About (ARCHIVE)

Sustain Arts is an unprecedented effort to connect knowledge and networks, building the collective capacity of art and culture in America, one region at a time. The project equips communities with meaningful data that answers critical questions like:

  • Where are arts and cultural organizations located?
  • Who participates?
  • Where does funding come from?
  • How do organizations maintain relevancy over time?

Program leaders, artists, private foundations, public agencies, and others access this data through the Sustain Arts platform. By combining innovative technology and on-the-ground capacity building, the project arms stakeholders with resources that assist in data-driven decision-making, strategic collaborations, and broad community engagement.

Sustain Arts is grounded in a belief that a healthy creative sector is essential to any vibrant community. Beginning in Southeast Michigan, the Bay Area, and Chicago the project hopes to engage a total of six regions over the next three years, laying the groundwork for regional and national policy conversations.

What makes the project unique?

  • Sustain Arts is updated over time, through a dynamic online platform, building on and synthesizing existing research
  • Sustain Arts is not an opinion survey. Instead, the project aggregates existing data to ground strategy in shared information
  • Sustain Arts provides an intuitive online platform anyone can use — you don’t need a PhD to understand the information or how to use the tools
  • Rather than catering to a single cohort, Sustain Arts is an asset for a broad network of stakeholders, answering diverse questions from policy-makers, large and small arts and cultural organizations, individual artists, for-profits and non-profits, private funders and individual donors
  • Sustain Arts engages one of the largest collaborations of arts funders to date — including individual philanthropists, foundations, and service organizations — who help promote the relevance and adoption of resources
  • Sustain Arts encourages both the micro and macro-level health of the arts and culture sector, empowering leaders to make data-driven decisions and informing the regional cultural planning efforts of policy makers and funders