Nearly 28 million U.S. adults have some type of disability related to hearing, sight, cognition, walking, and other activities of daily living. The latest NEA research offers the first, nationally representative analysis of arts-participation patterns among people with disabilities.
A Matter of Choice? Arts Participation Patterns of Disabled Americans offers several insights on how adults with disabilities engage with the arts. Among the key findings:
Featured Resources on Indicators
These tools and frameworks offer diverse information about indicators. This list has been assembled from many sources and fields and annotated by evaluator Suzanne Callahan of Callahan Consulting for the Arts.
The Advocacy Evaluation Project, orchestrated by Innovation Network (Innonet), began in 2005 to move the field of advocacy evaluation beyond assessing policy change into one that considers more fundamental and contributory components of advocacy efforts: capacity building, network formation, relationship building, communication, issue framing, and leadership development. In Phase I the Advocacy Evaluation Resource Center was created. Now a part of Innonet's Point K Learning Center (which requires a free login), the Resource Center is a database .
Publication Date: May 23, 2017
Resource Format: practical tool
Aesthetic Perspectives is a framework developed by Animating Democracy to enhance understanding and evaluation of Arts for Change—creative work at the intersection of arts and community/civic engagement, community development, and justice. Arts for Change projects often challenge the conventional terms by which creative work is described and assessed. In the U.S., evaluative practices—from academia to art criticism to funding panels—have historically been dominated by Euro-American values.
Resource Format: book / article
Continuum: Awareness, knowledge, understanding
In this article, author Alan Brown revisits and interprets the 2005 report, The Gifts of the Muse, published by the RAND Corporation and commissioned by the Wallace Foundation, with valuable analysis of how public value occurs from the core artistic experience. Starting with an individual experience, the cumulative impact of exposure to the arts can ripple through a community. Brown argues that artists and practitioners need a consistent language to communicate the transformative experience of the arts to funders and policymakers.
The site offers an overview of Urban Institute's Arts and Culture Indicators Project, defines cultural vitality, briefly addresses cultural vitality indicators, offers case study examples, and gives abstracts and links to high-quality relevant research studies. The site is a beautiful resource for arts and civic engagement practitioners and policymakers. Graphically strong with top notch research, it is a model for the field.
Resource Format: book / article
This 43-page report is a literature review commissioned by the Arts Council of England to support its two-year social inclusion research program. It examines the impact of arts in addressing social exclusion with the purpose of informing the design of the research and placing it in a policy context. The first section attempts to define social exclusion, offers ideas and obstacles to measuring it, and relates it to the arts.
Resource Format: case study
Arts for All, a partnership between the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Office of Education, and local partners, developed the School Arts Survey to measure the availability and quality of arts education throughout Los Angeles County. The survey was administered as a pilot to five Los Angeles County schools. Using 16 indicators of quality, access, and equity, the survey can be used to compare arts programs at different schools. Indicators of pedagogy, student learning, school environment, and community engagement were evaluated by school staff using a 10 point scale.
Publication Date: December 31, 2007
Resource Format: book / article
In order to better understand film as an agent of social change, this article offers examples of documentary films that have led to change in viewer behavior, public policy, and discourse. After examining the successful impact of these examples, the authors offer planning tools for outreach campaigns, an approach to assessing impact, and lessons learned. This article may be useful to the strategic design of programs and outreach efforts that aim to affect change.
Resource Format: practical tool
The Boston Youth Arts Evaluation Project (BYAEP) Framework responds to the need for an evaluation model that considers the combination of education, youth development and social services outcomes and that does justice to the beauty, complexity and holistic nature of such integrated work. The BYAEP model has the potential to provide useful comparisons of program evaluations between organizations and across disciplines.
Resource Format: practical tool, website
Published by the Alliance for Justice, this highly useful, interactive guide has two major parts: the Advocacy Capacity Assessment Tool (13 pages) and the Advocacy Evaluation Tool (11 pages). The graphically pleasing guide is made for foundations and grantees to help improve evaluation methods given the difficulties of showing cause-and-effect between advocacy and policy change. A user-friendly introduction explains the purpose of the tools, suggested uses, a definition for advocacy, how the tools can guide grantmaking decisions, and how the tools can be customized.
Resource Format: book / article
Written for Animating Democracy's Arts and Civic Engagement Impact Initiative, this 69-page paper speaks directly to arts and civic engagement work, surveys current research, and makes recommendations for future practice. The paper has three sections. The first attempts to define and differentiate civic terms: civic engagement, social capital, public sphere, community engagement, community and civic capacity, arts, culture, humanities, social inclusion, cultural citizenship, and the cultural public sphere.
Resource Format: case study
Collective Encounters (CE), a theater based in Liverpool, England, uses evaluation tools to measure its efforts to affect social change. This seven-page primer details CE’s evaluation policy framework, which distinguishes between feedback, monitoring, evaluation and advocacy.
An online service based at the University of Kansas, this extensive site aims to promote community health and development by connecting people, ideas and resources. With over 7,000 pages presented in user-friendly language, the Community Tool Box (CTB) hopes to build capacity for those who wish to change their communities for the better. Users can approach the site in five different ways: To read about specific skills in community work, users may click on the Table of Contents to locate the 46 chapters and nearly 300 distinct CTB sections.
Resource Format: practical tool, website
This site is an easy-to-follow guide for developing and enhancing arts programs for older adults. Essentially an online book with ten chapters, all of which are available as pdfs for easy printing, the toolkit is a good example of a "soup to nuts" approach to program design, including evaluation.
Resource Format: practical tool
This PDF is related to two resources: (1) the Cultural Planning Toolkit, and (2) a related Web Resource . The related web resource on integrating cultural and community planning offers more of an overview and is only nine pages long. It opens with a series of nice, concise definitions of cultural planning and some related terms.
This 104 page report (with eight chapters and seven appendices), based on extensive community research, discusses cultural vitality and gives extensive information on indicators. This piece -- primarily for evaluators, researchers, and policymakers -- is written in clear, user-friendly language. The fundamental goal of the Urban Institute's Arts and Culture Indicators Project (ACIP) is to help policymakers make better decisions for neighborhoods and cities.
Publication Date: May 23, 2017
Resource Format: practical tool
The Curator Companion to Animating Democracy’s framework, Aesthetic Perspectives: Attributes of Excellence in Arts for Change, offers ideas and insights to help curators working in/with visual arts and time- and performance-based projects to enhance understanding, description, and evaluation of such work at the intersection of artistic creation and civic engagement, community development, and social justice.
Resource Format: book / article, practical tool
This short book defines developmental evaluation and addresses some myths. Offering an alternative approach to linear logic of traditional methods, developmental evaluation supports the process of innovation within an organization and its activities. The book outlines developmental evaluation's uses in innovation and developing project ideas and defends the approach's credibility. It is an appropriate resource for organizations that work in an innovative manner and thus seems tailored to arts organizations.
Publication Date: May 23, 2017
Resource Format: practical tool
The Educator Companion to Animating Democracy’s framework, Aesthetic Perspectives: Attributes of Excellence in Arts for Change, offers ideas and insights to help educators and students apply the framework in curriculum development, faculty/student critique and review, planning community-based projects, assessing Arts for Change work using criteria aligned with the values of community-engaged scholarship, and more.
Resource Format: book / article, case study
Abstract: This paper tells two stories of how evaluation helped artists know what difference they made; their narratives help make evaluation concepts accessible and show how evaluation can be doable and even enjoyable! Most community-based arts practitioners feel overwhelmed by what it might take to implement credible evaluation. They’re pressed to define what is meant by “civic” or “social” impact, whose standards to apply, what evidence to look for, and what to document and track.
Resource Format: book / article, practical tool
These appendices are lists of indicators for evaluating the impact of leadership development programs.
This website is a good resource for individuals and community groups working for change in their communities, specifically with issues relating to race and racial equity. The site is written for users who are new to evaluation -or perhaps those who give funds related to racial equity, but who are not yet clear on how to evaluate it. The site discusses how to apply a “racialized” perspective to evaluation, meaning using the ideas of racism, oppression, privilege and access to power as a lens through which evaluation questions are developed and results are analyzed.
Publication Date: May 23, 2017
Resource Format: practical tool
The Evaluator / Researcher Companion guide to Animating Democracy’s framework, Aesthetic Perspectives: Attributes of Excellence in Arts for Change, offers ideas and insights to help evaluators and researchers apply the framework to address their needs and interests. Aesthetic Perspectives aims to enhance understanding and evaluation of creative work at the intersection of arts and community/civic engagement, community development, and justice.
Publication Date: May 23, 2017
Resource Format: practical tool
In the Funder Companion to Animating Democracy’s framework, Aesthetic Perspectives: Attributes of Excellence in Arts for Change, author Chris Dwyer of RMC Research offers ideas and insights to help funders apply the framework to address their needs and interests. Aesthetic Perspectives aims to enhance understanding and evaluation of creative work at the intersection of arts and community/civic engagement, community development, and justice.
Resource Format: practical tool
An outstanding piece, this 51-page handbook presents a great discussion of outcomes as they relate to policy and advocacy. Intended for grantmakers but useful for nonprofits as well, it encourages users to think about measurement of advocacy and policy efforts toward social change. It offers outcomes lists, examples of data collection tools, and many sample instruments from which users may benefit.