Arts Engagement

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The James Irvine Foundation

Arts Engagement

The premise of our prior arts grantmaking was that arts engagement strengthens communities by promoting increased social tolerance and civic participation.

New California Arts Fund
Exploring Engagement Fund
Field-Building

Photo by Justin William

New California Arts Fund

Through the New California Arts Fund (NCAF), we are helping arts nonprofits move engagement to the core of who they are and what they do. We are providing multiyear grants for organization capacity building and arts engagement programming that encourages participation in the arts among California’s diverse and low-income communities. This engagement work is resulting in significant changes to our grantee-partners' artistic programming, staffing, governance, business models, and more. These 15 NCAF grantee-partners were selected through an invitation-only process.

Watch a video about the New California Arts Fund. Play Video

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Exploring Engagement Fund

Through the Exploring Engagement Fund, we have provided risk capital to seed more than 100 experiments that have fueled arts engagement with a diverse group of more than 800,000 Californians, including many low-income participants. The last round of grants were awarded in 2016.

Watch the animated video that described the intent of the Fund. Play Video

Grantees Funded in:

Learn more about the Exploring Engagement Fund

Field Building

We have supported the development of a strong field of arts leaders and organizations working to strengthen California communities by enabling all Californians to engage in the arts. We believe that achieving this requires nonprofit arts organizations to intentionally change by expanding arts engagement and being more responsive and relevant to the public.

To that end, we publish research and evaluation on arts engagement, and foster opportunities for practitioners to share their on-the-ground experiences and insights with others in the field.

We welcome you to review the latest research.