The Arts & Coalition Building

Part of the Transforming America’s Communities Through the Arts Initiative, started in 2015, includes increasing visibility for the arts and Americans for the Arts. During the second year of the campaign, in addition to continuing our advertisements on NPR, we focused advertisements that illustrate how the arts transform communities--through education, through health & wellness, through civic engagement & voting, tourism, and more. We also recognize all our awardees and honorees annually to help bring visibility to all those making impacts in their communities using the arts.

Our NPR campaign reached more than 25 million listeners. In March, we ran our Arts Advocacy Day ad in The Hill, Politico, and Roll Call for a total circulation of 80,000. This fall, we placed an ad featuring all our cross-sector honorees from 2016 in nine publications with a total circulation of 218,100. Other topic-based ads were placed in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Independent Sector’s new quarterly magazine, Nonprofit Quarterly, and Nonprofit Times for a total circulation of 105,000.

Americans for the Arts merged with the Business Committee for the Arts in 2008, formalizing and prioritizing the connections between the arts community and the business community. In 2016, we introduced a new series of workbooks designed to encourage collaborations between arts and business. The Employee Engagement Workbook series features three in-depth case studies, with more upcoming.

On May 5, 2016, Americans for the Arts and the Business Committee for the Arts introduced The David Rockefeller Lecture Series, named for David Rockefeller, founder of the Business Committee for the Arts for the Americans for the Arts program and former Chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan Corporation. This new annual lecture series was created to advance Rockefeller’s belief that the arts are essential to free enterprise and human achievement, and to encourage businesses to form alliances with the arts as an expression of their broader responsibility to their communities.

In March 2016, Americans for the Arts convened the first State Policy Symposium, part of our State Policy Pilot Program focused on arts education. The Symposium was presented in collaboration with The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Education Commission of the States, and Arts Education Partnership. Attendees discussed the impending impacts of the new Every Student Succeeds Act legislation, state-level funding issues, and other policy initiatives. The three-year State Policy Pilot Program was started in 2014 to better understand complicated education policy topics ranging from teacher effectiveness and high school graduation requirements to Title I funding and equitable implementation of state policies.