When elected officials don’t hear from their constituents about the arts and culture, they could easily assume that arts issues aren’t important to their voters. That is why it is imperative that arts advocates speak up regularly by letting key decision makers know their positions. To help you get ready, the Americans for the Arts’ Government Affairs team along with the Arts Action Fund will host this timely webinar entitled Advocacy 101 on March 29 at 3 p.m. ET. Learn how you can advocate for the arts on the local, state, and federal levels both as an individual and organization. Hear from arts advocacy veterans on tips and tools to make your work as effective as possible.

The Americans for the Arts’ Government Affairs team will host this timely advocacy webinar on Congressionally Directed Spending Requests (Earmarks) on March 2 at 3 p.m. ET. Learn about the earmark process; best practices for securing an earmark; and examples of how nonprofit arts, governmental arts, and arts education groups secured millions of dollars last year. The application period for earmarks is short, so please attend to learn how to navigate the process quickly and efficiently.

Listen to Vanessa Cruz and Beth Prevor discuss how organizations can be proactive in addressing accessibility and disability justice in their budgets. Vanessa and Beth push the audience to see how local art agencies can make things accessible that look like art in their 30 minutes pre-recorded conversation.

Listen to Dominic Bradley and Lily Lipman discuss the complexity of accountability within Disability Justice as a topic area that is still being discovered. Dominic and Lily work to inspire the audience to dig deeper in their 30 minutes pre-recorded conversation.

Listen to Joselia Hughes and Kayla Hamilton discuss deeply how disability justice is uniquely positioned to break down systematic oppressions. Disability justice as an ethos and a practice - gives shape to a day and how you perceive an experience. How can your local art agency or organization bring forward a consciousness of changing siloed or monolithic perceptions to inclusive ideology.

Further building on Parts 1 and 2 of the How to Partner with Your Chamber of Commerce Series, participants will look to rural communities and consider how innovative partnerships can be used as inspiration or scaled to suburban and urban areas for long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships. This module will explore practical ways of orienting local economies around "Quality of Place" and of rethinking the individual roles of arts and business in a local economy. It will demonstrate how navigating public/private partnerships can strengthen the relationship between the business and arts sectors. This module will explore, in varying depth, case studies in multiple rural communities, and highlight how these arts and chamber entities have worked together to build community wealth, deepen alliances, and expand opportunity for artists and businesses alike. This Part will ask the questions: When the LAA is seen as a respected and equal partner to their chamber and economic development entities, what are you advocating for together? What can you do together that you can’t do alone? Participants are encouraged to use the toolkit as complimentary learning, and participate in a live discussion with presenters once completing the 3-part on-demand webinar series.

Just as local arts agencies act as voices and conveners for their arts and culture communities, so do local chambers of commerce for their business communities. This three-part curriculum will guide local arts leaders on how to build strong and lasting partnerships with their local chambers of commerce to achieve shared community and economic development goals. The collection and accompanying toolkits will focus attention on how local arts leaders can build business-to-business (B2B) relationships, shift thinking and actions to one of a creative business that positions one’s assets differently, and position their local arts agency as a driving force for equitable community and economic development alongside their private sector partners. This collection aims to flip the conversation away from ‘business support of the arts’ to ‘how and why the arts are an essential part of business and community development strategies.'

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.

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.

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.