Program Overview

Our national Arts and Culture Program focuses on the role arts and culture play in re-energizing the communities that have long been central to America’s social and economic life. We believe that arts and culture are critical to activities designed to revitalize neighborhoods in the metropolitan areas that most Americans call home.

Program update

Grantseekers and partners, Last year, we began the process of refining, and simplifying, our framework to focus on creative placemaking -- the integration of arts and culture into community development efforts. That process is nearing completion. Here – in very broad strokes – are the outlines of our new approach. We look forward to finalizing the details and will provide them shortly.  In the meantime, please remember that you can stay in touch though email subscription, RSS, or social media. Email subscribers will be notified within hours of our updates.

Our grantmaking and investments are directed at encouraging interdisciplinary approaches to the broad field of community revitalization.

We seek to make arts and culture as central to discussions of rebuilding and reinvigorating metropolitan areas as land use, housing, transportation, economic development and other more traditional disciplines.

Our approach requires that all community members benefit from revitalization activity and from the integration of arts and culture into such efforts.

We partner with organizations committed to creating opportunity for low-income and underrepresented people. Those partners include a wide range of entities from arts and culture organizations to community development corporations, and other public-sector and nonprofit agencies.

There is compelling evidence that arts and culture encourage participation in civic life and in discourse about the future of neighborhoods and cities.

There is, too, an abundance of talent and authentic culture in America’s diverse communities that can reveal character, provide distinct identity, and ground revitalization work in the genuine fabric of each community. We embrace efforts that respect and tap those assets.

Cross-discipline, multi-sector work has taken firm root in community revitalization. But the strategic integration of arts and culture is relatively new. So is the concept of “creative placemaking.” For our purposes we use “creative placemaking” to refer simply to the integration of arts and culture in revitalization work.  We appreciate that, for the foreseeable future, others may assign it different meaning.

We strive to be clear about our goals and to contribute to the evolving creative placemaking field through support for research, evaluation and other endeavors that advance field-wide and cross-sector understanding. We recognize that there is a great deal being learned. We are interested in building and contributing to the creative placemaking field.

Application Process

Information about the application process will be available when the details of our creative placemaking framework are complete.