatives, and works to integrate wrap around services into the City’s children’s savings account program, CollegeBound Saint Paul. Prior to joining OFE in 2020, Kasey was the Director of Applied Research at Prosperity Now in Washington, DC, where she managed the Prosperity Now Scorecard—a state-by-state assessment of how families are faring and the strength of state policies—and conducted research on household financial security and effective practices to build financial capability and wealth.