Arts and Culture
Strategy Overview
Our Arts and Culture funding supports institutions, programs, and initiatives working to bridge the arts and culture accessibility gap across our region. We offer funding through three strategies—one that provides valuable, general operating support to diverse and culturally relevant arts and culture organizations, another offering young people an entry point to and training in the arts, and a third that seeks to increase opportunities for people across the region to engage with a wide range of high-quality arts experiences.
Arts Presentation and Art Making
Arts and culture programming can provide benefits for individuals and communities, such as strengthening relationships among participants, establishing strong connections to neighborhoods, and fostering understanding and appreciation of various cultures and lived experiences.
Unfortunately, the benefits of these programs are not well distributed across the communities that contribute so much to our region’s diversity and vibrancy. As a result, our Arts Presentation and Art Making strategy supports projects that seek to achieve greater equity through their program design and presentation and with the audiences they serve. Funding will focus on supporting the planning, creation, and presentation of work that offers relevant and accessible ways for more people to connect with arts and culture.
Arts Education
Arts education allows young people of all ages to connect to their own creativity, to stretch their imaginations, and express their personalities. Thoughtfully designed and delivered arts learning can act as a safe space for that expression, allowing young people to share personal stories, process conflict and trauma, and develop interpersonal and cultural awareness. These opportunities can also help older students gain skills needed in post-secondary education and the workplace.
Funding through the Arts Education strategy supports programming that provides young people with hands-on arts learning led by skilled teaching artists and arts educators. We look to fund projects and programs, working in and out of schools, that are culturally relevant and make it possible for youth to engage as leaders and drivers of their own arts learning experiences.
Arts and Culture Hubs
Arts and culture organizations create positive social, economic, and community benefits for people across the region while strengthening cultural diversity and connections. However, we know that not all benefits of arts and culture are distributed or experienced equitably across communities, especially in low-income communities or ones with higher populations of people of color.
To this end, the Arts and Culture Hubs strategy supports organizations and institutions in the Greater Philadelphia region whose efforts address this inequity and provide equitable, inclusive, and high-quality arts and culture programs and experiences for all. We look to support organizations as they deepen and expand their commitment to racial equity and economic inclusion by providing flexible resources to invest in staff, operations, and programming.