As we close a year with unprecedented hardships, I believe more than ever that the arts have the power to help communities heal, rebuild, and reimagine. Your artistry, cultural services, and positive impact made all the difference in 2025. At the Department of Arts and Culture, we remain steadfast in our commitment to you and our mission to advance arts, culture, and creativity throughout LA County. The past year’s core programs and recovery-focused efforts are chronicled in a 2024-25 annual report we’ll share in the new year. For now, we highlight a few extraordinary accomplishments.

Highlights

• We provided vital grant funding to more than 550 arts organizations in the Organizational Grant Program, distributed in two-year cycles—awarding over $4.5M to 236 arts nonprofits in FY 2023–24, and over $5.6M to 238 nonprofits in FY 2024–25. Our Community Impact Arts Grant delivered $750,000 to support arts projects and programming at 80 nonprofit social service and social justice organizations, municipal departments, and fiscally sponsored organizations.
   
• We concluded a historic effort distributing over $46M in critical funds from the federal American Rescue Plan and other pandemic recovery programs to support the LA County nonprofit arts sector between 2020 and 2024. These efforts are explored in our research report, Relief, Recovery, and Reform.
   
• In 2025, through the LA County Arts Internship Program, we invested more than $1.6M in arts workforce development, providing over 171 Department grantee organizations with paid internships and 228 diverse college students with creative career experiences that will benefit them throughout their professional journeys.
   
• In November, the Board adopted a motion authored by Supervisors Solis and Horvath to update the Countywide Land Acknowledgment, including several Tribes with ancestral ties to the land that is now Los Angeles County and the re-named Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation. We worked with LA City/County Native American Indian Commission to release updated resources on lacounty.gov.
   
• Our Creative Strategist program engaged artist christy roberts berkowitz in a residency with the Department of Human Resources to produce a second LA County Employee Wellness, Arts, and Culture Festival, using poetry to support our public workforce in the aftermath of the fires at the Natural History Museum of LA County. As Creative Strategist with the LA County Homeless Initiative, artist Patrisse Cullors dispelled myths and shifted narratives about people experiencing homelessness, executive producing the documentary Closer to Home.
   
• In our work coordinating the Arts Ed Collective, we provided flexible matching Advancement Grants to LA County school districts to expand access to quality arts education, with more than $2.6M awarded to 36 school districts to support arts education. Our work in school districts, community, and County care systems can be explored in the Arts Ed Division’s End of Year Report.
   
• With our Creative Wellbeing approach, we promoted mental health through the arts, funding community arts partners to provide healing-centered arts instruction for nearly 6,300 school-age youth and youth in foster care, as well as arts-based self-care and professional development for nearly 3,450 adults who support them.
   
• We celebrated the 20^th anniversary of the Board’s adoption of the LA County Civic Art Policy, while our Civic Art Division managed 119 active projects and completed 34 projects spanning County facilities, artistic mediums, and artists commissioned.
   
• We responded to the January fires with creative recovery efforts, including directing FireAid funded grants to over 380 artists and creatives, many who lost homes or studios; sharing response and recovery resources; and serving 430 artists and community members in a series of Conservation Clinics, their fire-damaged artworks, family photographs, paintings, pottery, and sculptures cared for and cleaned by a volunteer team of nearly 150 partnering conservators and staff.

As I reflect on these achievements, I am immensely grateful to the Board of Supervisors, the Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative and Cultural Policy that guide us, our Arts Commission, the extraordinary work of our Department of Arts and Culture staff, all our collaborating partners, and you.

Onward,
Kristin Sakoda