Hair Parties is a project of the Brooklyn-based and internationally recognized Urban Bush Women (UBW). The project uses a method of cultural sharing that alternates between dance performance and dialogue to explore how ongoing debates about the politics of hair within the African American community can lead to deeper dialogue about issues of race, class, and social justice. Hair Parties were held in homes, barber shops and beauty salons, YWCAs, corporations, and other community settings. As UBW sought to establish a home for the company in Brooklyn, Hair Parties became a vehicle

The Orton Family Foundation integrates art and artists into its community planning work with small towns in New England and the Rocky Mountain West. As foundation staff helps small town residents plan for and control future growth through their signature Heart & Soul Community Planning grants, they’ve found that using art projects—radio stories, intergenerational sculpture projects, illustrated recipe books—to discover and highlight stories about what makes their town special is an effective civic engagement and community building strategy. As residents are engaged

The Teaching Artist Companion to Aesthetic Perspectives: Attributes of Excellence in Arts for Change, written by Dennie Palmer Wolf and Jeannette Rodríguez Píneda with contributing teaching artists, shares how teaching artists, and the programs and institutions that support them, embody and activate the values in the Aesthetic Perspectives framework.

Available online as a pdf (or it may be ordered from the Kellogg website for free), this 116-page handbook from the Kellogg Foundation provides a framework for thinking about evaluation as a relevant and useful program tool: “For those with little or no evaluation experience, and without the time or resources to learn more, this handbook can help project staff to plan and conduct an evaluation with the assistance of an external evaluator.” A blueprint for conducting project-level evaluations, this handbook is an excellent resource and was written primarily for project directors

The Fledgling Fund, a private foundation launched in 2005, seeks to “inspire a better world” by supporting the work of documentary filmmakers and building the evolving field of social issue documentary film and media.  It believes in the power of film to engage communities in timely issues and focuses its grantmaking on supporting filmmakers’ outreach and engagement efforts, helping them build awareness, strengthen movements, inform decisions, and even impact policy.  While all the films it supports address

This piece suggests that the accountability movement is “setting a floor for minimum standards” (p. 84) and has consequences for effective social change work. Foundations, in particular, measure impact in terms of attentiveness to accountability standards, but this is a false measure of success.  Instead, the organization’s focus should be on its transformative value to society. Focusing on narrow measures of accountability is problematic, because, as Bare states, “For foundations, when they attempt to deconstruct complex social change agendas to create bite

In answer to the challenges that face corporate philanthropy in identifying a shared definition of impact measurement, the author sets out to assess current measurement practices, clarify what is needed in terms of impact evidence, and identify next steps. The article is organized into three conversations between key stakeholders engaged in corporate philanthropy. Although this piece is written specifically for those involved in corporate philanthropy, it provides useful insights for cultural agents about measurement and outcomes of key concern to corporations with which they may partner or

The Evaluator / Researcher Companion guide to Animating Democracy’s framework, Aesthetic Perspectives: Attributes of Excellence in Arts for Change, offers ideas and insights to help evaluators and researchers apply the framework to address their needs and interests.  Aesthetic Perspectives aims to enhance understanding and evaluation of creative work at the intersection of arts and community/civic engagement, community development, and justice. It offers 11 artistic attributes that elevate aesthetics in civically and socially engaged art, expand

The Compton Foundation supports the arts, including individual artists and filmmakers, with the explicit intention of amplifying critical issues in a way that blends the personal, political, emotional, and intellectual. It makes these grants based on a recently updated mission statement that recognizes “courageous storytelling” as a powerful strategy for “inspiring action toward a peaceful, just, sustainable future.” The family foundation, launched in 1949 and long focused on issues of peace, the environment, and women’s reproductive rights and justice, awards

The J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, based in Montreal and funding throughout Canada, supports what it calls socially engaged arts—arts organizations and activities that build bridges between culture and community—as a way to realize its vision of “a Canada where all people feel a sense of belonging and contribute as active citizens to improving the well-being of all.” The foundation’s most recent initiative focused on arts-based social inclusion owes much to what it learned from ArtsSmarts, an arts-infused learning program launched at