From the Research Team

Each year, NASAA updates our broad overview of state arts agency funding and grant making. The State Arts Agency Grant Making and Funding Report provides data on the overall scope of state arts agency grants and the long-term trend data for state arts agency revenues. This brief snapshot of grant making and funding can help answer some basic questions about state arts agencies. Several report highlights make for useful talking points when speaking about the value of state arts agencies, such as:

State arts agencies provide almost 23,000 grants per year and more than $300 million in direct funding to arts organizations, artists and communities.
State arts agencies fund more than 4,600 communities covering the entire country, and provide more than $39 million specifically to rural communities.
Nearly 10,000 state arts agency grants have a primary focus on arts education, which account for more than 40% of all SAA grants.
State arts agencies foster state heritage by investing more than $7 million in the preservation of cultural traditions through folk and traditional arts.
State arts agencies fund a wide variety of art forms and foster civic engagement and participation though the support of live performances and community based arts.
State legislatures continue to recognize the value of state arts agencies and their return on investment, as aggregate state arts agency revenues have now passed prerecession levels.

Though this report provides a simple and straightforward approach to understanding state arts agency revenues and grants writ large, NASAA analyzes these data in much greater detail and in a variety of ways. Notably, dynamic data on NASAA’s Funding and Grant Making pages allow for some deeper dives into state-by-state comparisons and trend data. Many of our grant-making statistics have been updated to report on fiscal year 2018 data at this time—but be on the lookout for final FY2020 state arts agency revenues data, which will be arriving in members’ and colleagues’ inboxes and on our website very soon. As always, you can ask NASAA to provide custom data and reports specific to your needs.