About this Webinar

Part 2 Deep Dive: Teaching Artists Unpack Using the Continuum to Understand Impact

September 21, 12:00 noon - 1:15 ET 

In this workshop, teaching artists Raz Salvarita (Philippines) and Francine Kliemann (Brazil) share their respective creative practices and projects as well as their evaluation efforts and learning using the Continuum of IMPACT.  Raz’s project, Unmasking Climate Injustices: Voices from the Past, Present, and Emerging Generations, aims to magnify citizens’ and students’ roles individually and collectively as activators, facilitators, and educators toward shifting community consciousness about climate change. Francine’s project, The School of the (Im)Possible, engaged eight- to 10-year-olds to give voice to the meaningful perspectives and expectations that youth bring regarding the future and issues of climate change. This workshop delves into the nitty gritty of how the Continuum was adopted and applied in each project to help specify desired outcomes and indicators and formulate a logic model and evaluation plan.  Raz and Francine will share what data they collected, how they approached data analysis, and what outcomes they were able to gauge. As teaching artists who are receiving continued support through the ITAC IMPACT: Climate initiative, they will talk about what that extended support is enabling toward policy and systems change.  ITAC’s Aislinn Ryan provides a preview of a 20-hour online curriculum that ITAC will offer for teaching artists and their allies to develop their own climate change projects, including a look at the evaluation curriculum.

Learning Objectives:

• Gain practical evaluation know-how through these artists’ adoption and practical application of the Continuum of IMPACT.
• Learn how the Continuum can help understand multiple layers of impact from individual to the collective. 
• Consider program design measures such as duration and multi-year funding to ensure sustainability of efforts that can further structural and systemic changes.  
• Consider how sharpened attention to civic or social outcomes may influence aesthetic choices and/or creative practice.

Students and community members engage with public artwork installation from Raz Salvarita’s Unmasking Climate Injustices project. Photo: Courtesy of Raz Salvarita

About this Series

Free 2-part series!

Continuum of IMPACT in Action!

Teaching Artists Addressing Climate Change around the World

Through its groundbreaking ITAC IMPACT: Climate initiative, the International Teaching Artist Collaborative (ITAC) is supporting teaching artists around the world to engage students and their local communities around pressing issues of climate change. Teaching artists from Brazil to Alaska to the Philippines and beyond are designing and leading innovative projects in schools and communities to raise awareness, educate, change minds and behavior, and to activate participation around a local climate challenge. Having impact around this pressing issue is imperative and evaluation is an integral part of the work for both ITAC and the teaching artists. To help, ITAC has embedded Animating Democracy’s Continuum of IMPACT as a central tool for sharpening desired outcomes and indicators of change and guiding artists’ evaluation planning, implementation, reporting, and communication.  

Part 1 – Big Picture: Evaluating Initiative- & Ground-Level Impact of ITAC IMPACT 

September 14, 12:00 noon - 1:15 ET 

ITAC’s Aislinn Ryan provides a big picture overview of the impetus and design of the IMPACT: Climate initiative, its goals, the range of projects supported, and how the Continuum of IMPACT has facilitated a consistent and doable approach to evaluating outcomes of teaching artists’ projects and the initiative on the whole. Teaching artist Katie Basile shares her project in Alaska for an on-the-ground look at her teaching artistry strategies and experience using the Continuum in project development and evaluation.  Click here for detail and to register for this free ArtsU webinar.

Part 2 – Deep Dive: Teaching Artists Unpack Using the Continuum to Understand Impact

September 21, 12:00 noon - 1:30 ET 

In this workshop, teaching artists Raz Salvarita (Philippines) and Francine Kliemann (Brazil) share their respective creative practices and projects and take a deep dive to share their evaluation efforts and learning using the Continuum of IMPACT.  Having completed their pilot projects, they’ll talk about how ITAC’s extended support is enabling continuing efforts toward policy and systems change. Participants will learn about a new online curriculum developed to help teaching artists and those who support and partner with them to develop their own climate change projects and evaluations of impact.  Click here for detail and to register for this free ArtsU webinar.

We recommend that registrants explore the Continuum of IMPACT prior to the webinars to gain familiarity, as only a brief introduction will be provided in Part 1.  

About this Webinar

Part 1 Big Picture: Evaluating Initiative & Ground Level Impact of ITAC IMPACT

September 14, 12:00 noon - 1:15 ET 

The International Teaching Artist Collaborative (ITAC) is forging important pathways for teaching artists, schools, community leaders, and funders who share concerns about climate crises as they escalate locally and globally. In this session, learn from ITAC’s Aislinn Ryan about its groundbreaking initiative, ITAC IMPACT: Climate, which provides a framework through which teaching artists can design and lead projects in their local communities to positively impact climate issues using teaching artistry. Gain an overview of the impetus for this initiative, its intents, program design, funding, and multi-year evolution. Most specifically, participants will gain insight into how Animating Democracy’s Continuum of IMPACT is being applied as an integral tool for evaluating the range of teaching artist-led projects and the initiative on the whole and, of course, what has been learned about impacts. Teaching artist Katie Basile will discuss her in-progress project using photography and drones with students in Napakiak, AK, concerning permafrost melt, flooding, and rapid erosion and her experience using the Continuum.  

Learning Objectives:

• Learn ways to apply the Continuum of IMPACT to define and evaluate initiative level and project level outcomes and indicators for creative issue-based projects, as artists, partners, and funders.  
• Learn how this initiative is building teaching artists’ capacity in evaluation through cohort orientation and exchange, connection with local climate experts, an online curriculum, and the ITAC Climate Collective.
• Gain deeper understanding of the role teaching artists and their partners can play to engage students and community members regarding local climate change concerns.

Students in Napakiak, AK using drones to capture shoreline erosion as part of Katie Basile’s teaching artist residency project with ITAC’s IMPACT: Climate initiative. Photo: Courtesy Katie Basile  

2022 Member Briefings

Member Briefings are our opportunity to talk to you about what’s happening now! These calls will take place once a quarter, so mark your calendars to stay up-to-date on what’s happening at Americans for the Arts and across the sector. These calls are for you, so let us know if there’s a topic you’d like to know more about by contacting membership at membership@artsusa.org.

Topics will be announced approximately two weeks prior to the scheduled briefing.

We firmly believe that our #AFTAmember network is one of our strongest resources, so after our update, we’ll open the floor up to your questions, comments, recommendations, and lessons learned – we hope you’ll take advantage of each other’s expertise!

March 2022

Topic: Six Principles for Transformational Change at Americans for the Arts with President and CEO Nolen Bivens

Date: March 8, 2022

August 2022

Topic: SRP Updates & Member Spotlight

Date: August 9, 2022

October 2022

Topic: TBD

Date: October 11, 2022

December 2022

Topic: TBD

Date: December 13, 2022

About this Webinar

June 16 @ 3:00 P.M. ET

Moved by the cultural and social reckoning catalyzed by the events of 2020, scholar, educator, and writer Jan Cohen-Cruz and artist and cultural worker Rad Pereira embarked on a journey.  Forty years apart in age, with different racial, gender, and national backgrounds, yet aligned in their commitment to a vibrant U.S. theater that responds to its time and place, they co-wrote, Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance 1965-2020 (released in June, New Village Press).  Based on nearly 100 interviews and exchanges, they capture the contributions and experiences of a diverse range of socially engaged theater and performance makers who reflect and lift up the many voices that make up the U.S. today.

Meeting the Moment provides a platform for a conversation that centers socially engaged artists—the unique roles they play, challenges they face in such intersectional work, and what they need to do that work effectively and in keeping with their values.

This session explores themes that emerged through the authors’ interviews such as:   

• their diverse influences and multiple approaches to education and training;
• the role played by race, circumstances, class, gender/sexuality, and other identity grounders;
• the rise in artists embedded in community development initiatives and collaborating with public agencies;
• the supports that are needed by artists who are equally committed to art and social justice to sustain them in life and work; and
• how 2020 has impacted socially engaged artists and may influence their directions moving forward. 

This webinar sets the stage for a fall event series, Animating Democracy / Reflecting Forward. The series considers the practice and progress of community-based and socially/civically engaged art and culture over recent decades, and its promise now and into the future.  It will bring together trailblazing artists and cultural leaders from Animating Democracy’s founding years along with this generation’s leading-edge practitioners from arts and other sectors to reflect back on and imagine forward the role of arts and culture, artists and culture bearers in animating democracy. 

This webinar is free as part of our support and service to the field. Please consider becoming a member or donating to Americans for the Arts to support ongoing access to resources like these for everyone. 

Jan Cohen-Cruz is a scholar, educator, and writer who has made vast contributions to building and sharing knowledge of community-based and socially engaged theater and arts. She wrote Local Acts, Engaging Performance, and Remapping Performance; edited Radical Street Performance; coedited with Mady Schutzman, Playing Boal and A Boal Companion; and co-authored with Rad Pereira, Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance, 1965-2020, by Those Who Lived It, published by New Village Press. From 2013-2019, she worked with A Blade of Grass, supporting socially engaged artists, serving as director of field research and co-founding its magazine. From 2007-2012, she directed Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a consortium of colleges and universities committed to civic engagement, and co-founded its journal, Public. Cohen-Cruz earned her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University and was a professor in the Drama Department, initiating its minor in Applied Theatre. In 2012, she received the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Award for Leadership in Community-Based Theatre and Civic Engagement. Jan was an evaluator for the U.S. State Department/Bronx Museum cultural diplomacy initiative smARTpower and for New York City’s Public Artists in Residence. She and Pam Korza researched and wrote the Municipal-Artist Partnership guide, a joint effort of A Blade of Grass and Animating Democracy/Americans for the Arts. Jan teaches at Touchstone Theatre/ Moravian University and, with her family, operates the Smokehouse Food Truck in eastern Pennsylvania. 

Rad Pereira is a queer, mixed Black, Indigenous Brazilian Jewish (im)migrant cultural worker building consciousness between healing justice, system change, reindigenization, and queer futures currently based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn). As a community artist, they created The (Im)Migrant Hustle and produced Bang Bang Gun Amok I + II at Abrons Art Center, Media Tools for Liberation with JackNY, and facilitated Decolonization Rave and Cosmic Commons with You Are Here. They are a 2017 New York City Public Artist in Residence with Department of Cultural Affairs and Children’s Services working with LGBQTIA foster youth. As an actor and director, Rad has contributed to stories at HBO, CBS, NBC, MTV, National Black Theatre, MITU350, The Public Theater, La Mama etc., Shakespeare Theatre in DC, Pittsburgh Public Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, The Bushwick Starr, Target Margin, Poetic Theater, Ars Nova, New Ohio, Sesame Street, Theatre 167 and various online media platforms. Rad has spoken and consulted at the Queens Museum, Rio de Janeiro Museum, Instituto Republica, PSU Art + Social Practice, SITI Company Thought Center, United Nations, A Blade of Grass, Superblue, Broadway Advocacy Coalition, The 8th Floor, Working Woman of Color Conference, Dance/NYC Symposium, and Culture/Shift. 

About this Webinar

This session offers an overview of ways the Aesthetics framework can be activated in evaluation of civically and socially engaged arts and culture projects and programs as well as action-based research.  These include: developing a shared language among artists and stakeholders about the creative work; defining indicators of artistic success; guiding data collection; designing ethnographic and developmental evaluations; and communicating findings and lessons learned.

While working as an evaluator and researcher at the Los Angeles County Dept. of Arts & Culture, Susannah Laramee Kidd, in collaboration with artist and community engagement coordinator Sara Daleiden, used the Aesthetic Perspectives framework in a formal evaluation of public art projects and community engagement at four county parks and libraries. 

Participants will learn how the Aesthetics framework was used to:

• analyze what aesthetic attributes of specific artworks and artistic processes contributed to success
• inform data collection tools that documented community members’ experience with creative work
• further stakeholders’ learning about public art impact and evaluation practices 

Looking for more on Aesthetic Perspectives? This webinar builds on the content in the webinar, Assessing Arts for Change: Understanding Aesthetic Perspectives. We recommend viewing this before attending. This webinar is part of the Activating the Aesthetic Perspectives Framework: A Tool for Funders, Evaluators & Artists collection.

This webinar is free as part of our support and service to the field, as is the Aesthetics Perspectives framework. Please consider becoming a member or donating to Americans for the Arts to support ongoing access to resources like these for everyone. 

We encourage registrants to become familiar with the Aesthetic Perspectives framework before attending these webinars so that we may give good time for the specific focus of each webinar. Find the free online Full version or the Short Take and a webinar on the framework below. 

About this Collection

Since its release in 2017, arts and cultural organizations, Local and State Arts agencies, funders, and evaluators have tapped the framework, Aesthetic Perspectives: Attributes of Excellence in Arts for Change, to support their grantmaking and evaluation.  Animating Democracy presents two webinars, one on Grantmaking and one on Evaluation, that shine light on how funders and evaluators and the artists they support have and can put this tool to work.

Developed by artists with ally evaluators and funders to address aesthetic and cultural biases and Eurocentric standards of excellence, Aesthetic Perspectives offers 11 attributes and inquiry questions to guide the development, implementation, and evaluation of creative practices and products in arts and community development, civic engagement, civic and social change, and justice work.

Join us to learn how you can apply the framework. Each session offers:

• An overview of multiple ways the framework can be activated
• A featured case presentation detailing how the framework has been applied 

Click the CONTENT tab to learn more about these two webinars!

Looking for more on Aesthetic Perspectives? This two-part collection builds on the content in the webinar, Assessing Arts for Change: Understanding Aesthetic Perspectives. We recommend viewing this before attending the sessions in this two-part collection.

This two-part collection is free as part of our support and service to the field, as is the Aesthetics Perspectives framework. Please consider becoming a member or donating to Americans for the Arts to support ongoing access to resources like these for everyone. 

About this Webinar

With the arts advocacy season fully upon us, join Randy Cohen, our VP of Research, to discuss the latest updates to the top “10 Reasons to Support the Arts” and get 10 case-making arrows to include in your arts advocacy quiver to convince anyone to support the arts.

This webinar is free as part of our support and service to the field. Please consider becoming a member or donating to Americans for the Arts to support ongoing access to resources like these for everyone. 

10 Reasons to Support the Arts in 2022 (Blog)

Americans Speak Out About the Arts Study (Public Opinion Poll)

Arts and Economic Prosperity 5 Study

Creative Industries Reports

State of the Arts in Healthcare Report

The Conference Board: Ready to Innovate Report

About this Webinar

This session offers an overview of ways the Aesthetic Perspectives: Attributes of Excellence in Arts for Change framework can be activated in the cycle of grantmaking: from designing and refining programs, to framing criteria for aesthetic characteristics, to preparing and guiding grant panel processes toward fair and equitable review of artistic practice and aesthetic qualities in arts for change work.  In the featured presentation, the Kentucky Foundation for Women shares how it has integrated the framework into its Bridging Divides grant program which supports two-year projects aiming for positive social outcomes for women and girls in Kentucky.  In its commitment to deepen understanding of impact of its grant support, KFW used the framework to guide grantee evaluation and mid-term and final reporting and the foundation’s own learning. 

During this webinar, we will...

• Share KFW’s commitment to a participatory evaluation approach and co-learning with grantees;
• Walk through KFW’s process and grantee reporting form which incorporates questions from the Aesthetics framework and experiments with a 4-point scale;
• Demonstrate how KFW has helped grantees gauge social or civic outcomes using Animating Democracy’s Continuum of IMPACT as well as aesthetic qualities/attributes that support excellent artistic practice and outcomes;
• Invite grantee reflections from Yes Arts on their experience of tapping the Aesthetics framework;
• Share KFW’s use of the Artists Thrive rubric to support KFW’s Equity and Access goals 

Looking for more on Aesthetic Perspectives? This webinar builds on the content in the webinar, Assessing Arts for Change: Understanding Aesthetic Perspectives. We recommend viewing this before attending. This webinar is part of the Activating the Aesthetic Perspectives Framework: A Tool for Funders, Evaluators & Artists collection.

This webinar is free as part of our support and service to the field, as is the Aesthetics Perspectives framework. Please consider becoming a member or donating to Americans for the Arts to support ongoing access to resources like these for everyone. 

We encourage registrants to become familiar with the Aesthetic Perspectives framework before attending these webinars so that we may give good time for the specific focus of each webinar. Find the free online Full version or the Short Take and a webinar on the framework below. 

About this Conversation

Join your peers for a free virtual conversation where we will explore how local arts leaders can expand their roles as arts leaders and increase their community impact by building relationships with their local economic developers and chambers. We'll hear examples from Mark Nerenhausen, President & CEO of Hennepin Theater Trust, as to how Hennepin has become a trusted and vital community and economic development partner, beyond being a leading arts organization in Minneapolis. This conversation will build upon the content in Part two of the How to Partner with your Local Chamber of Commerce collection. We recommend checking out the on-demand webinars and toolkit before joining us for this discussion.