From the Field

Arts on Prescription Field Guide

Mass Cultural Council, The Center for Arts in Medicine and Tasha Golden have released the Arts on Prescription Field Guide. The guide offers a roadmap for communities and organizations interested in generating their own arts and health partnerships and enhancing efforts to establish cross-sector partnerships. The guide shares foundational information and early learnings, equips readers with practical advice, and supports the development of more expansive approaches to health. “Arts on prescription” refers to programs in which health providers are enabled to prescribe arts and culture experiences to patients or clients in order to support their health and well-being. This type of program is grounded in evidence that engaging with arts, culture and nature has positive impacts on mental and physical health, social connection and overall quality of life.

The Pandemic and Nonprofit Funding

The Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) has published Before and After 2020: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Changed Nonprofit Experiences with Funders. It compared grantee experiences with funders from before the pandemic to after, based on feedback collected by CEP’s Grantee Perception Report. The main take-away is that funders streamlined their granting processes, so grantees spent less time on applications and reports. Grant makers also increased their levels of general operating support, allowing grantees the flexibility to use grant dollars on day-to-day operations.

Careers in the Arts for People with Disabilities

The National Endowment for the Arts has introduced a toolkit to help people with disabilities seeking a career in the arts. The Careers in the Arts Toolkit promotes inclusive and equitable practices and provides pertinent resources for artists with disabilities, arts employers, arts educators and arts grant makers.

Creating Inclusive Artist Demographic Surveys

The Association of Art Museum Curators Foundation has released Best Practices Guide for Artist Demographic Data Coordination to aid arts organizations in facilitating inclusive and equitable artist demographic and identity surveys. This publicly accessible guide was created in response to the need for reassessment of collecting and exhibiting art and artists. Within this guide, the term artist is used as broadly as possible to encompass makers and curators from a wide variety of mediums and traditions. The guide addresses all phases of a demographic survey, including questionnaire preparation, creation and implementation as well as data use, management and maintenance. It provides detailed insights into establishing inclusive processes for artist surveys, supplemented by relevant support material in the form of case studies and additional resources.

Engaging the Arts to Build Vaccine Confidence

The Center for Disease Control Foundation has released an impact report on the Center for Disease Control’s program to encourage COVID-19 vaccine confidence through the arts. The report suggests that the use of arts and cultural programming was effective because cultural institutions had existing platforms and audiences that trust them; it made medical information more engaging and accessible; and it supported a sense of community responsibility toward public health.

Implementing High-Quality After-School Arts Programs

The Wallace foundation has published a new report on after-school arts programming, Setting the Stage: Practical Ideas for Implementing High-Quality Afterschool Arts Programs. The research examines five Boys & Girls Club organizations that implemented the Youth Arts Initiative, which aims to bridge the gap in access to formative artistic experiences through a sustainable and scalable model of arts programming. Early lessons suggest that employing teaching artists with youth development skills was critical for program success. The organizations also found that quality arts space is often not scalable, but high-quality arts programming can still be implemented. Additionally, current, high-quality equipment and materials were seen as very important.