The Alliance for Arts and Culture has introduced a province-wide campaign, Creativity Counts: Restore Arts Funding Now, as their contribution to the groundswell of arts community protests against the devastating cuts in provincial arts funding this past fall.

There are six things they are asking each of us to do to move the campaign forward:

1) Personalize this message and send it to everyone on all of your email lists -- professional and personal. The government needs to hear from everyone who cares -- working artists (professional and amateur), audience members, arts board members, and their friends, colleagues and neighbours.

2) Go to Creativity Counts: Restore Arts Funding Now and send an email message to the Premier and your own MLA. They have created an auto-letter tool for your use.

3) Review the Advocacy Toolkit on the blog site and use and adapt it in your personal advocacy efforts. It contains a wealth of information, accurate statistics, case studies of the damage these cuts are doing to our communities and ideas for action. This is an abbreviated and more targeted version of the Advocacy Toolkit on our website.

4) If you are an arts or community event manager and have an event coming up, donate some advertising space in your program to this campaign. Email their communications director Kevin Dale McKeown at communications@allianceforarts.com to request a working document of the ad which will appear in this Thursday's Georgia Straight (Nov.26.09), and can be adapted to your programs ad specifications;

5) Consider featuring the Creativity Counts logo as a hotlink button on your own website and social media pages. Email Kevin at communications@allianceforarts.com and he will provide you with the button's html code and some accompanying text.

6) Volunteer to distribute buttons, postcards and bookmarks at local arts venues and collect donations to the Alliance Advocacy Fund. Email communications@allianceforarts.com to express your interest, and Kevin will get back to you.

7) Donate to the Alliance's Advocacy Fund. Buttons and postcards and bookmarks all cost money. Your support will keep this campaign going. There is a PayPal link at creativitycounts.ca. Cheques can be sent, payable to the Alliance for Arts and Culture, to 100 - 938 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 1N9 (note "Advocacy" in the memo line).

What do we hope to achieve with your help?

We have only a few more weeks in which to influence discussions and decisions around the budget that will be brought down in early March. A relentless drumbeat of protest, letters, emails and community-based activism will ensure that the decision makers in Victoria hear our message loud and clear right up to the last moment.

Creativity Counts.

Restore Arts Funding Now.