Congress has reached a bipartisan agreement on a bill to fund the nation's federal agencies and programs for the remaining balance of the current FY2017 fiscal year, which ends on September 30, 2017. None of the nation's arts and cultural agencies nor programs incurred a budget cut. In fact, many of them received funding increases for this year, including the NEA!

Special thanks to House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee  Chairman Ken Calvert (R-CA) for initiating a funding increase for many of these cultural programs in the House Interior bill and to Senate Interior Appropriations Subcommittee  Chairman Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) for having the Senate match the funding increases in this bipartisan Omnibus Appropriations bill. 

Click here to read more at the Arts Action Fund and see the complete funding chart for federal arts/cultural agencies and programs.

Commonly referred to as the Nation's Report Card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only continuing, national measure of the academic achievement of America's public and private schools. For nearly 50 years, student performance has been measured in the following subjects: reading, math, writing, science, U.S. history, civics, economics, technology and engineering literacy, geography and the arts. The 2016 NAEP marked the fifth national assessment of both music and visual arts disciplines.

Music portion of the assessment
Students' ability to respond to music was measured in various ways. Responding questions asked students to analyze and describe aspects of music they heard, critique instrumental and vocal performances, and demonstrate their knowledge of standard musical notation and music's role in society. For example, after listening to a piece of music, students were asked to identify the music's region of origin and to describe a feature of the music that helped them to identify the part of the world that they selected. The average responding score for music was reported on a 0-300 scale.

Click here for more information and to review the entire results of the Nation's Report Card.

As part of the Center for Cultural Innovation's (CCI) efforts to support new arts leadership with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Investing in Tomorrow Organizational Grants is a new, one-time grant program that will invest $105,000 in bold ideas by individuals at California nonprofit or fiscally sponsored arts organizations that have the potential to re-shape the future of the arts sector in exciting and important ways. 

CCI recently published Creativity Connects: Trends and Conditions Affecting U.S. Artists, a national research report to examine the state of the arts and its shifts. The report described how the nonprofit arts sector is changing in dramatic ways. Shifts in demographics have created new priorities for democratizing production of and access to culture. In addition, emerging generations of artists and arts leaders eschew being defined solely by sector or discipline in favor of more complex identities, including prioritizing artistic practices that have social impacts. On January 23, 2017, CCI convened over 200 artists and arts professionals to brainstorm the future of the arts. What we heard affirmed our Creativity Connects research findings: Participants want to work toward advancing equality, inclusion, equity, and financial sustainability in common cause with others.

At this time, there are no grants of this type-field-wide change capital for promising leaders to improve the nonprofit arts sector through existing arts organizations. Investing in Tomorrow Organizational Grants will therefore surface and support catalytic individual and institutional leadership at this time of tremendous social, economic, generational, demographic, and technological change.

Click here for more information and to apply. Grant deadline is July 12, 2017.