Portland City Council just voted yes on updates to the Arts Education and Access Tax — and Portland's kids are the winners.

This happened because our community showed up. Teaching artists wrote letters. Families made calls. People testified. You made noise for children who couldn't make it to City Hall themselves.

Here's what this means for Portland's children:

• The arts tax is now indexed to inflation for the first time, protecting arts education funding from the quiet erosion that has cut its purchasing power by 25% over the last decade.
• The City must now report their plans to create a dedicated funding category for arts education organizations — the ones putting teaching and cultural artists directly in classrooms.
• And the City has committed to a formal plan for support of teaching artist programming in schools, naming teaching and cultural artists as an ats education access priority for the first time.

This is not a small thing. This is Portland saying that its children deserve access to creative learning. That every child — regardless of their school, their neighborhood, or their family's income — deserves the experience of being seen, of having their culture matter, of discovering they have something to say.

At Arts for Learning NW, we are ready. We served 40,000 students last year. We have 120 rostered teaching and cultural artists. The infrastructure exists. This vote means we can keep building on it.

Thank you for your letters, your calls, your social shares, and your voices. You made this possible. Portland's kids will feel it.