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