Sep 2018
John Riedie, a staple in the Austin community for 30 years and CEO of the Austin Creative Alliance, thrives on supporting creativity. As a former music manager, he oversaw and conducted business for multiple bands and coordinated numerous productions. Now he is helping artists of various disciplines reach their unique and sometimes overwhelming goals at a macro level. He is also devoted to finding common ground between artistic disciplines since they fall under the same interest group in public policy. “Our mission is to advance, connect, and advocate on behalf of arts, culture, and creativity in Austin. We help artists on their career paths and connect artists and organizations to resources. We also advocate for public policies that support the economic development of arts, music, and cultural industries,“ John explains.
The organization offers a variety of systems and resources to help artists. They provide fiscal sponsorship, allowing artists to use ACA’s 501c3 status to obtain funding to start a nonprofit organization. Career counseling is also available for artists who are not ready to apply for money but need help navigating their steps to reach their goals. Unified Auditions is another aspect of the Austin Creative Alliance, a day-long audition opportunity open to any actor or production staff. It gives these artists access to 30 theaters and casting companies in one day with the chance to get hired for theater, television, or commercial roles. They also hold a space for a community gallery, a visual arts program focused on underrepresented and young emerging artists who have never had a show before. Since it’s been running, they’ve only had one show that’s included a white male artist.
Due to the successful insights John has gained in the past, he and his team are restarting Creative Sector Summits, a gathering of people who run art and music organizations. In these meetings, leaders in the art community find out how they can work together and address the challenges and opportunities that intersect among them. “We learned there was an appetite in the community for someone to sort of stay at the table on issues like transportation and land use, things that maybe our community wasn’t tuned into. But transportation and land use in a rapidly growing city is important to everyone,” says John.
Things have changed since John started working for Austin Creative Alliance. “People are struggling to find or hold on to affordable space. Morale is really low, particularly in the nonprofit arts community. People are upset and panicking in a lot of ways. We’ve lost tens of hundreds of thousands of feet of space, visual arts studios, performance stages, rehearsal studios, costume shops, you name it, we’ve lost it. And the market is such that people are not finding replacements. So it feels like when a space is gone, it’s gone.” As a result of lost space and transportation inconvenience, many artist meetings now lead to the topic of leaving Austin in order to succeed.
“Artists also feel disappointed in the larger community because we hear the business community and the mayor talk about how important artists and music are, but it doesn’t feel like anything substantive is happening.” To counteract that, John and his team have begun advocating and designing a program called the Austin Cultural Trust, which will hopefully be funded by successful tech and business professionals in the city who have benefited and succeeded primarily due to the vibrant cultural life. John believes it would be a massive advantage to invest and help preserve cultural assets, historical sites and develop new spaces.
In the meantime, the Austin Creative Alliance is currently working with a development company to create a new creative arts district on Austin’s east side. “This fall, if all goes well, we will be opening up what we call The Pop, which is a pop-up arts district. It will have visual arts studios, a dance academy on-site, a co-working space, a performance space, a radio station, food trucks….” John says eagerly. “It will be 3-5 years of affordable space for art groups that have been displaced. But hopefully, a platform to talk about the future, which would be something like this.”
Additionally, John plays another vital role in the community as the Tourism Commissioner for the city. This puts him in a position to drive ideas that generate tourists’ desire to experience unique art events in Austin. He also wants to improve the marketing of creative experiences to new residents that have recently moved to Austin. “We haven’t done a perfect job converting them into live music fans or buying local when they decorate their new mansion. How do we get the new money and audience that are moving here to engage with existing local culture?”
Diversity and equity on the Austin Creative Alliance board was an intentional goal for John. As one degree removed from everyone in the scene, he wants to make sure everyone is heard and has a say in the artist community’s direction and progression. “I had a strategy to build a board that was almost like a body representative of the community. I wanted to make sure we had folks from the LGBTQ, Mexican American, and African American communities on our board. But also in terms of diverse disciplines, folks from visual arts, theater, dance, film, music, so that we could at least have ways to connect with all these communities’ concerns directly through the board and also so that they could be together a few times a year,” says John. “I do think it is super important to listen to everyone in the community. It’s more about synthesizing their needs because they don’t really know what to do. They know what their challenges are but they don’t really know how to solve them as individuals.” John and his dedicated team have helped many artists overcome obstacles and assisted in the realization of numerous creative dreams, supplying Austin with more colorful vibrancy and cultural abundance than it had before.
2022 Update:
Like many organizations during the pandemic, adapting and downsizing has become an inevitable part of existence for Austin Creative Alliance. John Riedie explains gathering the board for meetings has become more difficult in the time of Covid and unfortunately slowed down. “At the beginning of Covid, we prioritized keeping all of our positions funded, all four full-time positions at least. The original thinking was, this will be over in four or five months, so we want to make sure we can bounce back to full capacity and not be short-staffed when things go back to normal. And then, of course, it was more than four or five months,” he said.
They have also downsized because city funding has been paused and are not renewing any contracts for nonprofits in the 2022 fiscal year. So ACA is trying to pivot towards being more of a resource aggregator and added taking small donations for specific purposes and bundling them to fund specific needs in the arts ecosystem. They have also started Black Art Matters ATX, to help move projects along by black artists and have given emergency grants to help artists facing housing or food insecurity through lost work. Fortunately, ACA has received a lot of donations, was able to acquire grants, and obtained an approved loan from the SBA during this time. “We hope we can ride it out until city funding comes back. Right now, it feels more important to support the community. We’re constantly evaluating these things and being prepared to shift where we need to,” said John.
They are still providing fiscal sponsorship to embrace emerging groups into the arts ecosystem and help artists multiply their opportunities while saving money. John feels even more passionately about the benefits of fiscal sponsorship since some have recently come to see it as an exploitive practice. “Many of our sponsored projects, including one in December, ended up becoming their own nonprofit, but they do so after a few years of learning the ropes as a sponsored project. They learned best practices, how to become a nonprofit, do their work, produce it, grow their capacity, learned the ropes of city funding, and when they were ready, they became their own nonprofit. That’s how fiscal sponsorship works. You can choose to use fiscal sponsorship as a training ground to become your own nonprofit. Direct financial benefits like tax deductions for donations and connections with other artists in the ACA directory also help.”
When it comes to the pop-up arts district ACA was trying to create in 2018, it died before it began. Protestors were worried about gentrification and opposed to the idea of working with developers. Unfortunately, this led to vandalism of the office space and harassment of members. “The arts community kind of fled and became intimidated by the activism. I learned a lot of lessons there,” said John. But Austin Creative Alliance was instrumental in helping create the Austin Cultural Trust, which helps create affordable space for artists and preserve historic buildings and spaces for creative and cultural use throughout Austin. Even though recent city politics have made it challenging, John and ACA continue to serve the community as advocates for artists and their growth. “They count on us to pay attention and advocate for them. It’s my job.”