• The even playing field that is the Internet might be about to tilt in the favor of the powerful, in this case AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and the like. Net neutrality is in the hands of the DC Circuit Court.
• The National Initiative on Arts & the Military has released a new advocacy white paper on arts and health in the military context, just as the NEA has announced that it will expand its Creative Arts Therapy Program through a new three-month pilot at the Department of Defense’s Fort Belvoir Community Hospital.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Ralph Remington is stepping down as the NEA’s Theater/Musical Theater Director to become the western regional director and assistant executive director at Actors Equity Association. He had been at the NEA since 2010.
• Los Angeles has a new mayor, and will soon have a new head of cultural affairs. Olga Garay-English, who served as Executive Director of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs since 2007, announced she is stepping down January 4.
• Kenneth Foster, former Executive Director of the Yerba Buena Center for Arts, has kicked off his tenure leading the new Arts Leadership Program at the University of Southern California and offers some words of wisdom on how funders can best serve the performing community, and why  “best practices” aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
• Continuing a string of recent layoffs of classical-music radio staff, Houston’s KUHA has cleaned house. The station claims that the move will actually lead to more coverage of local arts groups.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Consider arts crowdfunding thoroughly kickstarted. Crowdfunding raised more than half a billion dollars for the performing and recording arts last year, almost 20% of the total money raised for all purposes through crowdfunding platforms, according to industry research. Lucy Bernholz is interested in investigating the small but increasing role U.S. foundations seem to be playing in driving this trend.
• Risë Wilson, the new Director of Philanthropy at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, makes the case – and offers a model – for arts grants as risk capital in an interview about the Foundation’s SEED grant program.
• Like many other downtowns, Philly’s is booming these days. But residential developer Carl Dranoff attributes the revitalization of the South Broad Street area to the Avenue of the Arts project, and insists that “anyone who says it would have happened anyway has a very short memory.”

IN THE FIELD

• In his coverage of last month’s 2013 Future of Music Summit for the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot describes a frustrated yet resolved music industry, “Music is generating a ridiculous amount of money, none of it flowing to the people who create it.” Check out the write-ups from day one and day two.
• Nina Simon responds to the backlash that her novel programming at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History has generated in recent months locally and, to a lesser extent, nationally. The contention is that encouraging active participation so strongly erodes the traditional museum environment of quiet contemplation, distracting the MAH from its historical charge. Simon argues that the new approach allows for both kinds of experiences, while “balancing priorities, embracing creative tension, including diverse voices, and staying true to our mission.”

BIG IDEAS

• The ambitious Sustain Arts project aims to bring the wonders of Big Data to the cultural sector over the next three years, ultimately strengthening the nation’s cultural infrastructure. The first wave of work is happening now in the San Francisco and Detroit regions; Marc Vogl, Bay Area Field Director of the initiative, explains what he’s up to and how Bay Area folks can get involved.
• New Bonfils Stanton Foundation president Gary Steuer weighs in on the “is ‘innovation’ a nefarious buzz-word” debate (which is really the ongoing argument over how funders find the sweet spot of nurturing, not hindering, their grantees) and provides other thoughtful comments on the recent National Innovation Summit for Arts + Culture. (All 27 talks from the Summit, by the way, are now available online.)
• Google has launched Helpouts, a service that provides live on-demand chatting with experts in fields ranging from the arts to cooking and electronics. Udi Manber, VP of engineering, believes Helpouts will offer users a more “precise” mode of online learning.

RESEARCH CORNER

• WolfBrown is out with a multi-pronged report on how to engage college students in the performing arts. It includes case studies of best practices and a survey of student attitudes toward the performing arts across seven different schools.
• The Wallace Foundation has released new research on the challenges of after-school arts programs in low-income urban neighborhoods. The study draws on hundreds of interviews with young people, their families, program leaders and others to provide some answers, including ten principles for developing effective programming.
• More evidence that art therapy helps patients with Alzheimer’s.
• Elizabeth Merritt reviews a new report from European consultancy Arup on Museums in a Digital Age.
• The U.S. may be out of UNESCO, but the work continues: the international cultural agency and the United Nations Development Program have just released a Special Edition of the United Nations Creative Economy Report concluding that world trade of creative goods and services more than doubled from 2002 to 2011, to $624 billion. Unlike the 2008 and 2010 editions, many of the case studies and recommendations this time around focus on the role of culture in sustainable development at the local level, especially in poorer countries.
• So many charts, so little time! The Foundation Center has launched the eminently clickable Foundation Stats, where you can find “the answer to almost every basic statistical question about the collective work of U.S. Foundations.” Emphasis on the “basic” here, but as an added bonus the data is open and free. Meanwhile, A new report from the Foundation Center, Media Impact Funders, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation shows that foundations are stepping up in a big way to support traditional media organizations struggling to adjust to the digital age.
• As cultural asset mapping projects continue to gain popularity, this quick overview of where to get spatial data, and what you can do with it, is particularly timely. And speaking of cultural asset mapping, Philadelphia’s massive CultureBlocks initiative is barely six months out of the gate and there is already an academic paper on it.

Learning about programs like this, I had a hunch that partnerships between arts organizations and health organizations will be the next big thing for both groups. I thought with some research I would learn that the number of partnerships between an individual health organization and an individual arts organization has grown in the last five to ten years, and to an extent, that’s true. But some of the best, and even the fastest-growing, programs for the arts in healthcare have been around for decades. The commonality between most of these very robust programs, old and new, is they are not one partnership – they are many partnerships. Programs for the arts in healthcare appear to thrive when they are created and supported by a network of groups, each contributing their own specialty.

Background

I present as informed speculation the idea that programs for the arts in healthcare work best as networks, and suggest it as an area for further exploration. My analysis is based on a subjective impression of which programs are thriving, as demonstrated by the number of patients an organization has served or visitors to an organization’s public galleries, and by an organization’s reputation within the arts or the healthcare communities. Several of these programs have received accolades or positive appraisal from external organizations. For example, CosaCosa’s Healing Art Project has been featured in Designing the World’s Best Children’s Hospitals, a publication of the National Association of Children’s Hospitals, and both NYU and Audience Focus, Inc. have conducted evaluations of New York MoMA’s Meet Me at MoMA that demonstrate the program’s effectiveness.

As the number of arts and healthcare partnerships increases, so does the number of ways the arts and healthcare interact, including therapeutic initiatives, increasing accessibility to the arts (for people whose disabilities may be a barrier), and decreasing the stigma of a disease. The Global Alliance for Arts & Health (formerly the Society for Arts in Healthcare) defines five focus areas for arts and health: patient care, healing environments, caring for caregivers, community well-being, and education. While all of these are valuable, the programs discussed here primarily relate to the first two categories (patient care and healing environments), although many of them may have other benefits.

Art therapy as a field of study originated in the late nineteenth century, as psychologists began to study the connections between art and mental and emotional wellbeing. As early as the 1930’s, psychologists used art in “milieu therapy,” encouraging patients to enjoy and create art as a part of healthy self-expression. More recently, the practice expanded from mental health to physical health. Music therapy as a discipline has followed a similar trajectory, emerging between the First and Second World Wars and first used for war veterans. These fields provide a substantial foundation for programs that combine arts and healthcare, and many healthcare organizations hire art and music therapists directly or through partnerships.

Musicians Care by Sherman Hospital on Flickr

Some of the earliest programs uniting art and healthcare were simple introductions of visual art into healthcare spaces. The British organization Paintings in Hospitals was founded in 1959 by a hospital employee who saw the positive effect that bringing the visual arts into a healthcare environment had on patients’ health and wellbeing. This type of program is still popular today, and now, many art-in-hospitals programs have blossomed into extensive networks of artists, art organizations, and hospitals. National networks such as Paintings in Hospitals and Scotland’s Art in Healthcare are thriving, and many other programs exist on a smaller scale, such as Oakwood Arts for the Spirit in Michigan. These early programs focused on improving the healthcare environment rather than giving patients opportunities to create art themselves. In the next few decades, more participatory arts and healthcare programs were created in a variety of disciplines, such as Dance Exchange’s Metlife Foundation Healthy Living Initiative program, founded in 1978.

Beginning in the 1990s, arts and healthcare partnerships have become increasingly common. Notable organizations include Dance for PD, a partnership between the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Brooklyn Parkinsons Group which has spread to over 100 communities, and Concerts in Care, which brings live music to residential care facilities across Canada. Over several decades, the concept of using the arts in healthcare has gained broad currency, as evidenced by numerous articles in mainstream medical journals and popular science periodicals (for example, this study showing that music can ease chronic pain and depression). It has also captured the attention of national policymakers.

The principle of network effects applies here; the more people who participate in a network, the more benefit users get from it. In the case of arts and healthcare partnerships it isn’t the number of people participating that makes the difference, but the number of organizations, and the people are still the ones benefiting. However, there is still a parallel. The more points of access there are for the users, with multiple healthcare organizations and multiple arts organizations participating, the more likely users are to find the program in the first place and find a part of the program that addresses their needs. Presumably, the network also creates opportunities for networking in the sense of making professional contacts, and new collaborations arising out of existing partnerships. The main drawback of having a network is that more people contributing ideas also means a more complex and often less efficient system of implementing them. For networks of organizational partnerships, having clarity and consensus around the group goals for working together as a whole can help to mitigate this drawback.

The Power of Networks

In our highly networked world, partnerships between three or more players have a lot going for them. A number of arts in healthcare programs consider their network of partnerships fundamental to what they do. For example, Shands Arts in Medicine, the hospital described in the introduction, says on its website, “An essential component of [our] mission is to create collaborations with other hospital departments, community arts organizations and hospitals around the world. These collaborations spark projects that move the message of art and wellness to a broader audience.”

A Network of Skills and Specialties

While many thriving arts in healthcare programs are organized as partnerships and networks, there is no set template that works best. In many cases, either a dedicated organization facilitates programming by reaching out to both health and arts organizations, or a healthcare organization brings in art by partnering with several different arts groups in their community. It is less common for one arts organization to partner with several health groups, but this approach seems just as effective.

Networks of program offerings, built on combining the strengths of multiple partners, allow arts organizations to leverage a set of related skills and expertise in multiple ways to target a variety of healthcare needs. For example, through a variety of partnerships the Smith Center for Healing and the Arts in Washington, DC offers different programs for cancer patients and survivors, military members and veterans, the general public, and health centers. This array of offerings and of recipients would likely be much smaller if the Smith Center limited itself to partnering with one hospital. Since the healthcare landscape is so multifaceted, the corresponding partnerships with the arts must also extend to many specialties.

Moreover, a network of partnerships can help an arts organization reach one particular audience more fully. For example, the New York Museum of Modern Art’s Meet Me at MoMA offers programs at the museum and on-site for organizations that work with individuals with Alzheimer’s. It also has a monthly interactive gallery program for individuals with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers to come independently. This combination of services, made possible by the museum’s connections to a variety of health care organizations, enables MoMA’s programming to reach people with Alzheimer’s in a variety of stages, at a variety of levels of independence, and in a variety of family and professional care situations.

Healing in the Community

The diversity networks provide helps organizations capture the best opportunities their community has to offer. For example, Snow City Arts in Chicago offers art classes to hospitalized children. While their teaching artist-in-residence program is the core of their offerings, the organization proclaims, “By working side-by-side with local arts organizations, performance groups, music ensembles, and prominent universities, we help ensure our children are learning from Chicago’s brightest artistic minds.” The program works with hospitals to bring this instruction to children who regularly miss school because of their health needs.

Artist Hein at Work by Virginia Lockett on Flickr

The advantage of networks goes in the other direction, too, helping arts and healing organizations play a more connected, more visible role in the community. In the case of COSACOSA’s Healing Art Project, this connection is intentional: “The Healing Art Project reaffirms the time-honored role of artists in sustaining the health of a community.” The project brings together children and youth of a variety of health experiences – healthy kids, kids with disabilities, and kids living in pediatric healthcare centers – to create collaborative artwork. The artwork is displayed in pediatric healthcare centers, and in some cases is an integral part of the design of these centers. Thus, the program is community-oriented both in the creation and the use of the art.

The visibility advantages of being in a network can also help a program expand and connect to the community of people it serves. For example, Dance for PD, which now has branches from Pasadena to Philadelphia to Pune, India, has been given the opportunity to participate in a number of high-profile events, such as the Parkinson’s Unity Walk in New York, which draws around 10,000 attendees.

Looking Ahead

The funding climate for this type of partnership appears to be growing friendlier as art therapy becomes more mainstream. There are several foundations and grant programs with a specific interest in bringing the arts into healthcare, such as the grants made by the Global Alliance for Arts & Health and the Metlife Foundation’s Healthy Aging grant program. Networks of partnerships have the opportunity to maximize their ability to seek support, since different funding avenues may be available to organizations on different sides of the partnership. However, networks also increase the number of variables involved, and any innovative program, especially one that is tangential to an organization’s mission or primary activities, may turn out to be a hard sell to grantmakers and donors if it appears on the surface to be riskier than traditional offerings. Organizations looking to enter partnerships should bear this in mind.

Arts organizations looking to get involved in an arts and healthcare partnership would do well to research the health and arts landscape in their area, to see whether there is an existing network they can join, and to learn what needs are not yet being met. There are a number of great resources put together by established organizations (see below); another benefit of networks is that they encourage a culture of freely sharing information. However, most of the literature out there on partnerships between the arts and healthcare is focused on providing practical guidance on what seems to work; little has been written on why it works. I am hoping to start the latter conversation with this piece, but the topic deserves more thorough attention than I am able to give it here. I envision studies that involve interviewing the leadership and staff of dozens of organizations across the country, including stand-alone projects, one-on-one partnerships, and networks. Such an effort would hopefully demonstrate whether networks are one successful model that has a lot of advantages and happens to be very popular right now, or whether they are truly the best model. The resulting lessons would equip many more organizations to unite healthcare and the arts.

Resources

• The University of Florida and UF&Shands Arts In Medicine have an online toolkit called AIM Together for organizations interested in the intersection of arts in medicine.
• The Global Alliance for Arts & Health has a basic toolkit for organizations which was created for a presentation at an event but has useful and in-depth information, and provides more resources in the members-only section of their website.
• The University of Florida also has an online toolkit specific to Arts in Healthcare for Rural Communities.
• New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s Meet Me At MoMA program provides museum programs to Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers. MoMA provides guides for museums, care organizations, and families on how to start or engage with this type of program.
• The National Endowment for the Arts has a page on the arts in healthcare on their website.