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New York Writers Coalition, decades-old creative writing hub, to close its doors
By
Catalina Gonella
Published Jul 11, 2024
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By
Catalina Gonella
Published Jul 11, 2024
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The New York Writers Coalition, a well-known city workshop, will be shutting its doors after 22 years of providing free writing workshops to a city teeming with literary hopefuls, the organization announced on Thursday.
The coalition has provided free creative writing workshops to all and has been a haven for underrepresented groups, including youth, seniors, women, LGBT communities, people with disabilities, and incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people. But founder and Executive Director Aaron Zimmerman and the coalition's other leaders determined they had to close up shop after years of struggling to pay the bills.
Zimmerman said several factors contributed to the financial difficulties. The organization expanded its services online during the COVID-19 pandemic and received emergency funds, which have since dried up. Zimmerman also said philanthropic foundations that once generously donated money for the arts are now giving less and less.
“We've known we're in a financial crisis for more than a year,” Zimmerman said in an interview. “We've been trying to raise money on an emergency basis. We did a GoFundMe, I reached out to a lot of donors — it got us through this year, but we're still facing the same kind of challenges, the lack of institutional support.”
Zimmerman said he informed staff Thursday and the group issued a statement on its website.
“Our budget was small and we just couldn't raise the money that we need to continue,” he said.
Prior to the pandemic, the organization ran around 30 workshops at different sites all over the city taught by artists it trained. Once in-person activities shut down in 2020, only some of those workshops initially moved to Zoom. Then the organization began to ramp up its online operations — including its Black Writers Program, which managed to immediately fill 120 slots across 10 workshops.
Four years later, the government funding is now long gone, with nothing to replace it. Zimmerman said he was also burnt out by the nonprofit funding hamster wheel: Constantly scraping for cash and providing a valuable service required more time and funding than the organization had.
Zimmerman also wanted the coalition's closing to be dignified, rather than abrupt.
“We wanted to make sure that we reserved some funds for a graceful wind-down if we were going to close,” he said. “So that includes some compassionate salary during the wind down period for staff and doing a party in October to celebrate our work. And supporting our community the best we can and having some time, rather than like wake up one day and go, OK, we have two weeks of money left. We're over.”
Zimmerman said hopes that the organization’s legacy can continue through the workshops that have already been established, an organic continuation of the coalition’s work without the bureaucratic struggles that nonprofits deal with.
“We're also talking to our teaching artists and community to see what grows — what comes out of the ashes of this, you know?” he said. “Like what rises up from this because it's a huge community that's connected in lots of ways. And I've been thinking about how the nonprofit field is broken and how can something continue without it having to be funded? You know, how can we have maybe a loose collective of people who lead workshops in these communities or things like that?”
Zimmerman predicts that more nonprofits will be announcing closures in the months and years to come.
“It's like a structural problem in the nonprofit field where we're all trying to address the harms of capitalism with band-aids and funded by the people and companies that have helped create these conditions,” he said.
He added: “F–k capitalism is what I want to say.”
Tagged
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Catalina Gonella
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