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.
Civic Engagement/Community Development
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.
Catalytic Change: Lessons Learned from the Racial Justice Grantmaking Assessment
ARC and PRE designed the Racial Justice Grantmaking Assessment to help foundation staff and leaders understand the benefits of being explicit about racial equity, and to determine the degree to which their work is advancing racial justice. This report is based on the pilot process, and is intended to share insights into some of the barriers within the philanthropic sector that stand in the way of achieving racial justice outcomes. It is organized into five segments:
- This introduction, which provides brief profiles of ARC and PRE, and of the assessment team;
- A description of the assessment process, including definitions, assumptions, and methodology;
- An overview of the assessments of the Consumer Health Foundation and the Barr Foundation, including brief profiles of each, summary findings, recommendations, and impacts to date;
- Lessons learned from the pilot process by the ARC-PRE assessment team; and
- Appendices with more detailed findings, recommendations, and initial impacts for each foundation.
New Report Offers Lessons for Philanthropic Field to Keep Up with Changing Face of America
The face of America is changing. Between 2000 and 2010, the population of the American South grew by 14%—and the Latino population in the South grew by 57%. One in five Americans have a disability. Fifty-seven percent of college graduates are women. Same-sex couples live in 93% of counties in the US.
How can the philanthropic field increase its diversity, advance equity, and improve its inclusiveness to keep up with these trends? D5—a five-year effort to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in philanthropy—examines this question in its annual “State of the Work” report.
Complete report: http://www.d5coalition.org/tools/state-of-the-work-2013/
