Animating Democracy inspires, informs, promotes, and connects arts and culture as potent contributors to community, civic, and social change.As a program of Americans for the Arts, Animating Democracy brings national visibility to arts for change work, builds knowledge about quality practice, and creates useful resources. By demonstrating the public value of creative work that contributes to social change and fostering synergy across arts and other fields and sectors, Animating Democracy works to make the arts an integral and effective part of solutions to the challenges of communities and toward ensuring a healthy democracy. The Impact Initiative provides resources for evaluating the social impact of the arts, including A Place to Start, Evaluation in Action, and Social Impact Indicators. The Landscape Initiative highlights the depth and breadth of work being done at the intersection of the arts and social change.
Arts & Economic Prosperity IV is the fourth study of the nonprofit arts and culture industry’s impact on the economy. The most comprehensive study of its kind ever conducted, it features customized findings on 182 study regions representing all 50 states and the District of Columbia as well as estimates of economic impact nationally. The findings from Arts & Economic Prosperity IV send a clear and welcome message: leaders who care about community and economic vitality can feel good about choosing to invest in the arts.
In creative placemaking, partners from public, private, non-profit, and community sectors strategically shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, city, or region around arts and cultural activities. Creative placemaking animates public and private spaces, rejuvenates structures and streetscapes, improves local business viability and public safety, and brings diverse people together to celebrate, inspire, and be inspired.
A consortium of nearly 100 colleges and universities from across the country, Imagining America is the only national coalition working explicitly at the nexus of publicly engaged scholarship and the humanities, arts, and design. Imagining America works with academic and community partners to develop knowledge about and resources for individual and institutional change through community organizing and movement-building, a large-scale annual conference, and ongoing research and action initiatives. Current initiatives include projects aimed at transforming higher education tenure and promotion policies, assessment practices, and graduate and undergraduate education to cultivate publicly engaged scholarship; linking diversity and engagement efforts on campuses; and partnering with community-based arts, cultural and humanities organizations. Imagining America is hosted at Syracuse University, and Timothy K. Eatman and Scott J. Peters are Co-Directors.
Public is a new, online peer-reviewed journal that will promote the documentation, evaluation, investigation, and analysis of theories and practices integrating arts and culture in public partnerships
