WHO WE ARE :

Artists In Resistance (A.I.R.) NYC is a collective of disabled and chronically ill artists and organizers. We operate a free air purifier lending library for our community, and we need your help.

Our goal is simple: support artists, performers, cultural workers, and community organizers in hosting COVID-safer, more accessible events in NYC.

The pandemic is ongoing, and COVID continues to cause illness, disability, and death in our communities. Meanwhile, the public health response has been systematically dismantled. Our government, institutions, and workplaces have failed us, but we can protect each other. Illness need not be the price of living in community or participating in the arts.

We’re a part of a growing network of volunteer-run action groups offering concrete tools, community education, and harm reduction. We can slow the spread of airborne infection in our city, and we know how to do it–together.

We refuse to abandon, isolate, and exclude each other. We insist on joy, solidarity, and community care. We are Artists in Resistance.

WHAT WE DO :

We are building our collective with long term sustainability in mind. This year has been the work of the building and maintenance of a functioning library! Long term, we aim to expand the ways we support our community around COVID safety and access, including but not limited to: community education, creating guides for artists and performers navigating conversations about COVID safety, guides for venues, hosting A.I.R. NYC events, and collaborating with other organizations and initiatives

Our purifier library prioritizes loans to artists and organizers in communities disproportionately affected by the pandemic and the inaccessibility of arts, culture, and nightlife spaces in New York City: disabled, Black, Indigenous, people of color, trans, queer, low income people, and those working public-facing jobs.

WHY DONATE?

We aim for long-term sustainability as a group. So we invite you to join us in supporting the monthly maintenance of this work. Running our air purifier lending library involves various operating costs.

WHAT YOUR SUPPORT DOES

Our monthly storage and upkeep cost is $350 : This includes maintenance to the purifier library, bills to the storage unit, web hosting, etc.
Transportation Fund. This is an essential part of our project, and supports our ability to make this community resource available to all ! It is intended to fill the gaps where transport would be a barrier preventing an artist or community member from being able to pick up a purifier for their event, due to lack of car or funds for ubers/lyfts. We currently prioritize requests from disabled and/or chronically ill borrowers, but anyone can request use of the fund. We hope over time to grow this fund to serve more and more community members. Every $25 above our goal funds transportation support to one community event.
Aspirational: We would like to establish a reserve damage fund. Our air purifiers are expensive to fix if they get damaged, and we aim to find ways to shoulder the costs of accidental damage, as a community, rather than place solely on individuals. Replacing one of our large purifier set would cost $1000.

We are committed to financial transparency. We report on our use of funds at regular intervals. You can find our last budget report at [link]. We are a 501c3 nonprofit with an EIN we can provide to folks wishing to make tax-deductible donations.

JOIN OUR WORK

DONATE : Every bit helps! HEPA air purifiers are long-term investments in the wellness and happiness of our communities.

SHARE : Help us spread the word! [include a social media post to share]

JOIN OUR TEAM : We have various opportunities to plug into our internal mechanisms – remote, in-person, we got it all! – at whatever capacity you have. Get in touch with us.

WORK WITH US : Are you an artist? Cultural worker? Organizer? Event planner? We work across all genres, and we’re looking forward to bringing cleaner air to your event! Request purifiers through our website.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We live and work in Lenapehoking, which occupies part of the unceded homeland of the Lenape and Canarsie peoples. Colonial settlers and federal policies have perpetrated generations of genocide, forced migration, and systemic, violent oppression that pushed most Lenape west and north to rebuild their nations in the areas now known as Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario. We acknowledge today’s Lenape communities, including Lenape people who belong to the Delaware Nation and Delaware Tribe of Indians in Oklahoma; the Stockbridge-Munsee Community in Wisconsin; and the Munsee-Delaware Nation, Moravian of the Thames First Nation, and Delaware of Six Nations in Ontario.

We support their land back movements and decolonization of their ancestral lands

and invite you to join our members in making regular donations to projects supporting their work:

Lenni Lenapexkweyok : https://lennilenapexkweyok.wixsite.com/landback
Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation Honorarium : https://nllhonorarium.carrd.co/
Manna-Hatta Fund : https://mannahattafund.org/

Artists in Resistance NYC ongoing operating costs fund