Partners for Livable Communities (Partners) releases, “Arts Organizations and Public Health,” a guide to creating partnerships between art and health organizations. This primer was designed for the arts organization that wishes to initiate programming focused on local health issues, or create partnerships with health groups in order to best meet the needs of the community. Arts Organizations and Public Health identifies best practices of diverse arts organizations from around the United States to inform this work. The best practices can be used as references, and are cited throughout the publication to correlate with text.
Subject Term: Arts Education
Arts Council: The Government Agency for Funding and Developing the Arts in Ireland
From the Arts Council of Ireland website:
The Arts Council of Ireland is the Irish government agency for developing the arts. We work in partnership with artists, arts organisations, public policy makers and others to build a central place for the arts in Irish life.
Art Therapy: Enhancing the Lives of Older Adults
From the toolkit:
Art can be a powerful activity for older adults. For many seniors art is a lifelong passion, for others, art is a hobby that they never had the time to pursue. No matter the situation, having an art program in your community can contribute substantially to the overall quality of life of your residents.
ArtCare: The Story of How an Arts Program Can Transform Long Term Care
ArtCare is a unique program that brings community artists, students and volunteers into Luther Manor Adult Day Care Center for art residencies with the Adult Day Care participants. ArtCare also provides trainings of how to work with persons with Alzheimer’s and provides general information on the nature of Alzheimer’s disease.
Association of Writers & Writing Programs
From the Association of Writers & Writing Programs site:
AWP provides support, advocacy, resources, and community to nearly 50,000 writers, 550 college and university creative writing programs, and 150 writers’ conferences and centers. Our mission is to amplify the voices of writers and the academic programs and organizations that serve them while championing diversity and excellence in creative writing.
Age-Friendly New York City
From the Age-Friendly NYC Site:
Started as a public-private partnership in 2007, NYAM’s Age-friendly NYC initiative has catalyzed hundreds of changes throughout the city. We have successfully created Age-friendly Neighborhoods, increased pedestrian safety, showed thousands of businesses how to become age-friendly, and improved transportation and access to recreational and cultural resources for the city’s older adults. Age-friendly NYC was awarded “Best Existing Age-Friendly Initiative in the World” by the International Federation on Aging in 2013 and has provided strategic assistance to more than 70 cities worldwide.
National Guild for Community Arts Education Benchmarking Data Report 2019
From the National Guild for Community Arts Education site:
The latest edition of the National Guild’s Benchmarking Data Report is now available! This report contains a wealth of data—on staff and faculty compensation, instructional fees, income and expense ratios, and more—that can inform your planning and budgeting and help funders and policy makers better understand the needs and impact of our field. The data, gathered from 179 Guild member organizations, is presented in easy to read charts and tables.
For the first time, the report also includes sections on racial equity, creative aging, and analysis of salary information by organization type, type of community served, and organizational budget size.
Data was collected in 2019 before the pandemic and this summer’s uprising and call to reckoning about structural racism and anti-Black violence. This means that the data provides a valuable snapshot of where the community arts education field was just before these transformational events.
Accessing the Report
The 2019 Benchmarking Data Report is available to all Guild members that participated in the survey, free of charge. For access, contact programs@nationalguild.org.
The report is also available for purchase. Guild members receive a discounted rate (Guild membership is currently “pay what you can”).
Rebuilding Pathways: How DEAI and Creative Aging Intersect at the Speed Art Museum
This blog post features critical insights about how museums are poised to think differently about serving all older adults through the delivery of creative aging programming.
Toya Northington, Community Outreach Manager at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, shares examples of how museums can approach programming with diversity, equity, access, and inclusion in mind. She draws from her own life, as well as from “Our Life, Our Stories,” a creative aging workshop that was made possible through Seeding Vitality Arts in Museums, a partnership between Aroha Philanthropies, the American Alliance of Museums, and Lifetime Arts.
Ms. Northington offers the following pointers “for doing creative aging programs that honor our elders’ experiences as part of a commitment to DEAI:”
- Language is important
- You have to think about intersectionality
- Diversity doesn’t happen naturally
- We need to be willing to sit down and listen to people
- Ask people to tell you their stories
- Think about intergenerational programming
Click through to the post to learn more.
Keeping Generations Connected at New England Conservatory
The New England Conservatory of Music (NEC) works with more than 40 senior service organizations around Boston to welcome approximately 75 older adult learners onto their campus each week. When the pandemic initially hit, NEC knew they had to quickly adapt to a virtual world and maintain the connection between their older adult students, faculty, college students and community partners. Faculty and staff transitioned their one-on-one lessons to a virtual format and creating innovative and responsive virtual programs for large groups of senior participants.
Online Choir Program Retains “Friendships, Solidarity and Community”
Since March 2020, the San Francisco Community Music Center (CMC) has developed several new ways to adapt their Older Adult Choir Program (OACP), which serves nearly 400 older adults in senior centers throughout San Francisco, to a successful online learning platform. To keep their dynamic choir communities connected during COVID-19, the CMC worked with their senior center partners, where brick and mortar choirs take place, to create instructional videos on their YouTube Channel, which led to implementing sessions on Zoom.