Approaches to Community Engagement in the Arts
December 2022
At the request of an ABA opera member, we explored how organizations across the performing arts are envisioning and delivering their community engagement initiatives, as well as how they are staffing and funding these growing efforts. We organized our results into a qualitative report and a quantitative benchmark.
Our qualitative report outlines the following:
Diverse approaches to community engagement efforts, with leading pillars ranging from who and what is on stage, to revisions of on-site experiences and expanding access to diverse audiences.
Opportunities that arts organizations have implemented to reimagine and revamp the use of their physical spaces for enhanced visitor experiences and community inclusion.
Partnership frameworks that support and build up from lower-level capabilities-sharing to deeper co-creative collaborations.
Staffing models to lead community efforts that help identify the trade offs to consider between more separate and dedicated community teams and cross-departmental collaborations.
Funding considerations between operational finding and additional fundraising for community engagement programs specifically.
Our quantitative benchmark surveyed 15 organizations and asked them to share details about their community engagement staffing, funding, and focus areas. We broke these institutions into two groups: "Community Core" (those who have an organization-wide, mission-entwined commitment to community work), and "Community Complement" (those who have a commitment to community work that is complementary to their mission and not as fully embraced across all departments).
ABA members can download both reports by clicking on the images below.
