From the LA fires to unemployment, film and TV workers are struggling. This nonprofit wants to help

$8.63 million in emergency grants sent to 562 families.

That’s how much financial assistance the Entertainment Community Fund has provided to performing arts and entertainment industry workers since fires broke out in Southern California in January last year. And the organization still is distributing grants, with the knowledge that needs are likely to increase soon.

 ”We know that the trajectory of the recovery process with homeowners and their insurances is that they will often pay some portion or all of a rent expense while people are displaced from their homes,” says Keith McNutt, the ECF’s Western Regional director. “That usually only lasts nine months to a year, and we're of course coming up on that year.”

Why entertainment workers?

Providing support to the entertainment community is nothing new for the nonprofit Entertainment Community Fund (formerly known as The Actors Fund), a national organization that’s been around since 1882 and is a sort of safety net for arts and entertainment workers in any kind of need or crisis. They also have built some of their own affordable housing.

Keep up with LAist.

If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less.

Subscribe

A significant portion of their work, McNutt says, is making people aware that help is available and also that it’s OK to access it.

“It’s hard for any professional person in their craft to ask for help from anyone,” McNutt says. “But literally, we were created 140 years ago for exactly that reason. Because people work hard in this industry, but the industry doesn't provide regular income, regular benefits, [...] predictability, a standard career ladder.”

On top of the normal unpredictability factors of a career in the performing arts, there’s also the fact that the past five years have been “such a brutal onslaught of crises,” as McNutt describes it, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023 to the January 2025 fires, “that people have not had time to recover.”

What help is available?

The Entertainment Community Fund’s staff of social workers, career counselors and health insurance counselors provides a wide range of services (many of them free), like classes on things like building “parallel” or “sideline” careers to supplement income and support groups (including some specifically designed for people impacted by the 2025 fires).

Some services, like emergency financial assistance, require a more formal application to show that a recipient does in fact work professionally in performing arts or entertainment.

From ‘parallel’ careers to career changes

For a long time, McNutt says, he heard from arts professionals who saw their non-arts-related day jobs (ECF calls them “parallel” or “sideline” jobs) as sort of betrayal of their art, but “ our message has always been, ‘No, no, no [...] that's what helps you stay in your creative craft.’”

Over the past couple of years, though, with hardships compounding and  ”profound shifts in the amount of employment, particularly in television and film,” McNutt has seen something different.

“We have seen significant increases in the number of people who are coming to our career center to consider transitioning to other careers," he says. "And that is definitely a change.”

And even for those cases and questions like, “How do you apply for a job that's not in the industry when you've never worked outside the industry?” McNutt says that's "something we can help people with.”