Houston Arts Alliance here, but before we go any further, we have staff member to staff members from several offices to recognize Council Member Selinas Alcorn.

Oh, Councilmember Martinez just joined us.

Um Councilmember Peck, Vice Mayor Pro Tem Peck, Councilmember Thomas, Councilmember Ramirez, and Councilmember Jackson's office.

So thank you all for being here.

Well, we are ready, I think.

We've got a great presentation today.

Michelle Dobb Dobbins with the Houston Arts Alliance, and we're gonna hear about what disaster recovery has to do with art.

Little known fact it has a whole lot to do with art.

So thank you for being here, Michelle, and we're ready.

All right,

thank you.

Dobbins and I serve as the Director of Resilience and Recovery for the Houston Arts Alliance, aka H A.

And so all right, is that better?

All right.

So if you didn't hear again, my name is Michelle Dobbins.

I serve as the Director of Resilience and Recovery at the Houston Arts Alliance, aka HAA.

And I thank you guys for the opportunity to speak with you this afternoon and just share a little bit about our work, why we do this work and why it's important, especially to arts and culture.

And before I kind of get into the presentation, what I would like to do is just kind of share some background information on the Houston Arts Alliance and uh my background so you can understand kind of how all this work came together.

And

so a lot of times when we think about resilience, we think about the infrastructure and preparedness and community response during a disaster, but also what we like to focus on or what we like to bring attention to are the people uh that are impacted, those people that their livelihoods, their businesses, and they their work are impacted, and this includes the artists, uh, creative workers, arts organizations, and cultural and heritage organizations.

And so again, I just want to share what we're building and how we got to the work that we're doing today.

Next.

And so uh Houston Arts Alliance actually this year we celebrated our 20th year anniversary, and so we've been uh HAA for 20 years now, and our mission is to connect the creative community with support, resources, and partnerships.

Uh and then with that, we look at how artists and organizations can sustain their work and look at how we can help them to propel uh in the future.

And so resilience and recovery is a big part of the overall agency commitment.

Next.

And

so Houston Arts Alliance, again, we invest in arts and organizations, we connect people to resources, and we connect with various partners, whether it's uh in emergency management, whether it's our nonprofit volunteer organizations active in disaster, and what we try to do is bridge the gap between uh what's available in the current system and then the systems that the arts and cultural uh ecosystems need in order to sustain and and to move forward.

And so a big part of our work that we do at HAA, we have civic arts uh and we have grants, and so those two are our major programs that are funded uh through the city, but also we have programs such as the one that I work with, which is now resilience and recovery.

When we first started doing this work 10 years ago, it was disaster services.

But one of the things that we start to understand is that you really need to combine resiliency with recovery in order for folks to be able to maintain and sustain.

And

so a little bit about myself.

I've been doing this work since 2000, I think 2000, 2001, uh right after Tropical Storm Alison.

Uh, and then after that, a lot of my work and my experience come from um working after Katrina Rita and all of the major disasters uh after that point.

And through that work, I've operated and maintained state programs, federal programs, local programs.

And so a lot of my experience and what I bring to Houston Arts Alliance comes from that experience of looking at the people side in community development.

Next.

And so one of the questions I'm always asked is what does arts have to do with disaster?

Or, you know, okay, you work in disaster, what does that mean for the arts?

And a lot of times what I do is I sit back and I take people back to the people behind the art.

A lot of times when artists and art workers are discussed, they're often discussed in terms of what they create and what they contribute, which is a big part of the conversation, and it's great because arts and culture actually keep our communities connected.

And it helps to build local economy.

But that's just a part of it.

And so what I try to do is take people back to the person and to look at artists, creatives, and artworkers as people first, uh people that have families, uh, they have bills, they have responsibilities, and they have livelihoods that depend on things like their equipment, uh, materials, venues, and access to markets.

And so when we talk about resilience, we need to account for the people and their livelihoods, and that's how or what I take arts back.

And so arts has a lot to do with recovery in terms of response.

Arts is there to build connections, it's a healing mechanism uh for disasters and doing disasters, but also again, because artists are so unique, they too need to be recognized, not just for their profession, but as people.

Next.

And so, like I said, uh Houston Arts Alliance, we've been doing this work since right after Hurricane Harvey.

And so after Hurricane Harvard, the agency took on this 18-month project where they brought in a consultant and really looked at the arts and the arts ecosystems.

And what we realized or what they realized then is that there was a big gap in terms of how the traditional systems were made up and how they work with artists.

Artists uh being a lot being sold prioriters and uh being small business owners, but not having the structure as a small business owners.

They work out of their homes, they do a lot of gig work, uh, and then when disasters happen and they lose that income, it's it's devastating.

Or if they're working from their home and their equipment is damaged, that also impacts their ability to continue uh to do this work.

And so uh we took out and we started doing this work, and since then we've been responding to most major disasters.

Uh so we responded to uh Hurricane Harvey, of course.

We also uh did COVID response.

We responded to uh winter street fire that happened in 2023, and then winter storm Uri.

And so a lot of our work is just mainly before now has been around response, but again, really understanding that uh most people that we engage with, they don't know where to start, they don't know what to do, and so that's where uh the education and the resiliency piece comes to play.