People, Land, Arts, Culture and Engagement: Taking Stock of the Place Initiative

This report serves as a point of entry into creative placemaking as defined and supported by the Tucson Pima Arts Council's PLACE Initiative. To assess how and to what degree the PLACE projects were helping to transform communities, TPAC was asked by the Kresge Foundation to undertake a comprehensive evaluation. This involved discussion with stakeholders about support mechanisms, professional development, investment, and impact of the PLACE Initiative in Tucson, Arizona, and the Southwest regionally and the gathering of qualitative and quantitative data to develop indicators and method for evaluating the social impact of the arts in TPAC's grantmaking. The report documents one year of observations and research by the PLACE research team, outside researchers and reviewers, local and regional working groups, TPAC staff, and TPAC constituency. It considers data from the first four years of PLACE Initiative funding, including learning exchanges, focus groups, individual interviews, grantmaking, and all reporting. It is also informed by evaluation and assessment that occurred in the development of the PLACE Initiative, in particular, Maribel Alvarez's Two-Way Mirror: Ethnography as a Way to Assess Civic Impact of Arts-Based Engagement in Tucson, Arizona (2009), and Mark Stern and Susan Seifert's Documenting Civic Engagement: A Plan for the Tucson Pima Arts Council (2009). Both of these publications were supported by Animating Democracy, a program of Americans for the Arts, that promotes arts and culture as potent contributors to community, civic, and social change. Both publications describe how TPAC approaches evaluation strategies associated with social impact of the arts in Tucson and Pima County. This report outlines the local context and historical antecedents of the PLACE Initiative in the region with an emphasis on the concept of "belonging" as a primary characteristic of PLACE projects and policy. It describes PLACE projects as well as the role of TPAC in creating and facilitating the Initiative. Based on the collective understanding of the research team, impacts of the PLACE Initiative are organized into three main realms -- institutions, artists, and communities. These realms are further addressed in case studies from select grantees, whose narratives offer rich, detailed perspectives about PLACE projects in context, with all their successes, rewards, and challenges for artists, communities, and institutions. Lastly, the report offers preliminary research findings on PLACE by TPAC in collaboration with Dr. James Roebuck, codirector of the University of Arizona's ERAD (Evaluation Research and Development) Program

Innovation 2.0: Grantmaking to Transform America's Education Systems

As social and technological forces reshape the environment, the educational landscape is being similarly transfigured as parents, employers, policymakers and students grow impatient with incremental efforts to reform a broken system. Too often such efforts have proven both slow and inadequate to the evolving needs of learners: Innovations have been inequitably distributed, promising solutions have been difficult to implement at scale. Yet the signs of widespread change are real, and there is little doubt that transformation has begun

Campus Art Museums in the 21st Century: A Conversation

In the summer of 2012, the authors of this study brought together a group of campus art museum directors and outside experts to 'think out loud' about the changes already occurring at campus museums and where new opportunities and roles may be emerging. We hope the resulting paper will further the field's larger, continuing exploration of its roles and potentials through dialogue, research, and experimentation -- an exploration that contributes to the continued healthy evolution of campus art museum practice

Unleashing The Potential Of Los Angeles: Submissions, Trends, And Impact From The My LA2050 Grants Challenge

As part of the LA2050 initiative, the Goldhirsh Foundation launched the My LA2050 Grants Challenge for nonprofits and for-profits to apply for $1 million total in ten$100,000 awards. During the My LA2050 Grants Challenge, 279 organizations submitted proposals that demonstrated passion and imagination to build a future where all Angelenos flourish. This report highlights trends, promising ideas, and surprises from the proposals. Submissions targeted the eight indicators for human development featured in the LA2050 report. More Than 70,000 people voted on submissions, and ten winners split $1,000,000 in funding evenly. This report identifies ten trends that emerged across indicators and details trends within each indicator

Powerful Arts Education Practice

This document describes 10 dimensions of powerful arts education practice — building blocks for organizations that engage young people in this practice. It also shares examples of the kinds of things you might see and feel at an organization — indicators — that could let you know these dimensions are at play.A working group of arts education leaders illuminated these dimensions and indicators through a collaborative process co-facilitated by Sarah Crowell, an expert practioner, and Lauren Stevenson, a researcher. Stevenson synthesized the group's insights and elaborated emerging dimensions and indicators through interviews with additional arts education leaders and iterative feedback from the working group. Working group members and interviewees included youth participants, youth mentors, young alumni, teaching artists, program managers, and artistic and executive directors at organizations known for powerful arts education practice. The following dimensions and indicators reflect their collective wisdom.

The Great Generalization: Organizational Adaptation Strategies as Entrepreneurship in Higher Music Education

This study sought to measure how higher music education has evolved in response to the music industry’s digital revolution. I utilized a framework of organizational adaptation theory to synthesize five distinct organizational adaptation strategies: decentralization, generalization, specialization, formalization, and inaction. Music leaders were surveyed (n = 100) to assess adaptations across ten common domains in higher education. Higher music education was found to have undergone a great generalization through the expansion of activities in nearly every domain. Consistent with elements of organizational adaptation theory, and like individual musicians, higher music education has been entrepreneurial in response to the digital revolution

Could it Be Sunny in Philadelphia?

The Philadelphia Media Network--the serious broadsheet Inquirer, scrappy tabloid Daily News and digital hub Philly. com--has been the poster child for newspaper ownership turmoil over the past decade. A half-dozen separate owners have shepherded a half-dozen separate strategies, all while the business for major metro papers, including those in Philadelphia, was facing dramatic digital disruption and revenue declines. Enter Gerry Lenfest, a local cable network owner- turned-major philanthropist, who found himself as the sole owner looking for a better path forward. In January, the 85-year-old Lenfest announced a complex nonprofit/for-profit hybrid structure he believes will give PMN a fighting chance, both at survival after he's gone and at helping to solve the news industry's shared challenges. Lenfest donated PMN to a newly created Institute for Journalism in New Media, which is housed under the Philadelphia Foundation, and gave $20 million as seed money to help get the institute off the ground. The goal is to grow the endowment (to the tune of$100 million) to fund a potentially wide array of initiatives, including research and development of digital delivery models and specific public-interest journalism projects at PMN and beyond. The institute and PMN are managed by separate boards with separate missions and marching orders. While PMN is complex and still in an early stage, potential lessons can be learned about its component parts that could be applicable for other newspaper owners, publishers and funders

Funding Media, Strengthening Democracy: Grantmaking for the 21st Century

Despite the pervasiveness of media, the amount of philanthropic dollars in support of public interest media remains minuscule and, therefore largely ineffective. The report, based on a survey of the the funding sector, calls on philanthropists to embrace a practice of transparency and information sharing via technology, to determine how existing funds are being used and how they can best be leveraged to increase philanthropic impact within the media field

Profile, Spring 2008

Interactive Arts and Media Department Newsletter. 20 pages. Includes student, faculty, and alumni profiles, book and game reviews, calendar of events, internship experience, faculty article, and interviews with working professionals.https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/profile/1002/thumbnail.jp

Arts Integration as a Pathway to Unity in the Community: The (Ongoing) Journey of Pillsbury House + Theatre

This report is a 2013 study of how a nonprofit theater and a social service agency that happened to reside in the same building rediscovered their shared history as a 19th century Settlement House, and unified operations to become a 21st Century Center for Creativity and Community. In 2008, Pillsbury United Communities -- a network of five community centers, 70+ programs, and 8 business ventures in the Twin Cities -- made the unusual decision to hand over leadership of its largest facility, Pillsbury House Neighborhood Center (PHNC), to Faye Price and Noël Raymond, co-artistic directors of Pillsbury House Theatre. The theater had gained acclaim with almost two decades of professional productions reflecting contemporary social issues of relevance to its diverse South Minneapolis neighborhood. However, Price and Raymond had a larger vision to have high-quality arts underlie all of the Center's services to increase the individual and community creativity needed to tackle serious socio-economic challenges and revitalize the neighborhood. The journey is told through stories and interviews with more than 30 staff, artists, program participants, community and civic leaders, residents, and funders. It is supplemented by data from independent program evaluations from 2010-2013. The report (by veteran journalist and arts funder Nancy Fushan) documents not only what happens as the staff attempts to embed the arts in almost every aspect of the organization. It explores factors that contribute to success and thechallenges that informed further change and evolution. Pillsbury House + Theatre (PH+T), a center for creativity and community, shares lessons learned that may be of value to other nonprofit organizations that are contemplating a "re-imagination" of their work at this considerable scope and scale. The insights may also be of interest to artists, educators, evaluators and those in the human services and philanthropy fields