Community Arts Councils, Inc. (CACI) is the ancestor of today’s Americans for the Arts and as we look ahead to our 50th anniversary in 2010, we want to take this occasion to reflect upon effective arts development as we celebrate this movement that has grown from about 400 local arts agencies in 1960 to an estimated 5,000 today.

This essay underscores the crucial contributions of this segment of cultural organizations in the cultural ecosystem and toward achieving healthy communities and a healthy democracy.

Publishing and distributing these Grantmakers in the Arts essays is part of our ongoing commitment to sharing information and deepening the understanding between local arts agency grantmakers and their partners in the private funding community.

This study examines the size and structure of the arts sector and systems of support in major metropolitan areas and identifies strategies for sustainability, with the aim of providing policy recommendations to the city of Philadelphia.

This new version of The Arts in the Small Community - a National Plan maintains the organization and all the "big" and timeless ideas of the original as well as the examples from the five test communities, but has supplemented it with contemporary examples from communities all across the country including urban and suburban. Discussions on business, public education, and communications were rewritten to reflect the evolution on these fronts in the past thirty-five years. An appendix summarizes what is happening in the test communities today.

This Monograph tells the story of the Arts Council of Greater Lima (Ohio), which harnessed the power of the arts to prompt civic action, and high-lights best practices culled from the experiences of 37 arts and humanities projects.

Dialogue in Artistic Practice explores the work of three exemplary artist companies. Case studies examine the Animating Democracy projects implemented by these companies, as well as their long traditions of community engagement, to highlight how dialogue is inherently a part of their artistic practice. Through a form that alternates dance performance and dialogue, Urban Bush Women’s Hair Parties Project taps personal experiences to generate dialogue about the politics of hair within the African-American community and to examine deeper issues of race, class, and

Until 2003, local public funding for the arts stayed ahead of inflation and even showed growth during the recession years of the early 1990s. In 2003, aggregate funding estimates dropped for the first time in 15 years, from $800 million to $770 million. In 2004, local arts funding will drop an estimated 4 percent to $740 million. This Monograph discusses a number of factors that decision-makers should consider when evaluating public funding for the arts; presents an overview of policy strategies; and describes the innovative efforts of arts advocates to restore, sustain, and increase public

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer</SPAN> Doris Kearns Goodwin gave the 17th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy on March 29, 2004 at the The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

To provide the most accurate answers to these questions, Americans for the Arts conducts an extensive triennial survey to measure the status and condition of the LAA field. Here are the in-depth findings from our Fiscal Year 2000 Survey of Local Arts Agencies.