Federation 2026: The Year We Stop Perfecting and Start Building
The Problem We Refuse to Accept
Let me share some numbers that keep me up at night.
The typical creative worker in this country juggles nearly 15 freelance contracts per year. 50% of us are independent contractors. We work full-time hours, but fragmented across gigs, projects, one-offs.
We call it hustle. We call it flexibility. What it actually is: profound economic insecurity dressed up as freedom.
Here's what that looks like in practice: 49% of creative workers purchase their benefits independently. Only 9% access benefits through a union. And for those with union coverage, only about 14% of professional actors earn enough to actually qualify for their union's health insurance. The rest self-provision or go without.
The National Survey of Artists released this fall found that 50% of artists are self-employed in their main job. 61% of artists' main jobs are part-time. Median income from that main job? $15,000 per year.
Fifteen thousand dollars.
And it's getting worse.
This week, the ACA subsidies that made health insurance affordable for millions of creative workers expired.
Without those subsidies, premiums are rising by 114% on average for more than 20 million subsidized enrollees.
An estimated 4 to 5 million Americans are projected to drop coverage.
According to the National Survey of Artists, 15.4% of artists obtain coverage through a health insurance marketplace, and 21% are on Medicaid. Both pathways are now under attack.
This is by design. The system is working exactly as intended. Individual survival strategies will never work because they were never meant to.
As Nwamaka Agbo of the Kataly Foundation writes in her Restorative Economics framework: our current economy was built to harm marginalized communities. It is time to dream bigger and build an economy that heals the harm and restores those communities. When communities come together to collectively own and manage assets, they can leverage their joint economic power to collectively assert their rights and exercise cultural and political power in a more impactful way than they would on their own.
That's what we're trying to do.
What We Mean by Federation
When we say Federation, we mean a structure where organizations and individuals pool resources, share risk, and build collective power together. To quote Fatima Khadijah,
“Federation is a spiritual-civic framework designed to hold pluralism, non-extractive economies, and living ritual cultures inside a legal structure that can be replicated anywhere life is ready to reorganize.”
It's the difference between a network that connects people and a decentralized network of bioregional hubs that that holds material infrastructure: healthcare, retirement, emergency funds, shared services. A network that gathers us is beautiful. A network that can catch us when we fall is survival.
Federation means we stop competing for the same shrinking resources and start building systems we collectively own and govern. It draws on principles from the solidarity economy and the Just Transition framework developed by Movement Generation and the Climate Justice Alliance: the understanding that transition from extractive systems is inevitable, but justice is not.
We must stop the bad while building the new.
Strategies must democratize, decentralize, and diversify economic activity while redistributing resources and power.
For NET, Federation looks like: shared leadership, decentralized activity, consensus-based decision making, fiscal sponsorship that distributes resources directly to artists, transparent budgeting with members. Cooperative, democratic cultural institutions.
This is the next generation of service organization we are transforming into.
What We've Learned (and Unlearned)
NET has been around for 30 years. For most of that time, we operated like a traditional service organization: hosting convenings, running programs, re-granting funds. Good work. Important work. But work that operated within a framework we've come to see as fundamentally limited.
The traditional service org model was built to manage artists. It was not built to get us free.
Over the past five years, we've been transforming. We moved from traditional nonprofit hierarchy to shared leadership and collective decision-making rooted in ensemble values.
But the deeper transformation is this: we stopped seeing ourselves as a service provider and started seeing ourselves as a solidarity network. A service provider gives resources to members. A solidarity network builds collective power with members. A service provider maintains systems. A solidarity network transforms them.
NET Shared Leadership Team Member Rad Pereira has been stewarding deep research into what this transformation could look like. As they documented in Learning from the Labor Movement: A New Vision for Ensemble and Cooperative Practice, we've been studying with the Community and Worker Ownership Project at CUNY, learning from Mondragon, the Federation of Worker Cooperatives, Freelancers Union, and others building cooperative infrastructure across sectors.
One of the most important things we learned: in many ways, ensembles and collectives already are cooperatives.
We make work together and share ownership of the work. We build the necessary infrastructure to hold the creation and dissemination.
We are the machinery and the product.
Cooperative economics, at its core, is about collective power. It's about communities choosing to pool what resources they have to build something that benefits everyone.
We also learned: there are 17 unions in the theater industry, and they're difficult and expensive to join. And they only guarantee support if you work enough weeks to qualify.
Individual organizations solving problems alone will never be enough. A thousand organizations solving problems alone will never be enough.
But a thousand organizations pooling resources, sharing risk, building together? That changes the math.
The Year of Experiments
We could keep perfecting. Keep planning. Keep waiting until we have it all figured out before we share it with you.
But we've been trained to believe that what we actually need is impossible. Healthcare for artists. Retirement that doesn't require a day job. A field that doesn't run on scarcity and burnout. We've been told these things can't exist, so we keep tinkering at the edges.
This year, we're done tinkering.
No one is coming to save us. The policy landscape is getting worse. The funding landscape is contracting. If we wait for conditions to be right, we'll wait forever.
So we're running experiments. We're going to try things. Some will fail. And that failure is the data we need to figure this out together.
We're calling this Federation 2026. Four pathways, each testing a different theory of how we build material infrastructure for cultural workers.
Pathway One: Learning from What Exists in Our Field
We're convening roundtables with performing arts unions to understand what's actually possible within current structures. Where are the limitations? Why can only 14% of actors access union health insurance? What would it take to change that?
This is research, but it's also relationship. We want to understand the landscape as it actually exists. And we want unions to understand who we are and what we're trying to build.
Pathway Two: Piloting with Partners Outside the Arts
What if the answer isn't inside our field at all?
We're in conversation with unions and cooperatives outside the performing arts, organizations like the Steelworkers, to explore whether cultural workers could be umbrella'd under existing benefit structures. Could ensemble theater artists access a steelworker health plan? Could we aggregate enough members to negotiate rates through a co-op designed for a completely different sector?
We want to test whether building bridges beyond our field opens doors that building within our field cannot.
Pathway Three: Building a Coalition for Power Building and Mutual Aid
No single organization can do this alone. So we're building a coalition.
We're forming relationships with other arts service organizations, cultural worker advocates, and aligned individuals to raise joint funds, share resources, and move together. Think of it as an underground network: sharing intelligence about what's working, pooling knowledge, coordinating advocacy, building collective power across organizational lines.
This is the slow relational work. It's also the foundation for everything else.
Pathway Four: Creating What We Own
What if we built our own infrastructure?
We're inspired by the work of Tribeworks, which converts 1099 income into W-2 employment through a worker-owned cooperative structure. We’re learning from the Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY), a three-year, $125 million initiative that provided guaranteed income and employment opportunities to artists across New York State. We're learning from what the Freelancers Union built, which at its peak provided affordable group health insurance to over 45,000 creative workers in New York City. We're studying why that ended and what we can learn from its arc.
Could we create a platform owned collectively by cultural workers? Payroll services. Scalable portable benefits. Tax support for independent contractors. Tools designed for us, by us, belonging to us.
This is the longest pathway. But it's also the pathway with the most transformative potential. Because if we own the infrastructure, we control it.
The Invitation
None of this is figured out. That's the point.
We're planting in multiple soils to see what takes root. We're going to learn from what fails. We're going to share the mess, not just the wins.
Do you know someone working in these spaces? A union organizer who's been thinking about creative workers? A benefits expert who understands portable benefit structures? Someone who's built cooperative infrastructure in another sector?
Connect us. Email us with an introduction or a name. The NET gets stronger when you weave it.
This year, we stop accepting the impossible as inevitable. This year, we build.