the Economic and Social Impact of the Arts on Urban and Community Development
This is a pivotal moment for Seattle. King Canton, Washington is experiencing rapid growth, attracting new companies and a diversifying, expanding population. We are also grappling with pressing challenges around education, homelessness, healthcare and mental health, workforce evolution, and income inequality. The benefits of our region's growth are not broadly shared, and inequities persist. To ensure a healthy and equitable hereafter, we need to detect new mechanisms to solve these interconnected, complex challenges.
To inject insights about how arts tin can play a role in addressing these needs, ArtsFund, a Seattle-based grantmaking and advancement nonprofit, recently published the Social Impact of the Arts Written report: How Arts Impact Male monarch County Communities. Defining "social impact" as the power to advance community priorities, we focused on fundamental areas where arts intersect with our region'due south challenges. We center on equity throughout, examining how arts can lessen the opportunity gap. Over the past ten years, a significant body of research that connects fine art to positive community outcomes has emerged. We reviewed over 150 of these resources, conducted a landscape scan of 200 arts nonprofits in King County, and profiled ten regional case studies.
Our report offers a new way of looking at things—how investment in the arts is a proactive, strategic investment in customs—with potential implications for advancing and amplifying the social impact of the arts in other localities. Framed by the data, let'due south await at v key means arts advance positive and equitable social outcomes.
Promoting Youth Development and Instruction
Already in 2019, Seattle Times editorials accept given repeat coverage to the urgent need to provide students employable skills, mental health support, and early learning, and to enhance aid for youth involved in social services. Sustained arts involvement for youth can help directly meet these needs. Research clearly shows interest in arts tin can better bookish and social outcomes for youth across socio-economic status and across all ages, leading to higher exam scores, improved disquisitional thinking skills and executive function, and a amend ability to regulate emotions. This is especially the case for youth from low-income backgrounds. Knowing depression income youth have the well-nigh to proceeds, and yet often have the to the lowest degree exposure to arts programs, suggests that creating this access will help close the opportunity gap.
In our region, over eighty% of arts nonprofits offering programs for youth and education. 1 example, Urban Artworks, provides justice-involved youth on probation with job training and life skills as they install murals throughout the region. A staggering data betoken: 83% of Urban Artworks youth don't re-offend. For these kids trying to move out of the juvenile justice arrangement, art is creating an offramp from the school-to-prison pipeline.
Promoting Health and Wellness
We are living longer, just are nosotros living amend? In and out of medical settings, arts can better individual and community health, reducing stress and anxiety and helping cope with trauma and symptoms of illness. Nationwide, 45% of medical institutions offer some sort of arts program, primarily doing so to do good patient recovery.
Most mental-wellness issues brainstorm to sally in adolescence. Young people participating in local programs like Seattle Arts & Lectures "Writers in the Schools" programme country, "It saved my life." The idea that a high-quality outlet for self-expression tin can salve lives isn't exaggeration when suicide rates and depressive feelings reported past teens are increasing at shocking pace.
Crumbling adults, and those with diseases that crusade dementia, show especially favorable wellness impacts. For an aging person, social isolation has a negative wellness impact equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Programs similar Seattle Theatre Group's Trip the light fantastic for PD® connect people through dance, reducing isolation. Arts can exist a powerful antidote, leading to longer lives, better lived.
Fostering Neighborhood Vitality
Consider the stakes if, every bit our population grows, we aren't open to cultures and perspectives unlike than our own. When arts are present, there'southward documented increment in neighborhood livability, community identity, and social inclusion. This builds community cohesion and helps span cultural divides, outcomes especially resonant in a region growing as rapidly as ours. Cities with high concentrations of art likewise track improved child welfare outcomes, forth with reductions in crime and poverty. And the results are magnified in depression income neighborhoods.
Hither'due south where local examples like Path with Art come in. Working with 750 homeless and formerly homeless adults each year, Path with Art uses art and music to back up and empower vulnerable populations, bridge divides, foster trust, and transform lives. In this instance, art likewise provides an entry bespeak for connexion to social services.
Adding a Competitive Edge to Business
Businesses likewise benefit from strong arts sectors. Artistic thinking is fundamental to our growing economy. Arts build 21st century skills cardinal to developing local talent and the hereafter of work. Male monarch Canton is known to host an innovative corporate landscape, and our local businesses do good from an arts-educated pipeline of workers and rely on thriving arts sectors to attract and maintain a creative workforce. From a competitive perspective, places that invest in and promote arts thinking through their education and workforce systems, and that are host to a range of arts amenities and an openness and tolerance of ideas, accept a singled-out advantage in the future economic system.
Partnering beyond sectors
Arts aren't working in isolation. In our area, more 4 out of 5 arts organizations are working together with schools, refugee and immigrant organizations, hospitals and clinics, senior centers, city departments, ecology organizations, and many more than. For case, in add-on to popular mainstage performances, Jet City Improv works year-round with a youth substance use disorder handling center, and Seattle Arts and Lectures partners with Seattle Children's Hospital to bring instruction artists to hospitalized children and teens.
The results are clear: when art is integrated with another intervention and in complement to traditional approaches to social bug, it makes people more successful.
Our research uncovered a disconnect between public perception of the value of the arts and their impact. While 79% of King County residents believe arts benefit their personal wellbeing, and 60% cite them as a key factor in their determination to live in the area, but 28% recall arts and culture promote social alter at a community level. Examining the social impacts of the arts brings attention to new possibility, and to an aspect of solving customs challenges that isn't broadly acknowledged—the public benefits of the arts. If we are to see our most pressing challenges, nosotros will need to observe a fashion to leverage and aggrandize the powerful social impacts of the arts so that more people and more communities can benefit.
ArtsFund'southward study was a product of cross-sector partnership and support, including funding from: The Boeing Visitor, Seattle Foundation, 4Culture, the Glenn H. Kawasaki Foundation, King County, Seattle Office of Arts & Civilisation, Swedish, Peter and Susan Davis, Peter Horvitz, the Nesholm Family Foundation, Carlo and Lalie Scandiuzzi, Starbucks Coffee Company, the Tagney Jones Family unit Fund, and an anonymous donor. Support for the Social Touch on Study Customs Conversations is provided by: 4Culture, The Boeing Company, King County, Sound, and Seattle Office of Arts & Civilization.
ArtsFund is a Seattle-based non-turn a profit that has been strengthening the Puget Sound community by supporting the arts through leadership, advocacy and grant-making since 1969. Our study is designed to exist replicable across geographies and bear on areas; more information, and open-sourced process documents, available at world wide web.artsfund.org/socialimpact.
Americans for the Arts' Arts + Social Impact Explorer, examining the themes mentioned here and more, is available at http://www.americansforthearts.org/socialimpact.
Source: https://www.americansforthearts.org/2019/04/30/the-art-of-community-building-leveraging-the-social-impact-of-the-arts
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