In 2021, a collaborative project between Creative Generation and ElevateArtsEd emerged to better understand how practitioners - such as artists, educators, community leaders, and more - can make the case for and also advocate through arts and culture to drive systemic change and address the complex challenges we were facing, such as a global health pandemic, reckoning with racial justice, environmental crisis, threats to public education, and economic recession. This resource serves as a review of current literature on advocacy, case-making, and systems change: it incorporates overarching concepts from the distinct sectors of culture, education, and social justice; and includes bodies of knowledge including in the arts, health, housing, social justice, environment, and economics. The publication establishes the need for intertwining the science of advocacy — building blocks for understanding what effective advocacy looks like — and the art of advocacy with calls for improvisation, adaptability, and generative thinking, all characteristics of art making.

In 2021, a collaborative project between Creative Generation and ElevateArtsEd emerged to better understand how practitioners - such as artists, educators, community leaders, and more - can make the case for and also advocate through arts and culture to drive systemic change and address the complex challenges we were facing, such as a global health pandemic, reckoning with racial justice, environmental crisis, threats to public education, and economic recession. This resource serves as an annotated bibliography on advocacy, case-making, and systems change: it incorporates overarching concepts from the distinct sectors of culture, education, and social justice; and includes references from the arts, health, housing, social justice, environment, and economics.