General

This unprecedented national study by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research and policy center in Washington, DC, documents and analyzes the environment of support for artists in the United States. The study addresses the following questions: What are the important features of our current structures of support for artists? What are its strengths and weaknesses? How might we improve it? More information about the project is available here.

Barry Hessenius, the former head of the California Arts Council, was worried about where the next generation of leaders in arts organizations would come from. With baby boomers retiring and fewer workers in the succeeding generation, Hessenius foresaw a fight to recruit new leadership that often-cash-strapped arts organizations would be ill-equipped to wage. Hessenius transformed his worries into a plan of action with “Involving Youth in Nonprofit Arts Organizations: A Call to Action,” a sixty-two-page study underwritten by the Hewlett Foundation, that outlined the problem and proposed some solutions.