Through a partnership with Vans Custom Culture, Americans for the Arts has designed the Arts Education Navigator, a series of e-books designed to help educators, students, and advocates alike navigate the complex field of arts education. Each e-book in the Navigator series below will cover a specific topic, ensuring arts education supporters like you are equipped with the knowledge, statistics, and case-making techniques needed to effectively communicate with decision-makers. This one is a wrap-up of different facts and figures to present when arguing for more arts education in schools.
Arts Funding
Arts Education Navigator – “Facts and Figures”
Through a partnership with Vans Custom Culture, Americans for the Arts has designed the Arts Education Navigator, a series of e-books designed to help educators, students, and advocates alike navigate the complex field of arts education. Each e-book in the Navigator series below will cover a specific topic, ensuring arts education supporters like you are equipped with the knowledge, statistics, and case-making techniques needed to effectively communicate with decision-makers. This issue: Facts & Figures: data on the benefits and decline of arts education.
Working with Small Arts Organizations: How and Why It Matters
Enriching our culture and engaging diverse and underserved communities, small arts organizations pop up, flourish, and sometimes flounder, mostly under the philanthropic radar. They often foster artistic expressions not adequately served by larger organizations.
From Alliance for California Traditional Arts’ (ACTA) intermediary work in the Community Leadership Project 1 and our joint field research on small organizations for the James Irvine Foundation-funded report California’s Arts and Cultural Ecology (2011), we’ve learned how small arts nonprofits are undercounted, how broad ranging, sustainable, and valuable they are, and how they differ from larger organizations. Sharing ways that funders can better work with smaller arts nonprofits to further their missions, we urge philanthropy to nurture a fuller range of artistic expression in our contemporary world.
ON DEMAND WEBINAR: Arts Education webinar — Collective Impact
On March 20, 2013, John Kania, managing director of FSG, presented his research into the uses of “collective impact” by the social sector, followed by a discussion with NEA Director of Arts Education Ayanna Hudson. Both Kania and Hudson then took questions from the public.
As defined by FSG, collective impact is the commitment of a group of actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a complex social problem. The webinar examined how collective impact can help federal, state, and local leaders move forward in a common direction.
Fundraising: Keys to the Cashbox
Musical America takes an in-depth look at successful efforts, some of the pitfalls, and how to tap social media for greater fundraising success. Just some of the features:
- Using social media to open new fundraising channels (p. 4 )
- How Columbia University raised $7 million in one day (p. 7)
- Naming: Stories from the front lines (P. 9)
- Competitive Fundraising? Absolutely (p. 13)
- How to kickstart fundraising with Kickstarter (p. 19)
Creative Communities: Art Works in Economic Development
Urban and regional planners, elected officials, and other decisionmakers are increasingly focused on what makes places livable. Access to the arts inevitably appears high on that list, but knowledge about how culture and the arts can act as a tool of economic development is sadly lacking. This important sector must be considered not only as a source of amenities or pleasant diversions, but also as a wholly integrated part of local economies. Employing original data produced through both quantitative and qualitative research, Creative Communities provides a greater understanding of how art works as an engine for transforming communities.
