Community Meeting Notes: Arts education
As part of its strategic planning process, WPF held twelve facilitated meetings, involving nearly 150 civic leaders, practitioners, public officials, and subject-matter experts in areas related to our grantmaking.
The following are notes taken at a meeting held on September 9, 2011 to discuss how WPF should approach future grantmaking in arts education.
Individuals participated with the understanding that they were speaking without attribution, so their names are intentionally omitted from these notes.
Meeting Purpose and Questions
WPF has been supporting Arts Education through collaboration
between its Arts & Culture and Children, Youth, & Families program
areas, with the major support being for the development and implementation of
ArtsRising, a collaboration among three nonprofits to expand arts education for
youth in the region in schools and in communities. In addition, the Foundation has supported
other work intended to augment the ArtsRising work, including state-wide
advocacy, technical assistance to help arts organizations scale their education
work, and exploring the capacity needs of the region’s community arts centers.
We invited representatives of arts organizations, education
providers and advocates, and technical assistance providers to discuss the
following questions:
Given where we are,
and what has been accomplished to date, are we on the right track? What
areas of inquiry/investment should we explore? What are others doing?
Given our desire for “systems change” and sustainable programs/projects, what’s
missing? What should we focus on, given the challenges of the School
District of Philadelphia?
Insufficient
resources are a major challenge for all aspects of arts education—nonprofits,
schools, public sector. There is need to
better leverage the scarce resources, through, for example: collaboration among
arts providers, higher education, schools; advocacy for support, including use
of parents and community members as advocates; and using indicators of
effectiveness to make the case for support.
There is a great
need to establish the case for arts education—including not only collecting
appropriate data but communicating it well.
Areas of need include: getting adequate School District of Phila (SDP)
data, understanding the impact of arts education on student performance, and
designing data collection that does not put an undue burden on arts
organizations. It is also important to
tie arts education to other education goals, such as reducing drop-outs.
While SDP has been
supportive of arts education in the last few years, leadership transition and
major budget problems are significant obstacles to expanding arts
education. Other issues with the school
district include personnel turnover and insufficient professional
development.
The ArtsRising
initiative has a solid start in 5 middle schools and their related zones, but
the program is not well known or understood outside of those 5 schools nor
beyond the arts organizations participating so far. There is need for more communications about
the initiative and for the documentation and dissemination of its effects. In addition, the issue of whether to go broad
or deep with the initiative needs to be resolved. How many youth and schools can be
served? What infrastructure is needed
within each organization to ensure quality service?
Guidance to WPF
Coalition Building – work to strengthen the network of
community organizations that are dedicated to education and the arts. Support the more diverse, smaller community
arts programs as well as the large main stream organizations. Look for opportunities for partnerships to
bring them together. Provide incentives to foster collaboration and help
organizations, especially smaller ones, band together to increase impact.
Capacity Building - support and train parents,
community members and teachers as advocates.
Develop innovative ways to provide much needed materials to schools
through resource banks.
Resources - use Foundation’s leadership to leverage
other funds. Establish a collaborative
among higher education institutions to better leverage resources in developing
pipeline of arts teachers. Incubation of
local grassroots models. If they are going to accomplish big important things,
then corporate and private foundations need to marshal resources.
Convener - pull together players from different
sectors including peer funders (statewide and national) to raise awareness of
issues and articulate them – it is an intellectual but important
conversation. Don’t be afraid to have
intellectual discourse.
Communications/Media - creation of case statement that
documents the connection between arts education and innovation, economic
development, and the facilitation of learning of other subjects. Deeper
discussion about implementation of policies.
Advocacy – look for opportunities to support advocacy
through parents and community members.
Create the environment for parent/community inclusion. Engage non-traditional partners.
Systems change – consider whether a systems change
approach (for ArtsRising) is realistic in the face of not having sufficient
resources (public or private) and leadership instability in SDP. Is there a different way to shape our funding
of arts education to achieve change?