February 2012

An appeal for the Founder's Keeper Fund

Founder’s Keeper Fund is the brainchild of (retiring) Executive Director and Founder of Art Enables, Joyce Muis-Lowery. It is envisioned as the seed of a fellowship program which will help cushion against what has proved to be a random but recurring threat to continuity of service for artists experiencing what can only be categorized as bad luck.

Here’s the backstory:
        A condition of joining Art Enables is that an artist be sponsored to help cover costs. The majority of artists are sponsored by the DC Department on Disabilities Services under the Medicaid Waiver; others receive support from their umbrella rehabilitation agency or, in exceptional cases, from family. That support constitutes more than half of the Art Enables operating budget.
      It has happened in the course of the first ten years—and is probably inevitable going forward—that funding support for an artist is disrupted, temporarily or permanently. The sponsoring agency itself is dissolved, there are policy changes and support for day programming is cancelled. Each case is different, but each case leaves an artist stranded.
         Alice Jean McGurrin who died in October 2011 was one of the stranded. She had come to Art Enables from an organization that was disbanded. Subsequent case managers could not find a new funding source for her, but Art Enables was simply not prepared to tell her she couldn’t continue in the studio. Art was what kept Alice Jean grounded. It was crucial to her sense of purpose, her sense of worth. Even during her last hospitalization, Alice Jean called the studio to make sure that she would not lose her place in the program.

Hopefully, Founder’s Keeper will evolve into a full-fledged fellowship program that ensures that no artist who has come into the program in good faith and is working hard will lose his or her place because a sponsor has defaulted.

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Why donate?
Art Enables does not make money selling artwork. Money from artwork sales goes to the participants as earnings (60%) and to framing costs (40%). To cover programming expenses and overhead, Art Enables is dependent upon a combination of fee-for-service from the government, grant awards from foundations, financial contributions from individual donors and gifts of goods and services from people in the community. Donations make our programming possible.

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