OUR MISSION
As the world weathers the global Coronavirus pandemic, individuals living in long-term care facilities are facing a crisis within a crisis.
Uniquely vulnerable due to age, disability, and preexisting conditions, long-term care residents and the frontline workers who care for them are now at the epicenter of the pandemic. The combination of large, high-risk populations, close living quarters, and intimate personal care has created an explosive cocktail of risk factors, and in city after city the disease has ravaged these facilities, producing a majority of deaths from Covid-19 and establishing a grim pipeline to already-overwhelmed hospitals. Long-term care facilities--which include nursing homes, assisted living facilities, group homes, and convalescent hospitals--highlight a nexus of senior rights, disability rights, immigrant rights (many LTC workers are immigrants), and labor rights, and face an uphill battle as representatives of historically devalued and unseen populations. The residents and the workers need our protection now!
Artists 4 Long Term Care is a social action initiative that uses art and storytelling to raise awareness of the crisis facing residents and staff of long-term care facilities during the Covid-19 pandemic. We invite artists, photographers, writers, and filmmakers to create works that confront this issue, to be shared on social media with the hashtag #artists4longtermcare. We encourage you to create images of love, appreciation, resilience, resistance and humor with an eye towards increasing the visibility of those inside long-term care facilities. Our hope is that many of these materials will be displayed on the walls of these facilities to boost resident and staff morale.
These individuals are our mothers, our fathers, our grandparents, our siblings, our neighbors, and our friends. Collectively, they hold our memories, our history, our family knowledge, our languages and values. They are the bridge from our past to our future. In the face of this unprecedented historical crisis, we must show solidarity with the courageous residents of long-term care facilities and the heroic workers at their bedside. We must show them they are not invisible.
For media requests and all other inquiries please e-mail: artists4longtermcare@gmail.com
@i_am_faustova | © 2020 Liza Faustova
@xalihamdanix | © 2020 @xalihamdanix