Americans for the Arts

Arts organizations are partnering with businesses to help build employee engagement and enhance teamwork and combine right-brain imagination with left-brain logic. Learn how organizations across the country are making the case for arts-based training and creating new and innovative programs to work with businesses. This tool-kit will show you how to tap into these opportunities and develop lasting and mutually beneficial partnerships.

Businesses often promote volunteerism as one of the key elements of employee engagement. Arts organizations are looking for ways to increase involvement with skilled volunteers. This tool-kit focuses on how volunteer programs can make employees feel more engaged on the job, learn new skills or improve their existing skills, and increase interaction between junior and senior employees, and how we can bring this information into conversations with corporate partners about designing Business Volunteers for the Arts® programs.

Even in the current economy, businesses are still searching for innovative ways to recruit and retain employees. Programs that allow employees to bring their values to work are good investments. The arts are a wonderful catalyst that can help shift perceptions, embrace diversity, build team spirit, foster creative thinking and improve communication. This tool-kit will provide information on how and why the arts help engage employees.

Volunteers are a critical component of any arts organization. From ushers to fundraising, to pro-bono consulting and board service, volunteers expand the capacity of a nonprofit. Volunteers also create an entry point for establishing a relationship with businesses. While this tool-kit focuses on skills-based volunteering, much of the advice is applicable to all types of volunteers. This tool-kit will provide information about how to more effectively engage skills-based volunteers.

This annotated bibliography focuses on broader issues about the new economy and how to understand it.

In this article I review and evaluate recent work that argues for the rising importance of the cultural sector, and creativity in general, in the context of the new economy.

The BCA Survey of Business Support for the Arts is the nation’s largest survey of its kind, delving beyond pure numbers into the motivations behind and goals of business partnerships with the arts. The specific findings from the survey are used to project national trends in support for the arts by businesses large and small across our nation. The study acts as a resource for current and potential funders of the arts, and for local advocacy organizations to encourage increased partnership between the business community and the arts. BCA has conducted the survey since 1968

Excerpted from Arts & America: Arts, Culture, and the Future of America’s Communities. This essay looks at changes in the American economy and the workforce and the role the arts may play in positively impacting those changes over the next 10–15 years and beyond. The

First essay in the book Arts & America: Arts, Culture, and the Future of America’s Communities featuring an introduction by Americans for the Arts CEO Robert L. Lynch. The

Why are some organizations consistently good at innovating and adapting while others seem to be blindsided by change? Is it because of their disciplined innovation process or the knowledge and skills of their people? Or is it their determination to build a culture where challenging assumptions is not only encouraged, but expected? IBM's Creative Leadership Study found that leaders who embrace the dynamic tension between creative disruption and operational efficiency can create new models of extraordinary value.

Five years after the onset of the Great Recession, companies are beginning to reset their horizons. For the last several years, human capital decisions have been largely shaped by that recession and its aftermath of weak economic growth. While the global economy continues to lurch forward, the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends 2013 report finds companies pivoting from the recession to the new horizons of 2020.

Deloitte's 2014 global survey identified the top 10 findings of global human capital trends, and outlined an agenda to guide business and HR leaders as they pivot between the recession and future growth strategies. Companies cited four issues as the most urgent: leadership, retention and engagement, the reskilling of HR, and talent acquisition and access.

Global organizations today navigate a “new world of work”—one that requires a dramatic change in strategies for leadership, talent, and human resources. More than 3,300 organizations from 106 countries contributed to Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2015 survey, assessing the importance of specific talent challenges and their readiness to meet them. This report explores 10 major trends that emerged from our research, which reflects four major themes for 2015: leading, engaging, reinventing, and reimagining.

In May 2014, Adobe commissioned Forrester Consulting to investigate how creativity influences business outcomes. The study surveyed senior managers from corporations across a diverse set of industries to quantify and qualify how creativity impacts business results. We wanted to see if companies that cultivate creativity experience, what is termed in this study, a “creative dividend.”

Americans for the Arts conducts an annual survey of the Business Volunteers for the Arts® field for the purpose of providing the best possible benchmarking information about skills-based volunteer work in the arts.