The East Bay Community Foundation (EBCF) makes grants to artists and artist-centered nonprofits to assure that East Bay’s multi-cultural, multi-racial artists have the resources they need to advance their community-based practices, tackle social issues, and give back to local audiences. The foundation’s arts grantmaking of close to $250,000 is drawn from three donor-supported funds that, despite separate awards processes, work synergistically to advance art that grows out of and impacts the East Bay community. The Macpherson Fund for Small Arts Organizations, an endowed fund,

A Blade of Grass (ABoG), launched in 2011 as a service organization, supports socially engaged artists working in partnership with communities to create social change. While it isn’t primarily a grantmaker, each year ABoG makes fellowship awards—$20,000 stipends for specific projects paired with strategic support, assessment tools, video documentation, and other tailored resources—to up to 10 artists or artist collectives. In 2013, ABoG inaugurated a second program of Distinguished Artist Fellowships to make

The authors suggest that traditional evaluation approaches (formative and summative) fail to meet the complex needs of social sector innovators. Instead, grantmakers should approach evaluation differently, specifically involving the use of developmental evaluation (attributed to Michael Quinn Patton). Through a review of literature, interviews, and case studies, this piece assists with putting developmental evaluation into practice. At the heart of this call for new evaluation approaches, is the encouragement of social innovation and change. Stanford University’s Center for Social

This piece sheds light on the philanthropic sector’s efforts to improve measurement and evaluation (M&E), specifically within the context of foundations involved in social change work. The broad observations of the six contributing authors are that purpose; cost-benefit ratio; culture, context and capacity; unit of analysis; timing; feedback; and transparency matter to measurement and evaluation. Luis A. Ubinas, president of the Ford Foundation, discusses how an organization’s results-focused climate is established and can be used to “define, promote and reinforce a

The Art at Work is a national initiative to improve municipal government through strategic art projects between artists, city departments, unions, elected officials and the community.  Launched in 2007 in Portland, ME, as a three-year project, the initiative includes artmaking workshops led by artist Marty Pottenger with local artists (currently a printmaker, poets, and photographers) within the city’s Public Works, Health & Human Services, and Police Departments. Art At Work's working hypothesis is that it is useful for people to make art about their work and lives, and

Based on a literature review drawing from the social sciences, humanities, and public policy, Stern and Seifert of the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania suggest documentation and evaluation strategies that artists, cultural and community organizations, philanthropists, and public agencies could take to improve the quality of knowledge about the social impact of arts-based civic engagement work.

In 2015, the Evaluation Learning Lab (ELL), a collaborative effort of Animating Democracy, a program of Americans for the Arts, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation developed this guide to values-based evaluation.

Animating Democracy’s Continuum of Impact guide defines six families of social and civic outcomes that arts practitioners and their partners commonly aspire to and achieve through creative work. These outcome families articulate ways the arts contribute to making change happen.

 Based on 13 years of national research on integrating arts and culture into concepts of healthy communities, Senior Research Associate with the Urban Institute Maria Rosario Jackson observes how sound and worthy community arts programs with social and civic intention are often saddled with unrealistic expectations about the impacts that they might have on a community and the ways in which such impacts might be proved. In this paper, Jackson argues for a shift toward more realistic expectations of social impact and evaluation of arts-based civic engagement both on the part of

The Andy Warhol Museum presented the traveling exhibition, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America-100 photographic prints and postcards from 1870 to 1960 that document the history of lynching in the United States. Racially motivated killings in the city had heightened existing racial tensions, and the exhibition provided a potent context for refocusing dialogue about race in Pittsburgh. The Warhol worked with a community advisory group to determine how the exhibition should be presented and interpreted both within and outside the museum. A timeline depicting African American