The California Arts Council offers this toolkit to advocate support for the arts in the state. The toolkit outlines the impact of the recent state budget cuts to the agency and to the arts in the state. California currently ranks last among the 50 states in per capita support for the arts. It includes flyers, program inserts, a sample newsletter article, and an announcement card that can be read to an audience before a live performance.

This paper focuses on the cultural future of small cities and on how cultural and arts organizations work together (or fail to work together) in a small city setting.

This article takes the first steps toward characterizing both professional and amateur artists simultaneously and uses General Social Survey data to build probabilistic portraits of active arts participation.

This essay suggests a healing and strengthening role for the arts in this altered world. The beneficial function of the arts in health care has been documented over the past 20 years, with significant evidence that the arts have a powerful healing capacity when incorporated into hospitals, treatment facilities, senior care programs, and rehabilitation programs.

The importance of cultural institutions to contemporary revitalization efforts in U.S. cities is attributed to several factors, including cities' dependence on their consumption economies, cultural institutions' interest in improving their surroundings, and cultural institutions' abilities to draw on serious and popular art forms.

This paper reviews recent empirical studies of community service, service learning, and volunteering, and then frames the consistently strong evidence that participation in clubs and organizations during adolescence leads to higher levels of civic engagement during adulthood.

Part of the government agenda recognises that arts and culture have an important contribution to make to education and social inclusion in ways that more formal education and social policy approaches struggle to achieve. Bread and Roses examines this contribution and explores the relationship between arts and culture and lifelong learning, especially in overcoming social exclusion.

A Report from the First Joint Convention of Americans for the Arts and the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies

The current way government and nonprofits respond to change is by following the clearly defined corporate model. To help develop new methodologies, the author advocates for the re-introduction of the notion of meaning into public life.

Over the last two years, a team of ethnographers from the Chicago Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College (CCAP) conducted a research study in the Chicago metropolitan region, investigating adult participation in the “informal arts” (sometimes called “unincorporated arts”). The informal arts encompass such diverse experiences as acting in community theater, singing in a church choir, writing poetry at the local library, or painting portraits in a home studio. These popular creative activities fall outside traditional non-profit and commercial arts experiences, and