At a time when arts and humanities face budget cuts, a celebrity gathering in Detroit aims to raise money for a creative cause. On September 25-26, the Detroit Opera House will welcome several southeast Michigan celebrities for a fundraising event called “The Coney” to raise money for Detroit youth arts education.
Advertised as “[a] celebrity gathering with everything on it,” the host committee comprises Kristen Bell, Tim Meadows, Marc Evan Jackson, Dax Shepard, Sam Richardson, Diona Reasonover, J.K. Simmons, and others. Tickets for the event go on sale starting June 24 at 12 p.m. via the Detroit Opera House.
One of the charities, the Detroit Creativity Project, was founded by Evan Jackson, who has starred in shows including “Parks and Recreation,” “The Good Place,” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”
The Detroit Creativity Project, founded in 2011, has a team of teaching artists who lead the classes focusing on improv, aiming to use “improv training to transform how Detroit’s young people view their potential at school and in life.”
The event is also produced in partnership with the Children’s Foundation of Michigan.
Organizers hope to raise money to fund teaching artists; art based experiences (“expand travel; competition; exhibition, and performance opportunities that allow Detroit students to share their art with the city, nation, and world”); and create an arts infrastructure that allows the purchase of equipment, supplies, people, instruments and more. They also hope to fund a permanent endowment for arts education, Endowed Fund for Youth Arts, to provide annual grants to youth-serving programs in the city.
The event comes at a time when arts and humanities enrollments are low. Arts have often been pushed to the side for roughly two decades, as more emphasis in schools has been placed on STEM. The number of bachelor's degrees in the humanities in college has also been declining for the past few decades, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. While part of this may be due to ongoing economic uncertainty in the U.S., as indicated by the Federal Reserve, many school districts have reduced budgets or eliminated funding for the arts altogether.
The budget cuts to schools and universities have been occurring nationwide. President Donald Trump’s budget cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 2025 was one among several slashes to arts funding in the United States. Locally, Michigan State University’s College of Arts and Letters, including the Department of Art, Art History, and Design has faced major budget cuts. Michigan State University has also paused some graduate admissions within the College of Arts and Letters.
