“The arts belong to everyone.” That conviction of our co-founder, Lila Wallace, has defined the core goal of two decades of The Wallace Foundation’s work in the arts: to support effective, innovative ideas and practices that bring the benefits and pleasures of the arts to more people, especially adults and children who might never otherwise experience them.
Our overall goal in the arts is to build current and future audiences by making the arts a part of more people’s lives. Our strategy has two components:
The first, the Wallace Excellence Awards, provides support to exemplary arts organizations in selected cities to identify, develop and share effective ideas and practices to reach more people. An important objective of this work is to help develop a “knowledge portfolio” of such practices that can benefit many other organizations. We also seek to create “learning networks” in our target cities that can help elevate the visibility of participation-building in those cities and spread the lessons broadly. Since 2006 grants have gone to 54 arts organizations located in the six cities selected as Wallace Excellence Awards sites: Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle.
The second element of our work, Arts for Young People, seeks to build future audiences by helping selected cities develop effective approaches for expanding high-quality arts learning opportunities both inside and outside school, and to capture and share lessons that benefit many other cities and arts organizations. We are currently supporting the following such efforts: the Thriving Minds initiative in Dallas; the Minneapolis Public School's development of a five-year arts education plan; the Los Angeles County Arts Commission’s Arts for All initiative and the Los Angeles Unified School District’s development of a new 10-year plan for arts education; and Arts for Children and Youth of Greater Philadelphia initiative in collaboration with the William Penn Foundation and other groups. For more details on Dallas’s initiative, click here. For research by RAND on the benefits and challenges of the “coordinated approach” to enhancing arts learning in Dallas and in other cities, click here.)
This two-pronged approach to building appreciation and demand for the arts is grounded in principles that were strongly affirmed by Gifts of the Muse, a widely heralded Wallace-commissioned report published in 2004 by RAND. First, arts participation takes many forms and confers a wide range of benefits on both individuals and communities. And second, these benefits will be most fully realized if people have meaningful arts experiences as children. To learn more about how improving access and quality of arts education can help increase demand for the arts overall, click here.
In each of Wallace’s three current areas of activity — arts participation, education leadership and out-of-school learning — we seek to create widespread change by sharing lessons that public and private institutions can use to promote benefits for the people they serve. Please visit the Arts Participation section of Wallace’s Knowledge Center to download publications that offer field-based insights.
Partner institutions
In each of its three focus areas, The Wallace Foundation supports public and private institutions that are committed to pursuing innovative ideas and practices. Wallace funds their work so that their experiences and lessons can ultimately help the field nationwide.
For more information about Wallace’s grant policies and restrictions, see our Funding Guidelines page. To download publications that can help further your own organization’s work, please visit the Knowledge Center.