Arts Workers United

Home of the Be An #ArtsHero campaign, Arts Workers United is a unique and visionary organization that exists to reposition the Arts & Culture sector and Arts Workers as legislative priorities at the city, state, and federal level. Co-founded in June of 2020 by Brooke Ishibashi, Jenny Grace Makholm, Carson Elrod, and Matthew-Lee Erlbach, Arts Workers United and the Be An #ArtsHero campaign has become one of the most nationally recognized Arts Advocacy organizations in the United States. Arts Workers United seeks to educate, organize, and mobilize the 5.2 million+ Arts Workers in the United States to leverage their unique powers and platforms to achieve meaningful and measurable changes in how the Arts & Culture sector and its workers are represented and elevated both legislatively, and culturally. After relentless advocacy work, in January 2022, Arts Workers United lobbied effectively for the first House Hearing on the whole of the Creative Economy in United States History, speaking before Congress on “The Power, Peril, and Promise of the Creative Economy.” AWU has partnered with organizations such as Dance/USA, the Dramatists Guild, and the American Circus alliance on dozens of successful social media campaigns that have achieved virality, spreading Arts Advocacy to a new generation, and bringing the term “Arts Worker'' into the common vernacular. Arts Workers United’s powerful Arts advocacy message have been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian, Forbes, New York Magazine, and PBS, among dozens of other publications and outlets. The campaign has been represented on television by Billy Porter, B.D. Wong, Jane Krakowski, Phillipa Soo, and Jeremy O. Harris and amplified on social media by the likes of Ariana Debose, Cher, Jordan Fisher, Bette Midler, Alfre Woodward, and Hillary Clinton.