We Create Our Own Abundance
Right now, you might be feeling the devastation of our current cultural and political moment. Policy changes, funding cuts, and the constant pressure to justify our existence to people who will never understand what we do or why it matters. We are witnessing a very visceral backlash. When the ground shifts, when change brings liberation to the fore, those who benefit from the status quo scramble; they fight to hold on to everything they know, with everything they have.
This isn’t abstract. We are seeing this play out right before our eyes. In LA, we’re experiencing the military deployment and escalating ICE enforcement targeting the communities our ensemble artists live in, work with, and create for. Artists and cultural workers are being criminalized for bearing witness. The violence is meant to fracture us, to make us retreat into isolation.
But isolation has never been the ensemble way. We know how to make a way out of no way.
There is inherent resilience in collective theatre-making practices, isn’t there?
Camp Ensemble was a glimpse of the future we're building together. And as we continue to reflect on the learnings from that gathering, something became crystal clear: Whenever we gather and exchange.
An unmistakeable truth emerges: There is abundance waiting for us, if we work together.
Culture workers do not simply create for the stage. We create worlds and erect containers for human processes, spaces where grief and belonging dance together, where stories birth breath and wounds are transformed through a shared medicine.
We make a way out of no way. We create our own abundance by working together; and we are interested in the kind of abundance that emerges when we focus on solving challenges together in principled struggle.
The Ensemble Arts field has been building paths where there weren’t any since before NET existed, since before many of us were born.
And in case we haven’t been clear enough: NET won’t move an inch backwards. We continue to find ways to gather, to find resources, to find ways to protect the most vulnerable amongst us.
This backlash by people and systems that relish in abuse of power and the twisting of truth, actually lets us know that what we are doing is working. The justice work and change movements that many of you have been building for decades have profoundly made an impact. And in terms of NET, we know the coalitions we are building ARE working. Our Federation building is a threat to power over, to oppression, to isolation, to the experience of not having your material needs met.
We’re navigating the messy middle between a familiar past and an uncertain future, and through it all, NET remains clear: abundance is possible when we move together.
We stand with immigrant communities, undocumented artists, and all people targeted by state violence. We reject the criminalization of protest, the militarization of our neighborhoods, and any attempt to silence cultural workers who bear witness to injustice.
The Choice Is Ours
We can let the backlash make us smaller. We can compete for crumbs. We can let them convince us that there isn’t enough, not enough funding, not enough audiences, not enough room for all of us to thrive. Or we can do what we have been taught for generations: create our own abundance. Build the path by walking.
That’s exactly what your support of NET does. When you contribute to “The Future Is Ensemble” campaign, you’re not just keeping an organization alive through this major transition and transformation. You’re investing in infrastructure that can hold our people when the ground shifts beneath us. We are building:
A Federation Pilot that seeks to create a shared cooperative employment agreement that will help freelancers and organizations access affordable healthcare, especially critical as artists face increased economic and physical precarity
Strategic advocacy that fights for policy supporting justice-based arts practice at every level of government, because policy is what turns violence into safety, scarcity into abundance
Regional gatherings that support moving from isolated artists and organizations into connected communities—because connection is survival, and community is resistance
Cross-industry partnerships rooted in solidarity economy principles, because our liberation has always been bound up together
This is what defiant resilience looks like in practice. Even as ensemble artists face direct threats, from immigration enforcement to funding cuts to the criminalization of public gathering, they continue to create, to hold space, to build community.
💡 COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT
💡 COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT
We have been really inspired by @ohmellyeah and want to share her brilliance with you if you aren’t already familiar, because Progress breeds resistance—but resistance is not regression. #TheFutureIsEnsemble
@ohmellyeah You guys need to maintain some perspective here. We’re on the right track, and rage baiting and panicking and despairing and wringing your hands is wholly unnecessary rn. They should be (and are) the ones doing that. Because they’re *actually* losing. You literally can’t stop progress. It’s impossible. Relax. Keep going. Stop making everyone miserable with fear. #fyp #foryou #hopecore #hope #politics ♬ original sound - Mell✨