Arts & Economic Prosperity III: The Economic Impact of Nonprofit Arts and Culture Organizations and Their Audiences documents the key role played by the nonprofit arts and culture industry in strengthening our nation’s economy. This study demonstrates that the nonprofit arts and culture industry is an economic driver in communities – a growth industry that supports jobs, generates government revenue, and is the cornerstone of tourism.
The Creative Economy Initiative
The Creative Economy Initiative (CEI) is a partnership of New England’s business, government, cultural and educational leaders committed to strengthening the region’s economic vitality by fostering its creative economy. This initiative has successfully linked businesses and organizations from economic sectors that had previously functioned only autonomously, and is unique in its regional approach. The involvement of all six New England states sets the project apart from state-based economic impact studies.
Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning
When young people are involved with art, something changes in their lives. We’ve often witnessed the rapt expressions on the faces of such young people. Advocates for the arts often use photographs of smiling faces to document the experience. But in a society that values measurements and uses data-driven analysis to inform decisions about allocation of scarce resources, photographs of smiling faces are not enough to gain or even retain support. Such images alone will not convince skeptics or even neutral decision-makers that something exceptional is happening when and where the arts become part of the lives of young people. Until now, we’ve known little about the nature of this change, or how to enable the change to occur. To understand these issues in more rigorous terms, we invited leading educational researchers to examine the impact of arts experiences on young people. We developed the Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning initiative in cooperation with The Arts Education Partnership and The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities to explore why and how young people were changed through their arts experiences.
The Arts and Academic Improvement: What the Evidence Shows
Project Zero’s mission is to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts, as well as humanistic and scientific disciplines, at the individual and institutional levels.
Foundation Yearbook: Facts and Figures on Private and Community Foundations
In June, The Foundation Center released its Foundation Yearbook: Facts and Figures on Private and Community Foundations, which documents changes in the actual number, giving, and assets of all active U.S. foundations. The report provides an overview of the state of foundation giving in the current year and beyond; comparisons of foundation activities by foundation size; and breakdowns of foundation resources by geographic location and grantmaker type.
Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts
Faced with intense competition for audiences and financial support, as well as adverse political fallout from the “culture wars” of the early 1990s, arts advocates have increasingly sought to make a case for the arts in terms of their instrumental benefits to individuals and communities. In this report documenting the most comprehensive study of its kind, the authors evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these instrumental arguments and make the case that a new approach to understanding the benefits of the arts is needed.
Critical of what they view as an overemphasis on instrumental benefits, the authors call for a greater recognition of the intrinsic benefits of the arts experience, provide a more comprehensive framework for assessing the private and public value of both intrinsic and instrumental benefits, and link the realization of those benefits to the nature of arts involvement. In particular, they underscore the importance of sustained involvement in the arts to the achievement of both instrumental and intrinsic benefits. This study has important policy implications for access to the arts, childhood exposure to the arts, arts advocacy, and future research on the arts.
