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5 key ways the arts drive economic & community development
“[Cultural activities] enrich and expand on my understanding of what binds us together as a community, where we have come from and perhaps where we are going.”
-ArtsFund Patron Survey, 2015
Arts advocates often talk about how cultural organizations play a critical role in creating a vibrant, thriving economy, in definining civic identity, and in building an engaged and connected population, but how do we support that claim?
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Legislative Sessions Open, Now What? Advocate!
With the start of a new year comes the start of a new General Assembly session, at least in my home state of Virginia, and also for three-quarters of our states’ legislatures. And for our state so begins the battle for increased funding for our state arts council—the Virginia Commission for the Arts. This Wednesday, arts leaders and supporters from across our Commonwealth will gather for Arts Advocacy Day when we will meet with our state representatives to plead our case. And just what is that case?
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OH at a Meeting: It’s Not Just a Bike Rack
We were in Oklahoma City and Heather Ahtone of Norman Oklahoma shared a story about the power of Arts And…, a moment when, as she said, “The arts community met a civic need in a creative way.”
Her city, like lots of other places, is growing fast. So fast that traffic has gotten a lot worse in the center. City planners decided to encourage more people to start riding bikes to get around, improving the quality of life for everyone. What happened next?
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Introducing the Artists & Communities Conversation Series
Americans for the Arts is excited to debut a new conversation series, Artists & Communities, highlighting the voices of artists and arts practitioners working across sectors and within communities. Over the next ten months, we will publish ten conversations between pairs of established and emerging community arts leaders as they share their visions for, experiences with, and challenges to making healthy, equitable, vibrant communities through arts and culture. As community-based work receives more recognition, and intersections and collaborations become stronger, these conversations illuminate just how artists and community arts leaders can work to sustain and maintain healthy communities through their practice.
First up: Liz Lerman, choreographer, performer, writer, educator, speaker, and founder of Dance Exchange, and Deana Haggag, Director of the Baltimore-based nomadic museum The Contemporary.
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Product Relevance–An Experiment in Engaging Silicon Valley Corporate Millennials
In June 2015, Silicon Valley Creates, a regranting organization in San Jose, California, with a thirty-plus year record in providing funding opportunities for the local arts and culture community, made a bold move–for us. We took a first-time experimental step in investing in capacity building, specifically to elevate the conversation about product relevance.
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Are you measuring the right metrics?
What gets measured gets managed. Is your organization measuring the right things?
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Living the Dream
“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.” As we reflect on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. this week, I was reminded of this one of many, but not often cited, quotes by Dr. King.
Recently, the Arts Education Advisory Council of Americans for the Arts met for its midwinter meeting in Los Angeles. We spent much of our time discussing equity and the need for access to the arts for all students, pre-K through high school. We took a tour of the Colburn School, an outstanding music conservatory with numerous community engagement programs. The mission of the Colburn School is to admit students who have tremendous artistic promise and provide them with full tuition, including room and board, so that they can focus solely on their musical careers.
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How a “non-artist” found her niche in the art world
A foray into the Monterey History and Art Association’s December 2012 exhibit, “Flows to Bay,” totally altered my outlook on how to communicate action on environmental issues. A small exhibit, it featured a variety of art using discarded plastics from the marine environment to demonstrate how they detrimentally affect our planet. I do not consider myself an artist, so the lenses I view the world through are primarily those of an environmental scientist. But what I saw hooked me, and its strong yet captivating message gave me new insight into a way to frame environmental degradation through art.
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Where We Love to Live—Tales from the Community Visions Tour
What kind of community is the place where we all want to live, work, and visit?
That’s one of the questions Americans for the Arts is asking on a national tour, talking with people about their vision for healthy, equitable, vibrant communities of the future. The answers—and the discussion—are compelling.
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Employee Resource Groups: what do they mean for the arts?
The pARTnership Movement’s latest tool-kit, on partnering with Employee Resource Groups, is a great introduction to working with these often under-discussed groups. Why should they matter to you, and how can you partner with them? Also, what are they?
An Employee Resource Group (ERG) is a network of likeminded individuals with similar interests or shared pasts and can usually be contacted though the company’s HR department. They’re often known as affinity groups, because they bring together people who have had a shared experience that influences their professional demeanor or outlook.
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Top 10 in Arts Education 2015
Each December, I have the pleasure to reflect alongside colleagues of the Americans for the Arts’ Arts Education Advisory Council about what happened in arts education in America over the course of the previous year. It is truly one of my favorite activities – a chance to celebrate big accomplishments, learn from incidents that were not-so-good, and identify trends which may crop up in our work in 2016.
Last year, as we looked back over 2014, we discussed STEAM, creative youth development, standards, new reports, resources for specific student populations, mayors and more. Some things continued this year, and some things did not – check out the list below!
