The Creative Freedom Act
A Civic Vision from the Creative Community
🌱 The Creative Freedom Act
A Civic Vision from the Creative Community
Dear friends,
I want to share an idea with you that’s been growing quietly in the back room of my studio, like a seed waiting for the right season.
It begins with a simple question:
What would happen if every artist in America received $100,000 a year—not as a prize, but as a foundation?
Not a grant you have to compete for.
Not a side hustle.
Not an award after a lifetime of struggle.
Just a Creative Basic Income (CBI), as a recognition of the essential role that artists, writers, musicians, thinkers, and makers play in the cultural fabric of our society.
This is the heart of the Creative Freedom Act—a proposal not only for economic justice, but for cultural rebirth.
🎨 Why This? Why Now?
We live in a time where machines are learning to write poems and paint pictures. Where jobs are being automated out of existence. Where the market values speed and scale above all else.
And in the midst of this, our artists are burning out.
Too many of us are trying to create while carrying the full weight of economic survival. Juggling three jobs. Bending our visions to fit shrinking grants. Watching years of practice go unrecognized and unsupported.
And yet, it is artists who help us understand who we are.
It is creatives who give voice to the soul of a culture.
It is makers who imagine the future the rest of us grow into.
If that’s not vital work, I don’t know what is.
The Creative Freedom Act is a bold idea: to fund artists directly and unconditionally. To trust them with time, space, and stability. To say: your work matters before the gallery, the sale, the applause. It matters because it exists.
🛠️ What the Act Proposes
A guaranteed annual income of $100,000 to professional creatives in the United States.
Paid monthly, no strings attached.
Open to any U.S. citizen or permanent resident with a sustained creative practice.
Managed by a newly formed division within the Treasury Department: The Creative Economy Office.
This isn’t charity.
It’s infrastructure—for imagination, for culture, for human becoming.
🌎 Not Just for Artists
Though the initial proposal is for professional creatives, this vision points further. It opens the door to something even deeper: the idea of a Creative Society, where the values of reflection, beauty, risk, and presence are not just preserved by a few—but lived by all.
The artist’s way of being—attuned, experimental, generous—has something to teach the world right now.
We’ve built a civilization on extraction, distraction, and exhaustion.
What would it mean to build one around attunement, imagination, and meaning?
🌀 A Civic Movement, Not Just a Policy
This is not about waiting for Congress. (I have a bill for that)
This is about beginning right here, with us—with the creative community.
Movements begin not when systems change, but when minds open.
So I’m asking:
What would you create if you never had to worry about money again?
What kind of world would you help build if your creativity was fully trusted?
Who else needs to hear this idea?
Let’s start imagining out loud.
Let’s begin planting this seed together.
✍️ Ways to Participate
Share this post with a fellow artist, writer, or visionary.
Write your own response: What would you do with a Creative Basic Income?
Use the hashtag #CreativeFreedomAct to keep the conversation linked.
Email me your stories, questions, visions, or hesitations—I want to hear them.
This is just the beginning of something larger.
Let’s shape it together.
With trust in each other and in the future,
Cecil