healthcare
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A healthcare clinic in Georgia will remain open after being on the brink of closing, thanks to a generous donation from Rick Ross.
On Monday (June 19), the Maybach Music Group mogul and rapper presented a check for $30,179 to the team of women running the Fayette C.A.R.E. Clinic in Fayette County, Georgia. The clinic enables poorer families to have access to the premium healthcare they need including affordable medication and doctors. “The patients that come to this clinic, all of them, their income level is 200% below the poverty level. The national poverty level,” said Geneva Weaver, the clinic’s executive director.
Ross is a resident of Fayette County and got word of the clinic’s potential closing through his lawyer, Steve Sadow. Before his donation, the C.A.R.E. Clinic had raised $19,000 with a goal of $50,000. “A clinic like this means a lot to me. I lost my father at an early age and I felt like one of the reasons I lost him so early was his lack of healthcare,” the artist said at the ceremony where the check was presented. “I look forward to continuing to help out as much as possible. I consider you family, friends, and of course, neighbors.”
Local network WSB-TV was present as Weaver thanked Ross along with other executives from the clinic. She said that the check was the largest donation from an individual donor that they’ve had since opening their doors in 2005. The “Aston Martin Music” rapper was humble about the donation on his social media profiles, opting to share information on Juneteenth with his fans along with photos from his recent car and bike show held on his sprawling estate. That event didn’t go over well with some in the county, as some attendees of that show trashed a plaza in South Fulton three miles away from his Promised Land estate. Local authorities believe they resorted to that behavior after not gaining entry to the event.
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On Monday (Dec. 19), Sony Music Entertainment (SME) shared a recap with the company’s artists and earnings participants on the progress of its Artists Forward initiative, which encompasses SME’s legacy unrecouped balances initiative, healthcare assistance, advances on projected earnings and more.
Notably, the recap offers never-before-reported stats on Sony Music’s artist portal and real-time insights platforms. Introduced in 2019, the features offer music creators and their teams “best-in-class” payment capabilities and real-time updates on consumption of their music and audience engagement data. According to the company, artists and other earnings participants have withdrawn nearly $50 million combined from both the cash-out feature, which allows users to cash out payable monthly account balances, and the real-time advances feature, which allows users to receive advances on qualifying projected earnings.
Newly announced as part of the recap is Sony Music’s recent introduction of healthcare advocacy services for on-roster and legacy artists in the United States, designed to make it easier for artists to navigate the process of obtaining and utilizing healthcare coverage, finding a doctor, managing healthcare bills and more. Since launching in the fall, the program has helped U.S.-based artists realize hundreds of thousands of dollars in healthcare cost savings, according to the company.
The label first introduced the Artists Forward initiative in June 2021 with its legacy unrecouped balance program, which waives the unrecouped balances of artists who signed to Sony Music prior to 2000 and have not received advances since that same year. The following month, the program was expanded to include songwriters, and this past May, Sony Music began offering eligibility on a rolling 20-year basis — meaning artists not initially covered by the program will become eligible once they hit the 20-year mark of signing with the label. According to the Dec. 19 recap, eligibility notifications recently began going out to the first group of qualifying artists and participants under the new criteria (those who signed with the label prior to 2001) in select markets around the world.
In September 2021, the company further expanded Artists Forward by launching “Artist Assistance,” an initiative covering mental health services for its artist roster. According to the Dec. 19 recap, over 100 artists globally have since been provided with information and support related to the program, with dozens across more than 12 countries having utilized these services to establish recurring sessions with a licensed therapist or receive in-the-moment support to deal with “acute issues.”
You can read the full recap here.
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