What Arts Workers Need to Sustain a Creative, Joyful Life
A collaboration with the MAP Fund is creating opportunities and fostering enhanced wellbeing for Walder Foundation’s Platform Awardees
TeAda Productions' "Masters of the Currents" received a 2018 MAP Fund grant. The production was co-created by 2018 Scaffolding for Practicing Artists artist Leilani Chan. Photo credit: Brad Goda
What does it take for an arts worker* to not just create ambitious work but also sustain a creative and joyful life?
Walder Foundation’s Platform Awards were designed to provide midcareer performing artists with financial stability at a stage when responsibilities often multiply and choices often grow more complex. As Art at the Center: Equity, Care, and Transformation showed, equitable investment in arts workers’ labor and wellbeing is foundational to a healthy cultural sector.
Alongside fair compensation, however, arts workers also need something else that is potentially harder to access: protected space and time to reflect, recalibrate, and grow.
That is where Walder Foundation’s collaboration with the MAP Fund’s Scaffolding for Practicing Artists (SPA) program comes in.
MAP Fund’s SPA programming, now provided to Walder Foundation’s Platform Awardees at no cost, offers ongoing professional and personal development to awardees, enabling them to strengthen what they make and to continually evolve.
Listening to Arts Workers and Building What was Missing
Founded in 1988, the MAP Fund has become one of the longest‑running national funders supporting individual performing artists and ensembles. Over its history, MAP has granted more than $40 million to support over 1,600 live performance projects across the United States, intentionally centering artists whose work challenges convention and expands cultural narratives.
2014 SPA artist Lisa Mezzacappa's "Glorious Ravage," for which she received a 2014 MAP Grant. Courtesy of the artists.
In 2011, MAP launched SPA in response to direct feedback from artists who were seeking space to think, reflect, and navigate the growing complexity of their professional lives. Since its inception, SPA has served more than 360 artists through one‑on‑one coaching and facilitated peer gatherings.
SPA is intentionally non‑prescriptive. Instead, “SPA provides a holistic approach to artist support that centers each artist’s questions, desires, and priorities,” said Ron Ragin, MAP Fund’s Director of Programs. “We hold the artist and their practice as sacred. The program’s peer gatherings expand the circle of care and facilitate artists to ask for and receive help from one another in a rare professional space that is non-competitive, non-evaluative, and rooted in trust.”
SPA is built on the belief that artists benefit from having compassionate accompaniment and rigorous thought partnership.
Reflecting on their coaching experience, one SPA participant shared, “I am so grateful for the SPA coaching sessions. My coach gave me a beautiful balance of solutions, strategy, empathy and encouragement that made me feel inspired to take action on her suggestions and recommendations. And these strategies are ones that I know I will be able to return to throughout my career.”
See how this work is unfolding, as shared with our community on social media:
Why Platform Awardees Are Especially Suited for SPA
Walder Foundation’s Platform Awardees are already deeply engaged in their fields and communities, and they are navigating increasingly complex professional roles while sometimes grappling with how to sustain, lead, and evolve their artistic practice.
SPA is especially impactful at precisely the moment when arts workers are:
Managing multiple roles (creator, employer, mentor, administrator)
Facing decisions about pace, scale, leadership, and longevity
Seeking coherence between artistic vision and life sustainability
As Art at the Center notes, when arts workers are given space to prioritize care and growth — not just production — the work they create can become more resonant, innovative, and deeply connected to community.
“SPA operationalizes this insight by focusing on the internal conditions that allow individual artists to continue developing over time,” shares Ebony Chuukwu, Senior Program Officer, Performing Arts at Walder Foundation.
What Arts Workers Learn Through SPA that Is Hard to Learn Elsewhere
For many mid‑career arts workers, opportunities for continued development become increasingly scarce. Professional learning spaces are often oriented either toward emerging arts workers or toward institutional leaders. SPA occupies a rare middle ground, which is a space that Platform Awardees find themselves in.
Through participation in SPA, artists may develop:
Enhanced agency in setting priorities and boundaries
Long‑arc thinking, rather than project‑to‑project survival
Reflective decision‑making skills that can be applied across creative and administrative contexts
Active peer‑based learning skills, grounded in shared experience rather than hierarchy
These are not skills easily taught through workshops or degree programs. They emerge through sustained reflection, trusted dialogue, and repeated practice.
Rather than prescribing outcomes, the Platform Awards–SPA collaboration creates space for artists to make grounded decisions for themselves and for their communities, and to continue evolving their artistic expressions and practices.
*The terms “arts worker(s)” and “artist(s)” are used interchangeably throughout.
Stay engaged with efforts from our Performing Arts pillar: walderfoundation.org/performing-arts
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