Washington: Arts Participation Leadership Initiative Ends, but Its Community of Learning Grows

With the conclusion of the Arts Participation Leadership Initiative (APLI), a four-year experiment to bolster audience engagement and arts participation conducted by the Washington State Arts Commission (ArtsWA) and The Wallace Foundation, ArtsWA remains committed to sharing the knowledge the project created and to growing a learning community around it. ArtsWA’s APLI web portal now includes a host of project resources, including evaluations, research reports, summaries and videos of the nine APLI forums, “forum response” articles by participating artists, recommended readings, and 10 “takeaways” consolidating the initiative’s findings and relating them to experiences of the 26 participating arts grantee organizations in King and Pierce counties. Also available are web pages dedicated to the three APLI goals (increase engagement by youth and young adults, work with diverse communities, and use social media/technology) and their respective strategies—as well as related case studies and toolkits showing how to implement them. The APLI web portal features a personalized portfolio tool (a.k.a. “shopping cart”) through which site users can save and share APLI resources. For more information, contact ArtsWA Grants to Organizations Program Manager Mayumi Tsutakawa.