I opened the meeting for the special meeting of the uh arts, culture, and creative economy commission.

Malin, would you please take role?

Okay, good morning, everybody.

Rick Gott.

If he's not here.

Maya Wallace.

Here Andrea Lapor.

Isela Perez.

Here.

Donnie Blumenstock.

Luisa Lavulo.

Here.

Dr.

Steven Winlock.

Here.

Priscilla Enriquez.

Here.

Dr.

Melinda Wilson Raimi.

Here.

We have a quorum.

Thank you for that.

Thank you, Melan.

Welcome, commissioners and also uh panel members that have helped us so much in the work that hasn't been happening with these great grants.

So we really want to thank you for your time and being a part of this.

And with this, our agenda item is to review the allocation of CARES Act Creative Economy Recovery Program, ground uh grants round two.

And I will uh turn it over to uh Ray Gorgano, our arts and program coordinator.

All right, thanks, Steve.

Thanks everyone for being with us today.

So before we get started on looking at the allocation, I just want to do a review of where we've been and uh make sure everyone knows where to find the information and how we'll be updating everything.

So, first of all, um our website, arts.city of sacramento.org forward slash grants.

We will get all of the updated information as we go.

So um if you're emailing or trying to find and you don't get an immediate answer, go there and we'll we're trying to keep that updated for you.

All right, so it round one.

If you remember, um, in July, we had our first round of creative economy recovery grants.

We were uh allocated about $7.5 million.

And you can see here through the categories of how the first round of reimbursements happened.

So creative businesses got about 1.1 million, individual artists got just over half a million, nonprofits under 400,000, cultural assets, which are our the city's uh cultural buildings that uh organizations that manage lease or occupy cultural buildings, uh got about 1.5 million and grantees that had been familiar with us already got um about three quarters of a million.

We additionally had program grants in the first round, which are up and running and amazing right now.

So that was almost three million.

So that's something to keep in mind as we look forward to round two.

Part of round one was also some professional development and some organizational development for all of the um artists and nonprofits who are who are able to join our two mentors that we hired for this, um, Estella Sanchez and Katie McClearly have been running these.

We have two full sessions left.

Um anyone is available or is invited to join us.

You can go to our website for this link, but you can sign up to it.

Uh sign up there.

Additionally, we've added some additional um non-sequential workshops for everyone to join.

You can also find this on our workshop from mastering your money mindset to tech to HR and management structures.

So we recommend that everyone join these because they are a virtual, um, they are accessible to everyone.

And you can register up at our website.

All right, so for round two, which we're talking about today, uh, you know that we had three competitive grant categories, one for nonprofit reimbursements, one for for-profit creative business reimbursements, and one for individual artists reimbursements.

Um we recognize that we needed to do a great deal of outreach and support for all applicants because many of them were first-time applicants or even second-time applicants with the Office of Arts and Culture.

So we did overall workshops for everyone to understand the process.

We recorded those and kept those on our website the entire time.

Katie McCleary did two amazing grant writing workshops, which we recorded and put them on our website for everyone to refer to.

From September 21st to the deadline, uh October 6th, we did drop in sessions every day so people could just drop in for individual support.

We had an email hotline that people could ask quick questions, and then we hired a cadre of mentors from the community who helped us from September 17th through the deadline provide individual meetings for grantees.

So we were hoping that we covered a lot of questions and we gave people the support they needed to complete their grants.

And when we were the panels were reviewing the grants, um, we we tried to keep in mind that not everyone was a grant writer, and we looked at how much of the support they were able to take.

Just a reminder of the second round timeline.