Past investment: 2001-2005
The issue…
Nationwide, state arts agencies (SAAs) commit more than $400 million annually to supporting the arts. However they must use this funding and their resources to carry out a complex mission: to promote arts participation, to support artists and to demonstrate the societal value of the arts. They also have a large and diverse group of constituents, including local arts organizations, state legislatures, other state agencies and individual artists.
The response…
The Wallace Foundation launched State Arts Partnerships for Cultural Participation (START) to help SAAs adopt new, more effective guidelines, programs and funding practices aimed at encouraging broader public participation in the arts.
The strategies…
Wallace gave direct grants to 13 state arts agencies to support programs, research and outreach efforts on arts participation, including leadership training, pilot demonstration projects and improved technical assistance. It provided access to expertise to help SAAs and local arts organizations launch successful initiatives, as well as evaluations to assess their effectiveness and to gain new knowledge about statewide participation-building efforts.
The accomplishments...
The Wallace Foundation invested about $12.5 million in the START initiative, enabling grantees to take a number of steps to broaden participation in the arts. These measures ranged from revision of mission statements so that they focused more on cultural participation to training of staff in participation-building practices. The Ohio Arts Council, for example, launched a major grants-program restructuring in which grant eligibility became based on public benefit rather than organization type. And the Minnesota State Arts Board established a four-year project that aimed, among other goals, to expand learning about arts participation and to share best practices. SAA managers also received guidance from Mark H. Moore, a professor at Harvard University and leading authority on public sector management, to examine what their public roles and responsibilities meant for their approaches to building cultural participation.
Publications
Wallace has issued the first two in a series of monographs exploring SAAs by RAND:
- State Arts Agencies 1965-2003: Whose Interests to Serve? traces the history of these organizations; describes how some innovative Wallace-supported SAAs are working to broaden audiences, build legislative support and measure their own progress; and offers suggestions on how they can arrive at more robust missions to help strengthen their public and political support.
- The Arts and State Governments: At Arm's Length or Arm in Arm? suggests that state arts agency strategies that reach out to the public and to government officials can be effective in placing the arts higher on the list of governmental priorities.
Two more monographs are expected to be published.
Other START-related publications are: