But as the rents in many neighborhoods in New York started to increase, artists around the city had to make sacrifices. After a tour with the punk band the Slits in 2010, and a three-month solo tour in Europe in 2012, Ms. Coleman started to run up debt. By 2013, she began working multiple jobs, including at Equinox and at the nightclub Output. She received housing assistance from the nonprofit organization MusiCares.

By the time Output closed its doors in January 2019, Ms. Coleman was working as an assistant in the club’s office. Now in her early 50s, she wasn’t eager to go back to working late shifts at a different club, so she decided to apply for office management roles, but wasn’t getting responses.

“Clearly I’m out of date,” she thought.

Ms. Coleman considered going back to school to finish her bachelor’s degree, but she was wary about taking out loans and was unsure of how she could schedule classes around work. She started collecting unemployment benefits in March, and was applying for health care several months later at the Labor Department when she came across a flier for the Grace Institute. The nonprofit institute provides low-income women with job skills, counseling, placement services and continuing education.

She wrestled with the decision to seek more assistance, saying she had felt judged in the past for having “the nerve to try to do what I want artistically” and for not following a more traditional career path.

“It took me a lot to learn how to ask for help, to be honest,” she said.

In August, she enrolled in Grace’s Administrative Professional Program. Ms. Coleman learned Microsoft programs, but more important, she said, she found a supportive space.

“Being in an environment where it was O.K. to ask for help and also let other people know was really great,” she said.

As part of the program, Ms. Coleman also completed an internship at ASA College. The Community Service Society, one of the seven organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, used $127 for a monthly MetroCard to help with Ms. Coleman’s commute to Grace in Lower Manhattan and to her internship at ASA College’s Midtown Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn locations from her apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.