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Recent Press Releases
FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
November 12, 2003
Contact: Suzanne Sousa, National Guild of Community Schools of the
Arts
NATIONAL GUILD RELEASES PRELIMINARY
REPORT ON LANDMARK CREATIVE COMMUNITIES INITIATIVE!
Study Identifies Benefits, Critical Success Factors in Delivering
Arts Programs to Underserved Youth in Public Housing Communities
The National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts has announced
publication of an Interim Evaluation Report
regarding its Creative Communities Initiative, the first national
program model to bring arts education to children and youth in public
housing communities across the country. The organization commissioned
independent research to assess the National Guild’s ability
to effectively implement Creative Communities and to determine if
and how the community arts education field should view the strategy
as a sound investment for replication.
“Creative Communities exemplifies the National Guild’s
mission to foster broad access to quality arts education to meet
community needs,” noted William Y. Fellenberg, Executive Director
of the National Guild. “We believe that the intelligence on
best practices revealed in the evaluation report will increase the
probability of success for what the National Guild hopes will be
the next generation of arts education partnerships in the public
housing environment.”
Creative Communities is an arts education, youth development and
community building strategy launched in April 2001 by the National
Guild through a cooperative agreement with the National Endowment
for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Creative Communities represents a distinct arts education model,
as it is the first and only strategy of its kind to be implemented
on a national scale with an investment of over 4 million dollars.
It is also the product of the first ever federal collaboration between
NEA and HUD. Through Creative Communities, 20 community schools
of the arts in 20 separate states are providing free instruction
by professional artists afterschool and on weekends for children
and youth living in public housing communities.
The National Guild commissioned the Institute of Cultural Policy
and Practice at Virginia Tech University and Emc.Arts of
New York City to implement the evaluation of Creative Communities.
"Creative Communities provides arts instruction that makes
a tangible difference in the lives of young people living in public
housing communities,” stated Richard
Evans, Principal at Emc.Arts, LLC. “Moreover, thanks to
the key role that the National Guild of Community Schools of the
Arts has played in providing training and technical assistance to
the Creative Communities partners -- while also ensuring that their
work is comprehensively evaluated -- the Initiative is taking shape
as a valuable model for the entire arts education field.”
The evaluation team is implementing a logic model methodology that
examines Creative Communities impact in the following areas: youth,
organizational and community outcomes; intermediary organization
outcomes; and sustainability and feasibility of replication. Drawing
on data collected from site visits and extensive document review
and analyses, the Executive Summary reveals the key ingredients
for success with partnerships between arts organizations and public
housing communities and provides critical benchmarks for quality
arts programming. For a copy of the Executive Summary, please visit
http://www.creativecommunitiesonline.org/vessel_h.html.
The mission of the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts
is to foster and promote broad access to high quality arts education
designed to meet community needs. It provides service, advocacy
and leadership for a diverse constituency of community arts education
organizations. The National Guild currently has 338 member institutions
serving over 500,000 students and tens of thousands more through
exposure to a multitude of arts activities. For more information
on the National Guild, visit its website at www.nationalguild.org.
To learn more about the Creative Communities Initiative, visit www.creativecommunitiesonline.org.
Download the Executive
Summary of the Creative Communities Evaluation
Back to Top
Emc.Arts'
Director of Evaluation & Research David B. Pankratz editor of
newly published book on Research and the Arts
The Arts in the New Millennium:
Research and the Arts Sector
co-edited by Pankratz and Valerie B. Morris
newly published by Praeger
New York, July 16, 2003—David B. Pankratz, Director of Evaluation
& Research at Emc.Arts, co-edited the recently-published The
Arts in a New Millennium: Research and the Arts Sector, which
examines how a well-developed, field-wide research capacity in the
arts will be needed by artists, arts administrators, and policy-makers
in the new millennium.
Most fields outside of the arts have "policy communities"
in which the generation of research, key issues, policy options
and dialogue, and strategies is proactive and on-going among researchers
and decision makers. The mid-90s arts policy community, in contrast,
was seen as fragmented and un-coordinated with shortages of reliable
data, analysis, evaluation, and opportunities for researchers and
arts leaders to interact.
The book outlines the many initiatives undertaken since the mid-90s
to build an effective arts policy community. It does so through
featured writings by distinguished change agents in the arts—think
tank leaders, foundation program officers, scholars, educators,
and practitioners. Pankratz contributes two chapters: "Values
and Policy Paradigms: Foundations for Research on the Arts Sector"
and from sector-wide convenings that discussed the blurring of distinctions
between the commercial and non-profit arts sectors "The Nonprofit
and Commercials Arts in American: Research on New Interrelationships."
These initiatives and the increase in research capacity during the
1990s have spurred new topics and forms of inquiry of relevance
to current and future challenges facing arts leaders. The trends
featured in The Arts in a New Millennium include: visioning
and core values; analysis and evaluation of program and policy outcomes;
research paradigms on the productions of culture, arts participation,
economic impacts of the arts, community-based arts and cross-national
comparisons of systems of support for the arts.
The Arts in a New Millennium: Research and the Arts Sector
was published in Spring 2003 by Praeger Publishers, a division of
Greenwood Press. It is available for purchase at Amazon.com.
Back to Top
Emc.Arts expands
Evaluation and Research services in the cultural sector—begins
major national program evaluations
New Director of Evaluation
and Research will extend the firm's capacity as range of services
grows
New York, February 21, 2003—Emc.Arts, LLC, a leading arts
and cultural consulting firm dedicated to providing innovative solutions
for creative enterprises, announced that it has engaged the prominent
consultant David B. Pankratz to fill the newly-created position
of Director of Evaluation and Research. His responsibilities include
providing the firm’s growing client base with high-quality
services in evaluation, assessment, and research, and directing
the design and implementation of specific evaluation projects.
At the same time, Emc.Arts announced that it has been selected
to lead two major evaluation projects. The firm will conduct a comprehensive
evaluation of the Ford Foundation’s New Directions/New
Donors for the Arts program, the single largest arts initiative
in the history of the Foundation. Launched in 2000, New Directions/New
Donors has provided $45 million in matching funding to strengthen
28 exemplary arts institutions throughout the U.S. And in partnership
with the Institute for Cultural Policy & Practice at Virginia
Tech, Emc.Arts will evaluate the design and outcomes of the Creative
Communities Initiative of the National Guild of Community
Schools of the Arts. This program, begun in 2001, marks a ground-breaking
alliance between the National Guild, the NEA, and HUD to foster
partnerships between 20 community schools of the arts and local
housing authorities, in order to provide hands-on arts education
opportunities to children who reside in public housing.
David B. Pankratz brings to Emc.Arts 20 years
of leadership with service organizations, foundations, educational
institutions, public agencies, and creative enterprises. He has
held senior positions with ARTS, Inc. (the Los Angeles chapter
of the Arts & Business Council), the Getty Center for Education
in the Arts, the Independent Commission on the National Endowment
for the Arts, and Urban Gateways: Center for Arts Education (Chicago).
He is widely sought after as a leader in the fields of cultural
research, evaluation and policy.
As an independent consultant specializing in evaluation, assessment,
research, analysis, and leadership education, he has worked with
such clients as the American Assembly, Armory Center for the Arts,
California Arts Council, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing
Arts, Music Center Education Division (Los Angeles), National Center
on Arts and Aging, National Office for Arts Accreditation, Performing
Tree, Inc., and Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, as
well as American University, The Ohio State University, University
of Oregon, and University of Southern California.
David Pankratz is the author of the book Multiculturalism and
Public Arts Policy, and co-editor of The Arts in a New Millennium,
The Future of the Arts, and The Challenge to Reform Arts
Education. He is a long-time editorial advisor to The Journal
of Arts Management, Law, and Society and Arts Education Policy
Review.
The Ford Foundation's Media, Arts & Culture
Unit (a unit of the Foundation’s Knowledge, Creativity &
Freedom Program) has selected Emc.Arts to evaluate New Directions/New
Donors for the Arts (ND/ND), a $45 million national initiative
which was launched by the Foundation in 2000 to strengthen the
financial base of 28 exemplary arts institutions, by stimulating
campaigns to attract support from individual donors. ND/ND is
the largest initiative that the Foundation has ever taken in the
arts.
The performing, literary, visual, and media arts institutions that
were selected to receive ND/ND support have demonstrated fresh energy
and vision by working in creative new directions, shaping innovative
artistic practice in their respective disciplines. Emc.Arts’
comprehensive evaluation of the program will take place from February
to December 2003. Our work will include an investigation into the
program’s origins and design (including the construction of
an applicable Theory of Change and program logic model), data analysis,
original research and assessment, and, finally, the production of
a major report on the ND/ND initiative’s design and implementation,
and its impact on grantees—both individually and collectively.
The National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts, a national
service organization representing over 300 member institutions across
the country, has engaged the Institute for Cultural Policy &
Practice at Virginia Tech to design and undertake the evaluation
of Years 2 and 3 of the Creative Communities Initiative (CCI),
a strategy for arts education, youth development, and community
building which the Guild began in the fall of 2001, in partnership
with the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department
of Housing and Urban Development.
Emc.Arts, which frequently works as a major sub-contractor for
the Institute, will provide the specialist services needed to undertake
the evaluation, including data analysis, group facilitation, and
documentation.
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