Since 2020, a special relief fund has provided crucial support to Kentucky artists and craftspeople in the wake of disasters like the 2022 floods.

The Craft Emergency Relief Fund has kept over a dozen artists afloat thanks to rapidly disbursed donations.

For this week's tapestry segment, Kentucky Edition reached out to Surf and Hyman's Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Company to see what a safety net means for artists in need.

The Craft Emergency Relief Fund was established in 1985 by a group of craft artists who had been, colleagues for a number of years.

They would meet other artists who were experiencing different hardships, and so they would pass the hat to support the artist.

So they established the Craft Emergency Relief Fund as a way to provide, a means for craft artists to support one another.

And over the years, that's been primarily our work is providing relief grants for individual emergencies.

So things like, injury, caregiving, you know, think of the typical, you know, fire theft, things like that.

And, then we've expanded, obviously, towards, disaster relief.

We're a nonprofit and we build, guitars, mandolins, banjos and dulcimer.

And we are, in fact, the only nonprofit stringed instrument manufacturing company in the entire world.

At first, we were just trying to, grow some skill among people that, wanted something interesting to do.

Then we started working with people in recovery, and now we have, a major program where we bring people in who are in recovery from addiction and we put them to work.

The surf grants were, actually, they they came to us at a time when we were literally, swamped.

We were we were destroyed as an organization, as a group.

All of our buildings were wrecked.

That would have been much more grim of a struggle than it was.

I think the surf money being there first.

Really, encouraged the guys a lot and helped us to get through some brutal work because we're small and we're nimble, we can get funds moving pretty quickly.

So, I would say in the past it would be, you know, a month or two before folks would start submitting applications and we would start seeing activity in the programs.

Now it's, you know, 2 or 3 days after an event happens that we start seeing applications and then they'll trickle in for however long it takes, for the community to get to stabilize.

Surf plus was very streamlined, and it was the first aid that we received just by virtue of the fact that it wasn't months or years out in the future.

It was critically important because you have a need that day when the disaster hits.

We've had a long relationship with the, folks in Kentucky in particular.

Over the last five years, we've provided $75,000 in emergency relief grants to craft artists in Kentucky.

I think for communities, a lot of times they don't have the resources that, are required to stabilize every individual.

And then when you think about an artist and the extra things that they have, their equipment, sometimes the tools that they have are generational.

They've been passed down or they've been, you know, custom made.

You can't replace those things.

Well, the mountain dulcimer that the Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Company specializes in originated in the mountains of eastern Kentucky.