Animating Democracy: Cultivating a landscape for creative social change
Animating Democracy inspires, informs, promotes, and connects arts and culture as potent contributors to community, civic, and social change.
As a program of Americans for the Arts, we bring national visibility to arts for change work, build knowledge about quality practice, and create useful resources. By demonstrating the public value of creative work that contributes to social change and fostering synergy across arts and other fields and sectors, we work to make the arts an integral and effective part of solutions to the challenges of communities and toward ensuring a healthy democracy.
Animating Democracy places high value on learning from and building capacity and visibility for practitioners’ work on the ground. At the same time Animating Democracy brings to bear Americans for the Arts’ strengths in research, policy, professional development, visibility, and advocacy specifically to advance and elevate arts for change work on field, cross-sector, and national levels.
Animating Democracy routinely connects and collaborates with other organizations and field leaders working at the heart of arts for change in order to draw on expertise and different perspectives in the planning and implementation of our programs and services.