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2019-09-16
GrantCraft;
This GrantCraft case study, developed for Candid's scholarshipsforchange.org portal, explores The Los Angeles Scholars Investment Fund. Created in 2012 through a partnership between California Community Foundation and College Futures Foundation, this fund partners with nonprofit organizations to provide scholarships and services that get students to and through college. It has brought together separate, unrestricted scholarship funds as a pool of scholarship resources to enable the success of students.
2019-09-10
Los Angeles County Arts Commission;
In 2018, the LA County Dept of Arts and Culture implemented a new eligibility requirement to its Organizational Grant Program. Applicants must submit a statement, policy, or plan outlining their commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and access (DEI). This analysis of the statements, policies, and plans submitted for the 2019-21 grant cycle finds that while nearly all applicants used the term diversity, they defined it and used it in different ways. Some applicants described their commitment to DEI by indicating how many of various race and ethnicity or gender categories they had on their board, in their staff, or among their artists. Other applicants addressed questions of diversity as they related to the organization's historical work around equity and inclusion. In some cases, applicant organizations demonstrated a long-standing commitment to addressing these issues in specific communities. This report concludes with a series of recommendations to arts and other nonprofits seeking to deepen their work, and recommendations for how the Dept of Arts and Culture can continue to improve implementation of this requirement.
2018-05-28
Los Angeles County Arts Commission;
This report is an evaluation of a range of outcomes at the four sites in the Creative Graffiti Abatement Project in Los Angeles County. This report evaluates the success of arts-based strategies in shifting perceptions, increasing positive activity, reducing graffiti vandalism, building a sense of community ownership and building capacity for future arts and culture activities at the sites. While this report takes a summative approach to evaluating outcomes, the evaluator was embedded in planning and public engagement activities throughout the project, combining elements of a developmental evaluation approach with strategies from ethnographic inquiry. The report offers detailed recommendations for public art commissioning agencies, arts organizations, artists and evaluators implementing similar projects.
2018-01-22
Los Angeles County Arts Commission;
Research and evaluation are core competencies at the LA County Arts Commission, as central to the mission as grantmaking, arts education, civic art, professional development and communications. In this report on our 2016-17 Research and Evaluation Plan we reflect on what we did and why, and some key lessons learned along the way.
2018-01-01
Conrad N. Hilton Foundation;
Since 2010, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation's Chronic Homelessness Initiative strategy has been working on addressing homelessness in Los Angeles with the idea that chronic homelessness can be eliminated through the successful creation and operation of permanent supportive housing, when those most vulnerable (people who are chronically homeless or homeless and medically fragile) can access and remain housed in those units. Now in Phase II, the evaluation is structured around measuring countywide progress in ending chronic homelessness, rather than examining a subset of actions specifically tied to Foundation action.
2017-12-26
Los Angeles County Arts Commission;
Artist Sandy Rodriguez was placed as an artist in residence at the Recuperative Care Center (RCC) at the Martin Luther King Medical Campus in Willowbrook, CA, in 2016-17. This residency was part of a $1.6 million investment in Civic Art funded through LA County's Percent for Art Policy. Rodriguez was given the task of developing a "meaningful, sustainable program for the Recuperative Care Center that will engage staff and clients and create artwork to be displayed at the facility." This internal evaluation of the residency found that Rodriguez created a workshop structure that was relevant to the needs of RCC clients and highly valued by staff.
2017-12-08
Los Angeles County Arts Commission;
The LA County Arts Education Profile survey was administered to all 2,277 public schools in LA County to learn about the quantity, quality and equity of arts education. Anyone can use this interactive tool to look up any school or district in LA County to find out what arts instruction is offered, and compare it to other schools and districts. The data can be downloaded as a CSV file.
2017-12-08
Los Angeles County Arts Commission;
The LA County Arts Education Profile survey was administered to all 2,277 public schools in LA County to learn about the quantity, quality and equity of arts education. We found that nearly every school offers at least some arts instruction, and most schools offer at least two disciplines. At the same time, we found troubling inequities that reflect disparities in the wider society.
2017-07-01
Surdna Foundation;
This report summarizes the main findings of the recent research, revisiting the reasons why addressing diversity and equity issues in the cultural sector matters more than ever and reviewing six key findings related to national and local patterns of funding distribution, the demographics of people making funding decisions, and the distinct issues facing cultural organizations whose primary artistic mission is to serve communities of color or low-income communities. It concludes with suggestions for how to speed progress toward a more inclusive and equitable system of cultural philanthropy.
2017-04-05
Los Angeles County Arts Commission;
In November 2015 the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution directing the LA County Arts Commission to conduct a county wide conversation about ways to improve diversity, equity and inclusion in cultural organizations for all LA County residents, focusing on four key target areas: Boards of Directors, Staffing, Audience/Participants, and Programming. To this the Arts Commission added a fifth: Artists/Creators. Through this process 13 actionable recommendations emerged. These recommendations open the doors to resources and promote tools that can break down barriers of exclusion in ways that foster and promote arts and culture – as well as the benefits they provide – for all residents of LA County. This report describes the process the Arts Commission went through as well as our findings and recommendations. It may also serve as a model for how other agencies - arts or otherwise - can plan and lead other initiatives to improve cultural equity and inclusion for their residents.
2017-01-01
Conrad N. Hilton Foundation;
In early 2013, Abt Associates Inc., as part of a larger evaluation of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation's Chronic Homelessness Initiative, prepared a detailed analysis of lessons learned from developing and launching the Collaborative: Home For Good Funders Collaborative: Lessons Learned from Implementation and Year One Funding. As the Funders Collaborative neared completion of its fifth year of facilitating public and private collaboration and joint investment in addressing chronic and veteran homelessness, the evaluation team from Abt revisited the work of the Collaborative. This report offers an analysis of the Collaborative's evolution, current dynamics, and opportunities moving forward as of year five. For readers interested in launching a similar funding effort, both reports will be valuable.
2017-01-01
Opportunity Fund;
As two of the nation's leading nonprofit small business lenders, Accion, The US Network (Accion) and Opportunity Fund help entrepreneurs thrive by providing affordable capital and support services so they can start a new business endeavor or grow an existing enterprise.
Accion and Opportunity Fund came together to develop a first-of-its-kind national longitudinal study of the impact of small business loans in the United States. With lead funding from The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, JPMorgan Chase Foundation, and with support from S&P Global, the study aims to uncover the qualitative impacts of lending on individuals, their businesses, and their broader communities. This study, conducted by Harder+Company Community Research, builds on the body of previous evaluation work that showed small businesses that receive loans create and retain jobs, increase revenue, and have high business survival rates. Following a cohort of more than 500 borrowers across the country, this study examines how business owners define success and how access to finance improves their entrepreneurial goals, financial health, and quality of life. By focusing on the longer-term impacts of small business lending while examining variations due to business type, geography, and other factors, the study will help deepen our understanding of how mission-based business lending impacts individuals, families, and communities.
This report includes preliminary findings collected during this first phase of the study. While entrepreneurs reported perceived and actual impact to date, these changes will be tracked over time to examine the ways in which they are or are not sustained, and how these changes compare across and within lending regions.
