We distributed more than $3 million dollars through the NIVA Emergency Relief Fund. We had thousands of artists that were helping us, and we did several fundraisers to help those that weren't able to make it to the funding programs. And the reason that we didn't see the exodus of rooms and spaces and festivals was because we had the Save Our Stages Act out there and everybody believed that it was an opportunity that could potentially happen. We did a survey at the very beginning that showed that 90% of the independent venues and promoters would close permanently within six months if they didn't get meaningful federal funding. So between the start of the pandemic to December 27 th, there was complete uncertainty as to what was going to happen. Moose: Yes, the CARES 2 didn't pass until the December 20 th, and the then President signed it into law December 27th. amicable.ĮarPeace: Yeah, haha, it was a little stressful. I don't know if you remember last year, I know a lot of people try to forget it, but the politics weren't exactly.uhm. Then, when CARES 2 passes in the next three to six weeks, we'll have that inclusion in there in some capacity. When something like that happens, in the speed at which they ran, the plan was we hire a lobbyist, they're already working on CARES 2, we'll get our needs in there. The CARES act wasn't appropriate for our business sector. Moose: Yeah, we weren't in the first funding program. And that you guys initially weren't successful in lobbying Congress, or at least. I think that was the thing that struck me. Thanks to Senators Cornyn, Klobuchar and Schumer, we got bipartisan support from it across the board, and now we're sixteen billion dollars further.ĮarPeace: It's amazing how quickly that structure and organization really came together. So the Save Our Stages Act, now known as the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, was the solution that we put forward.
These funding programs were things like three-month, payroll programs. Like full-page graphs in newspapers and stuff saying here's what things are going to look like and we were dead last, like the last of the last. If you remember back then there were all these charts, “the world to reopening”. We all knew that these businesses and organizations were the first to close and they would be the last to open. We moved quickly.Įveryone had a need, but this business model wasn't factored into the pandemic funding programs the government was putting forward. Out of those three committee meetings, within a week-and-a-half, came the board, members from every single state, the Save Our Stages campaign, our lobbyists, and our bylaws. We broke out and did three different committees: marketing, governance, and advocacy. The idea of creating this different organization that would represent the venues and promoters on Capitol Hill very much came out of those Town Halls.
Those ended up being weekly through the year.
*laughs* When South by Southwest was cancelled, Cecilie and I at Marauder activated the Independent Venue Week community and did a town hall on Zoom. We all agreed, we can do this, but let’s pick this up at the end of the summer because we're all just too busy right now. We had a really long discussion about creating an organization that would put all of these different independent venues together and how could that work? To cohabitate with Independent Venue Week, so we don't step on each other’s toes? It was a really great conversation. So, we already had this idea of building out to create this community.Īt the end of February 2020, Hal Real and Kerri Park from World Cafe Live in Philadelphia, came up to New York, and sat down with me and Cecilie Nielsen, who runs Independent Venue Week at Marauder. And through our work with Independent Venue Week, we've been building a national network of independent venues and promoters across the country. Moose: My company, Marauder, runs Independent Venue Week in the U.S. But what sparked this idea for you? Did that idea come in the middle of the pandemic? How did this kind of develop? EarPeace: So this organization really came out of, or at least came into fruition during the pandemic, and it was a perfect time for it.