Wallace Foundation Announces $40 Million Effort to Help Arts Organizations Thrive
The Wallace Foundation has announced a six-year, $40-million arts initiative, Building Audiences for Sustainability, designed to help about 25 outstanding performing arts organizations across the United States create programs that attract new audiences while retaining existing ones. This initiative aims to provide meaningful support to arts organizations whose artistic vision and mission involve building audiences. The foundation also seeks to understand and share evidence and experiences from these organizations on whether and how they can achieve and sustain audience gains, and whether these gains improve their overall financial health.
In this way, the initiative aims both to strengthen the organizations and to generate knowledge to benefit the broader field.
The foundation also released a report, The Road to Results: Effective Practices for Building Arts Audiences, that identifies and explains nine actions that arts organizations can take to increase the chances they will succeed in engaging audiences. These nine practices were identified in an analysis of the audience-building efforts of 10 arts organizations that took part in an earlier Wallace initiative, the Wallace Excellence Awards.