This news story via TruthOut caught my interest:

The article mentions Writeahouse, which I’ve blogged about before.

This overall strategy is intriguing, and not just as a part of the creative class this approach is intending to support/use to drive economic growth.

When the details of the PPACA started to become clear, I got a big dose of hope — more support for the arts means more artists living off their art, means fewer artists needing day jobs, means those day jobs go to other people, means the audience for art has more money to support artists.

Programs like this, acting together with the PPACA, could make some serious changes for what it means to be an artist in the USA, and in who can afford to live as a working artist. The easier it is for anyone to make a living as an artist, the more working artists we’ll see, and especially more artists from diverse backgrounds, rather than just artists who have inherited money or have an economic support system to allow them to work without making as much money.

The Thode Island plan is still in proposal stages, and it’s early to see how well facets of the PPACA (Medicare expansion, state exchanges, and plan rebates) will all work in execution, but I’m choosing hope for the moment.