Arts Education
Grantmakers in the Arts holds arts education as one of its core funding focus areas. GIA is committed to invigorate funding and support for arts education within federal policy and defend that every resident has access to the arts as part of a well-rounded, life-long education. In 2012, GIA formed the Arts Education Funders Coalition (AEFC), an interest group within GIA, to address identified needs in comprehensive arts education and to strengthen communication and networking among arts education funders. Advised by a committee of Coalition members, GIA engaged the services of Washington, DC-based Penn Hill Group, a firm with education policy expertise and experience working with diverse education groups to research, develop, and promote educational policy strategies.
Most recently, GIA worked with Representative Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) on the development of the Arts Education for All Act, the broadest arts education policy bill ever introduced in Congress.
In Spring 2021, GIA influenced the U.S. Department of Education to highlight the importance of equitable access to arts and culture to the process of reopening schools and to make explicit how racialized this access was prior to the pandemic and that addressing this inequity is essential to effective reopening.
Grantmakers in the Arts is delighted that in 2020 Congress passed the Supporting Older Americans Act, including our recommendations that the Administration on Aging include the arts in the issues to be identified and addressed and be included among supportive services for older Americans.
GIA has successfully lobbied to include arts-related provisions in the Child Care for Working Families Act, which proposes to better help low-income families pay for childcare and expand high-quality state preschool options.
GIA is extremely proud of our work over the past several years on raising the visibility of the arts in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in its legislative form. GIA and Penn Hill Group continue these advocacy efforts around the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), guiding GIA members and their grantees in advocating for new or expanded arts programs at their local schools and districts.
ARTWorks for Kids, part of the Hunt Alternatives Fund, garners sustained private and public support of arts organizations in Eastern Massachusetts and promotes the arts in classrooms, afterschool programs, and the larger community. This brochure is aimed at arts education advocacy.
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Making the Policy Case for Public Investment in Youth Arts (564Kb)
Grantmakers in the Arts – 2009 Conference – Sunday, October 18, 2009
Morning: Opportunities in Arts Education: What’s Different Now?
Read More...In October 2007, GIA and Grantmakers for Education (GFE) scheduled our respective annual conferences consecutively so that we could plan a collaborative program on arts and education. Over 90 funders took part in the Weekend, either extending their stay after the GFE conference, or arriving early before the GIA conference. A small group of members attended all three conferences and we asked a few of them to write about their experience.
Read More...Every field develops a language of its own which is generally understood by those immersed in that field. In the last twenty years Arts Education has in fact become a field and as such has a vocabulary all its own. This is not to say that those deeply involved in arts education all speak the same languagethere are variations and nuances to the terms that can mystify and confound even the most experienced arts educators. But for those who do not have a background in arts education, it can be a veritable Tower of Babel.
Read More...The Principals’ Arts Leadership (PAL) program was created by ArtsEd Washington in 2004 to inform and support elementary school teams, led by principals, in the development and implementation of school arts plans to increase arts education. Each school’s plan was intended to build on and reflect the unique pathway appropriate to that school’s characteristics and community, using existing and new resources.
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The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education; By Steve Seidel, Shari Tishman, Ellen Winner, Lois Hetland, Patricia Palmer. Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education (Cambridge, MA), 2009, 121 pages. Commissioned by The Wallace Foundation with additional support from the Arts Education Partnership
Read More...I began my work life over thirty years ago writing poems with children in my daughter’s kindergarten class. At that time, I didn’t think of myself as a community artist, the descriptor I’d come to use in a few years. I thought of myself as a mother, a volunteer, a lover of poems, and as someone who had fun sharing imagination with kids.
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