GOALS

Mission

To advance the arts and culture community of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County.

Every day, we’re connecting people to information, resources and each other. We do this in service of a much longer-term vision. We see a future where every resident in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County experiences the full value of arts and culture as an essential part of personal and community quality of life. To help us get there, we have some work to do.

Securing Additional Sustainable Public Revenue for the Arts and Culture

Arts Cleveland, in tandem with our partners at Cuyahoga Arts & Culture and the Arts and Culture Action Committee, is determined to build on the success of our past. (You can learn about when, how and why we’ve done what we’ve done in Elevating the Influence of Arts and Culture: A Cleveland Playbook.) We’ve hosted public education sessions throughout the city and county to ensure that the community is aligned about public-sector funding for arts and culture. Moving forward, we’re having discussions within government and throughout the arts and culture sector. In other words, we’re communicating with everyone about why public-sector funding is the bedrock on which Cleveland’s thriving arts and culture sector rests. For information and updates, and to learn how you can be helping right now, visit News, sign up for the email newsletter and consider bringing us in for an Advocacy Training session.

Strengthening Arts Learning

From its inception, Arts Cleveland has validated the foundational role arts education plays in child development and the human experience. Cleveland recently became a Say Yes to Education city, and the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) has a new arts education plan in the making. Those events, combined with findings from strategic-planning research we've done, made it clear that the time is right to examine how we can help support the arts education landscape. We began with discovery: speaking with educators, organizations and people inside the school system to gather feedback from the field. We continue to

work closely with the CMSD as its arts education plan unfolds,
engage in regular discussion with the Cleveland Arts Education Consortium,
stay connected with the field as a whole to serve its work and sustain its long-term success and
collaborate with our partners on Play It Forward Cleveland!, a musical instrument donation drive that unearths instruments from storage and puts them into the hands of Cleveland’s children.

Ensuring that Public Policy Supports Creative Vitality

We know there’s an appreciation for arts and culture at the local levels of government. We aim to infuse a deeper understanding of the sector into city and county government and to unleash the full potential of our region’s creative and cultural assets. Long term, we hope to see arts and culture accounted for and reflected in all policy. This includes both policy that enables arts and culture to thrive and policy that considers arts and culture part of the solution to the problems we face as a society. Our focus is at the local level, but we maintain a broader perspective on our efforts by connecting with national organizations and with other cities on the work they do in arts advocacy and cultural policy.

Expanding and Deepening Lifelong Engagement

Arts Cleveland’s immediate focus in this area is helping people in the arts and culture sector improve their capacity to serve and engage people with disabilities. In partnership with VSA Ohio and Services for Independent Living, in 2018 we hosted an illuminating series of discussions on accessibility for arts and culture. We heard a range of thoughts and many new questions during those events. To begin answering some of those queries, Arts Cleveland has received a generous research grant from the National Endowment for the Arts enabling us to look at the overall picture of arts and culture access in Cuyahoga County. We aim to identify the full scope of barriers affecting people with disabilities and to understand the challenges that arts and culture organizations face in meeting the needs of this audience segment. Then, we’ll make practical recommendations for addressing both issues.