This month, UNESCO’s International Commission on the Futures of Education released a paper outlining nine ideas for public action in education in a post-COVID world. The paper acknowledges that the global pandemic has the potential to both demonstrate our connectedness, and negatively impact the most marginalized students. Its emphasis on contextualizing each student’s role in a global community suggests a commitment to arts, culture, and social change in education and youth development. We’d like to hear from you about this! How have you seen the arts and culture impact your communities? How do arts and culture facilitate youth leadership to social change within educational contexts? How do they enhance community understanding?
Read moreSkill and Will Mapping: New Research on Funding Creative Youth Development in the United States
In 2019, the Creative Youth Development National Partnership engaged in a project to better understand the funding landscape of their field. To illustrate their findings, researchers connected with funders and program leaders in four settings to better understand the dynamics of their partnerships. Here is a summary of six publications illustrating the findings.
Read moreOur Community Responds: How Funders Can Support Arts Education Despite COVID-19
Funders should think about shifting available funding to benefit the most financially vulnerable members of the arts education community: teaching artists, independent contractors, and freelance educators and artists by providing direct-to-individual, one-time grants, and broadening the structures and criteria for grants which support – financially and through wraparound services – their ability to fill their unique role in the ecosystem.
Read moreHow do you write a strategic plan in a quickly changing field? Adaptive Impact Planning
Planning inherently leads to consideration of the mission’s relationship to programming and development. But creating an Adaptive Impact Plan, specifically, gives arts organizations a tool to respond to change and to make decisions without performing a full strategic assessment any time they are presented with a new possibility and without compromising its mission and vision.
Read moreA Call to Action for Arts Education Funders in the Wake of COVID-19
With funders – whether public agencies in the arts/culture, education, social service sector or private mega-foundations or family funds – re-evaluating their strategies during this unprecedented time, the arts education community calls on funders to partner with and respond to the direct needs of their current and potential grantees to ensure that every child continues to have the opportunity to develop their creativity and our infrastructure supporting these young people maintains is strength, agility, and vibrancy.
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