National Efforts Prove Arts Ed Vital to Lifelong Learning

Public funding for the arts at the state and national levels has always supported arts education. Historically, that has meant funding programs serving the k-12 population.

Shortly after we launched Lifetime Arts more a decade ago, two state arts agencies, the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, expanded their definitions of arts education to include lifelong learning.

Recently, I volunteered on an arts education panel for NYSCA. I anticipated that many of the cultural organizations who applied would expand their reach by requesting funding for programs serving older adults. Sadly, less than 10 percent of the requests did. Many arts organizations that claim to serve older adults often limit offerings to “talk-backs,” docent tours, or very elementary (usually one-off) workshops.

Culture change is hard and slow, but there has been some progress in this area. In fact, this fall NYSCA partnered with the New York Office for the Aging to launch an innovative three-region Creative Aging initiative with goal of bringing art making opportunities to 500 older New Yorkers.

The Decade of Creative Aging Implementation 

Over the last 10 years, a number of additional arts agencies have also expanded their definitions of arts education. In fact, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA) this spring, published a 10 page “Strategy Sampler,” outlining, among other things, the value of Creative Aging and citing successful examples led by state arts agencies in Arizona, Maine, Tennessee, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, among others. These efforts include:

• Generation(s) Lab, sponsored by the Arizona Commission of the Arts, is a free incubator program designed to help arts organizations, local arts agencies and other Creative Aging stakeholders to strengthen and/or develop new programming to better serve older adults. Participating groups benefit from a needs assessment, professional development workshops, specialized trainings and access to consultants before developing a mission-aligned Creative Aging plan.
• The Maine Arts Commission‘s Creative Aging Grant provides funds to hire teaching artists to work with older adults in community settings, such as libraries, senior centers, arts organizations, and assisted and independent-living centers.
• Creative Aging Tennessee is an initiative to improve older adults’ health and well-being through the arts. The program leverages resources available through a partnership of three state agencies — the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Tennessee Department of Health, and the Tennessee Commission on Aging and Disability — to provide opportunities for seniors to engage with the arts and to reap associated benefits, such as social connections, positive perceptions about aging, and ultimately, improved health and wellness.

To keep the momentum going, in September, Lifetime Arts’ CEO, Maura O’Malley, and Aroha Philanthropies’ Executive Director, Teresa Bonner, presented on the importance of strategic partnerships to support Creative Aging work at NASAA’s Leadership Institute in Providence, Rhode Island. They spoke on the continued progress of the major multi-year initiative, Seeding Vitality Arts (SVA), developed by Aroha Philanthropies in 2016 to seed Creative Aging programs nationally.

Through this initiative and others, museums and other arts and cultural organizations are creating successful cross-sector collaborations with myriad state agencies and organizations serving active older adults, including state and local agencies on aging, state libraries, YMCAs, public libraries, senior centers, senior housing providers and more.