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Hello, King County Cultural Sector,

We have tremendous news to share! Your cultural work is uplifting and essential, so Inspire Washington has been pursuing every opportunity to increase public funding that allows non-profit, community-centered programs to recover and thrive. We have made significant progress and we’re ready to share more and invite you into the process.

More money for Culture!

We are collaborating with King County Executive Dow Constantine and Council on a plan to implement the state’s Cultural Access Program through councilmanic action, which is a majority vote of the council. Our goal is to increase 4Culture’s capacity so that $90+ million of new funding will be invested in science, heritage, and arts programs annually.

Last week, King County Executive Dow Constantine transmitted the Doors Open legislation to the King County Council. They are the ultimate decision makers and hold the authority to approve the program. The legislation ambitiously aims to provide every King County resident–especially those in under-resourced communities and outside of Seattle–with equitable, transformative access to science, heritage, and arts programming. So, our cultural objective is officially underway!

Governor Jay Inslee signed House Bill 1575, providing Councilmanic Authority to WA's Cultural Access Program. This groundbreaking legislation paved the way for King County's Doors Open Program.

Pictured: Chair of Finance Committee, Rep. April Berg (LD 44), Jessi Wasson and Manny Cawaling (Inspire WA), Legislative Assistant Julia Lain (LD 36), and Prime Sponsor Rep. Julia Reed (LD 36).

King County Council commenced the public process yesterday with a virtual public hearing. Over 100 individuals joined the live stream to learn more about this opportunity and we recruited nearly 50 community members who shared passionate and compelling testimony. Overall, the hearing was a huge success. We demonstrated broad and significant support from a diverse group of constituents. We also framed the opportunity accurately. Expanding access to cultural programs is community-centered, especially for those historically under-resourced. There are "undeniable benefits" to cultural programming like economic, social, education, and more.

King County will hold several more hearings to explore this opportunity, hear from constituents, and deliberate. All of this will culminate with a vote of the King County Council (not a public vote) in early December. If the program is approved, tax collection would begin in April 2024 and the first round of funding could happen by year’s end.

This is the most important thing that I want you to understand. Securing this funding isn’t something that Inspire Washington can do for you. It’s something we will do together. We need your help! You, your team, board, partners, and community must advocate for this funding and the programs that will expand access, equitably, to communities across King County. We need you to advocate–show up for hearings (virtual or in-person), share your story, and write letters of support to Councilmembers. Please join us and advocate for Doors Open!

2 things we need you to do immediately:

Email your King County Councilmember. Now that we’ve had the first hearing, we need you to reach out to your Councilmember with a short email of support. If you don’t know who your Councilmember is, use this link. We’ve created some sample content you can use (click here for examples), but please personalize your letter. You can find the councilmember’s email addresses here.

Sign up to testify! All of the public meetings invite members of the public to articulate their support or opposition. We need passionate and compelling stories that reinforce our key messages and advance our political strategy. Testimonies are typically 1-2 minutes, virtual or in-person. If you’ve got a great story to share, please sign up to testify here. We’d love to have a broad variety of options and we will confirm your attendance closer to the meeting. We may need to trim the list if the number of speakers exceeds the allotted time or if we have many similar stories.

Critical meetings that we’d like you to attend in person or stream:

• Oct 11 (Wednesday), Regional Policy Committee, 3 pm
• Nov 8 (Wednesday), Regional Policy Committee, 3 pm
• Dec 5 (Tuesday) and/or Dec 12 (Tuesday), King County Council, 9 am

          * this schedule is subject to change and more will be added.

In-person meetings are held at Council Chambers (516 3^rd Ave, Room 1001, Seattle).

Want to do more? Please consider this list of additional tasks:

Educate Your Community. Please get your whole community excited about Doors Open and refer them to the recent Seattle Times article. They will be great advocates for the final vote if we decide to trigger a massive email campaign.

Join the Inspiration League AND Inspire WA’s newsletter. InspirationLeague.org is our political platform where we issue action alerts. The system makes it really easy to send a message to any elected official that represents you. Please also sign up for our newsletter because we’ll have a lot of critical information to share over the next few months.

Share your education sector contacts. We’ve hired Andy Jensen as the Community Organizer for the Education Sector. It’s critical that we demonstrate support from school districts, PTSAs, booster clubs, parents, and students! Email Andy at andyjoe1024@gmail.com with your education contacts and he will bring your folks into our coalition!

Join Inspire WA as a dues-paying partner. Effective advocacy is expensive. In fact, this King County effort is costing us nearly $200,000 in staff, communications, and lobbying expenses. I’m still falling short on our annual fundraising goal, but we need to keep focused on this important objective. Many of you received transformative funding from the state’s Working Washington Round 5 grant and now there’s this big county objective. Advocacy is successful and delivers the support you need! I’m hoping at least 200 cultural businesses will join Inspire Washington to provide us with the resources to secure Doors Open. Partnership dues are affordable and based on organizational budget size. Most pay between $100-250 per year – click here to join!

QUESTIONS?

We imagine you may have lots of questions and we want to bring you up to speed. Join us for a briefing of the Doors Open program and our plan to secure King County approval. To ensure good communications, we will be hosting an Open Office Hour, every Tuesday, 12:30 to 1:30 pm. Click here to register! And feel free to share this invitation with members of your team and community that need more information.

Oh, my friends, my partners, my cultural family... I’m just thrilled that we have made significant progress to enact a Cultural Access initiative to benefit your programs. Many of you know that I was inspired to take on this role of Executive Director to chart a path forward for this big endeavor after our loss at the ballot in 2017. There have been so many obstacles in the way since I started five years ago, but I never lost faith in King County’s cultural future. I believe wholeheartedly that we will pull this off together. This year!

Humbly yours,

Manny Cawaling, Executive Director

We have excellent news regarding a 2023 Legislative Session victory! Every single advocate in our coalition rolled up their sleeves and make their voice heard on behalf of the cultural sector. Thanks to each and every one of our advocates, the Legislature listened and appropriated $2 million to our sector for COVID relief.

It's now time to celebrate your hard work and claim your funding! The $2 million appropriation has now become the COVID Impacts Recovery Grant and will be distributed by ArtsWA and the Dept of Commerce. We are thrilled to announce that the application portal for the COVID Impacts Recovery Grant is now OPEN through November 1st!

These one-time grants of up to $5,000 are available to Washington businesses and nonprofits in the arts, heritage, and science sectors. For-profit and non-profit businesses are eligible. Special consideration will be given to our state’s most vulnerable businesses. Funds for this program are provided by Washington State Legislature, the Washington Department of Commerce, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Deadline to apply: Wednesday, November 1, 2023 | 5 p.m. PST

Learn more and apply: https://www.arts.wa.gov/covid-recovery/

About Inspire Washington

Inspire Washington nurtures the human spirit and strengthens communities by increasing access to science, heritage, and arts programming through advocacy, resource development, education, and coalition building.

Inspire Washington

info@inspirewashington.org

P.O. Box 806, Seattle, WA 98111

InspireWashington.org

Manuel R. Cawaling, Executive Director

Jessi Wasson, Programs and Operations Manager

Anna Tatelman, Annual Fund Manager

Madeline Dalton, Outreach Coordinator

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