A gathering of participants from ACTA's Community Leadership Project.
Working with Small Arts Organizations
Enriching our culture and engaging diverse and underserved communities, small arts organizations pop up, flourish, and sometimes flounder, mostly under the philanthropic radar. They often foster artistic expressions not adequately served by larger organizations. From Alliance for California Traditional Arts’ intermediary work in the Community Leadership Project and our joint field research on small organizations for the James Irvine Foundation–funded report California’s Arts and Cultural Ecology (2011), we’ve learned how small arts nonprofits are undercounted, how broad ranging, sustainable, and valuable they are, and how they differ from larger organizations.
Sharing ways that funders can better work with smaller arts nonprofits to further their missions, we urge philanthropy to nurture a fuller range of artistic expression in our contemporary world.
Learn more in this report by ACTA Executive Director Amy Kitchener and Ann Markusen, director of the Arts Economy Initiative at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, and Principal of Markusen Economic Research.
