This report is a Collaboration between
the Association of California Symphony Orchestras,
the California Arts Council
and the California Cultural Data Project Working Group
Civic Engagement/Community Development
How Cities Can Nurture Cultural Entrepreneurs
Many city leaders are newly aware that artists bring income into the city, improve the performance of area businesses and creative industries, and directly create new businesses and jobs.
Bringing the Museum to the Community
When the Museum of Craft and Design closed its doors in 2010 in search of a new location, it turned to pop-up exhibitions as a way to stay visible and continue serving the community. Two and half years and several pop-ups later, the museum once again has a permanent space. Detailed in this case study are the two primary challenges that MCD experienced during their pop-up period, and the ways in which the museum plans to address those challenges to produce a more tempered iteration of a pop-up program as it settles into its permanent home.
The Arts and Aging: Building the Science
Recent and ongoing research suggests exciting possibilities for the therapeutic use of art to improve the health and well-being of older adults. As this population grows in number and as a proportion of all Americans, it will experience dramatic increases in the number of people with aging-related health conditions, including cognitive decline and dementia. Given the arts’ potential to treat, prevent, or ameliorate those conditions, additional research is needed to clarify the relationship between the arts and the health and well-being of older adults. As part of a Federal Interagency Task Force on the Arts and Human Development, the National Endowment for the Arts and three units within the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-the National Institute on Aging (NIA), the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR), and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM)-joined in requesting the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to convene a public workshop around this research need. The NAS workshop subsequently aimed to identify research gaps and opportunities to foster greater investment in promising arts-related research that can seed interventions to improve quality of life for older adults.
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.
Directory of Creative Aging Programs in America
NCCA has launched the first of its kind Directory funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, MetLife Foundation, and The Michelson Foundation. The Directory features arts programs serving older people and includes intergenerational activities in urban, suburban, and rural communities in a variety of settings such as community centers, senior centers, assisted living, adult day care, arts institutions, and libraries.
It is also searchable by an assortment of options such as: location, arts discipline, program setting, and adaptive design, with the goal of enabling older adults to find programs, encouraging arts and aging organizations to find partners, and helping teaching artists to find employment with organizations committed to creative aging in their communities.
