The January 2024 “Healing, Bridging, Thriving” summit at the NEA celebrated an ethos of cross-sectoral partnerships involving the arts in federal government. Memorable outcomes were an interagency working group led by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the NEA, an impassioned speech by the Surgeon General, and an artists-in-residence pilot program at the Environmental Protection Agency.
In addition, in this year alone, the NEA has expanded its data-gathering and research capacity by teaming with the following units: the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Panel Survey for data on arts participation; and the National Center for Education Statistics’ School Pulse Panel Survey and High School & Beyond Survey for data on arts education.
Other departments or agencies renewed partnerships with the NEA this year. They include: the Bureau of Economic Analysis for measuring the arts’ contributions to GDP; the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s American Housing Survey for collecting data on the arts and neighborhood choice; the National Institutes of Health for supporting a Music and Health Research Network; and the National Science Foundation for studying the arts’ role in computer science education.
An Illustrious History
In advancing the arts’ integration with the work of other federal agencies, NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson has emphasized the strategy as one that will enable them to meet their missions more effectively, with lasting societal benefits. Call it an NEA tradition, but it’s just good government: pooling resources and expertise to solve some of the nation’s most complex challenges.
Sorting through papers on my desk recently, I came across this paragraph—
The NEA has…worked with a variety of government agencies and helped them to expand the benefits of the arts—and to provide funding for their related programs. In my time, partnerships were forged with the Interior Department to bring the arts into public parks; with the Veterans Administration to bring the arts and artists into hospitals; with the Small Business Administration to help teach artists business practices; with the General Services Administration to expand art in public places; with the State Department to give more emphasis abroad in American creativity; and with the Department of Education.
—and did a double-take. Those sentences were written nearly 30 years ago, in 1995. The article’s author was the third Chair of the NEA, Livingston Biddle (1977-81).
I started to reflect on this illustrious history because, last week, three NEA colleagues and I participated in a national conference held by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). We had been invited by OJJDP’s Heather McDonald to discuss grant opportunities—and exemplar projects—that permit artists and arts organizations to work with youth in juvenile justice settings.
The NEA’s Arts Education director, Michelle Hoffmann, Theater & Musical Theater Director Greg Reiner, and Senior Program Analyst Melissa Menzer (from the NEA research office) presented a range of funding options for those seeking to improve outcomes for justice-involved youth through the arts. Such opportunities included the NEA’s Arts Education and Research grant programs, but also Shakespeare in American Communities juvenile justice initiative.
Oases of Arts Enrichment
The most exciting part of the panel appearance, however, was joining two NEA grantees: Spy Hop and Texas Woman’s University. Spy Hop’s Director of Learning Design, Adam Sherlock, described results from a podcasting program, “Sending Messages,” that is recorded, edited, and produced by students in youth correction facilities.
The Salt Lake University, Texas-based organization has received multiple NEA grants, one for a mixed-methods evaluation study of the podcasting program. Adam shared initial findings about the program’s capacity to improve social, emotional, and behavioral outcomes for incarcerated youth.
Next up was Ilana Morgan, Associate Professor of Dance at Texas Woman’s University. She’s the lead investigator on another mixed-methods evaluation study—also designed to track social and emotional outcomes of an arts program. Working with the Denton County Juvenile Probation Center in Texas, researchers are monitoring how three months of dance training aligns with changes in self-confidence, awareness, self-control, and empathy.
To give an inside look at how dance connects us all with those attributes, she had conference participants on their feet—courtesy of a creative movement exercise. After a solid run of PowerPoint, the guided experience was especially welcome, as were two videos showing the Spy Hop and Shakespeare programs come alive for their young participants.
These oases of arts enrichment are comparable to the ability of arts-based strategies to blossom in various federal programs and institutions beyond the NEA. The conferees who took part in the dance exercise last week were able to heighten their perception and awareness for the remainder of the panel session, through Ilana’s expertise. Similarly, the videos of incarcerated youth thrilling to Shakespearean language, or curating their own podcasts, brought home to everyone what a more didactic approach might have failed to accomplish alone.
Just so, federal agencies and departments that integrate arts programs and research with their offerings, where applicable, can bring creativity and the mastery of specialized skills to the challenging work of stakeholder engagement, communications, education, and more. I’m writing this post on the week of Thanksgiving, so let me take the opportunity to express my gratitude to all my federal colleagues, such as Heather McDonald, who have glimpsed the shared benefits of cross-agency collaboration through the arts, and who wish to extend those benefits to the public we all serve.
Leave a Reply