Knight Soul of the Community (SOTC) is a three-year study conducted by Gallup of the 26 John S. and James L. Knight Foundation communities across the United States employing a fresh approach to determine the factors that attach residents to their communities and the role of community attachment in an area’s economic growth and well-being. The study focuses on the emotional side of the connection between residents and their communities. The results of the SOTC study identify new approaches to help create transformational change and new possibilities for continued progress in Knight communities. FULL REPORT
Civic Engagement/Community Development
Design and Social Impact: A Cross-Sectoral Agenda for Design Education, Research and Practice
Social impact design — the practice of designing for public benefit, especially in disadvantaged communities — has been garnering more attention from both professional and aspiring designers in a variety of disciplines. The National Endowment for the Arts has long supported design across these disciplines, from graphic to landscape design and architecture to product design. The white paper, Design and Social Impact: A cross-sectoral agenda for design education, research and practice (pdf), is a result of the Social Impact Design Summit that was hosted by Cooper-Hewitt, the Lemelson Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts in February 2012.
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.
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.
