What We Fund - Creative Communities | William Penn Foundation

Arts and Culture

Our Arts and Culture funding supports institutions, programs, and initiatives working to bridge the arts and culture accessibility gap across our region. We offer funding through three strategies—one that provides valuable, general operating support to diverse and culturally relevant arts and culture organizations, another offering young people an entry point to and training in the arts, and a third that seeks to increase opportunities for people across the region to engage with a wide range of high-quality arts experiences.

Arts and Culture Hubs

Arts Education and Exposure

Arts Presentation and Art Making

Arts and Culture Hubs

Arts and culture organizations create positive social, economic, and community benefits for people across the region while strengthening cultural diversity and connections. However, we know that not all benefits of arts and culture are distributed or experienced equitably across communities, especially in low-income communities or ones with higher populations of people of color.

To this end, the Arts and Culture Hubs strategy supports organizations and institutions in the Greater Philadelphia region whose efforts address this inequity and provide equitable, inclusive, and high-quality arts and culture programs and experiences for all. We look to support organizations as they deepen and expand their commitment to racial equity and economic inclusion by providing flexible resources to invest in staff, operations, and programming.

Theory of Change:
Arts and Culture Hubs

Arts Education and Exposure

Arts education allows young people of all ages to connect to their own creativity, to stretch their imaginations, and express their personalities. Thoughtfully designed and delivered arts learning can act as a safe space for that expression, allowing young people to share personal stories, process conflict and trauma, and develop interpersonal and cultural awareness. These opportunities can also help older students gain skills needed in post-secondary education and the workplace.

Funding through the Arts Education and Exposure strategy supports programming that provides young people with hands-on arts learning led by skilled teaching artists and arts educators. We look to fund projects and programs, working in and out of schools, that are culturally relevant and make it possible for youth to engage as leaders and drivers of their own arts learning experiences.

Arts Presentation and Art Making

Arts and culture programming can provide benefits for individuals and communities, such as strengthening relationships among participants, establishing strong connections to neighborhoods, and fostering understanding and appreciation of various cultures and lived experiences.

Unfortunately, the benefits of these programs are not well distributed across the communities that contribute so much to our region’s diversity and vibrancy. As a result, our Arts Presentation and Art Making strategy supports projects that seek to achieve greater equity through their program design and presentation and with the audiences they serve. Funding will focus on supporting the planning, creation, and presentation of work that offers relevant and accessible ways for more people to connect with arts and culture.

Public Spaces

Our Public Spaces strategies support the creation and stewardship of community and public spaces and the work that allows these spaces to generate long-term benefits for neighborhoods across the Greater Philadelphia region in equitable ways. We offer funding through two strategies – one that focuses on creating and maintaining community and public spaces and a second that helps ensure communities benefit economically from these improvements.

Public Space Creation and Stewardship

Equitable Economic Impacts

Public Space Creation and Stewardship

Public and community spaces can provide a variety of benefits to individuals and communities. In addition to serving as places where people can spend time together and build social connections, they support mental and physical health, serve as platforms for free speech and cultural expression, and have the potential to generate economic benefits. They are spaces where people gather to exchange ideas, share resources, and work together on solutions to local problems. And in the context of climate change, indoor spaces can provide shelter from extreme heat and storms, while green spaces can support climate resiliency by helping to mitigate flooding, capture stormwater, and cool temperatures.

However, the benefits of public spaces are not experienced equally, and poor maintenance remains a central challenge for many neighborhoods, especially for low-income communities and communities of color.

Public Space Creation and Stewardship funding will support the development of new public and community spaces as well as improvement of existing spaces. Our efforts will focus specifically on supporting more equitable access to the many benefits public spaces provide.

Equitable Economic Impacts

The Greater Philadelphia region is home to a variety of public spaces that are deeply appreciated and extensively used. From parks and recreation centers to community gardens, studies show that investment in these spaces can generate positive economic outcomes for neighborhoods, including increased property values and business activity near well-maintained public spaces and employment opportunities for community members.

However, economic benefits often occur in wealthier areas, where lower income communities and communities of color can experience negative outcomes from poorly cared for spaces and can even experience residential and business displacement following major investment in public space. Equitable Economic Impacts funding seeks to support efforts to ensure that public and community spaces generate economic benefits equitably.

Marshall Allen leads the Sun Ra Arkestra
97-year-old Marshall Allen leads the Sun Ra Arkestra at The Woodlands in West Philadelphia, presented by Ars Nova Workshop.

Photo credit: L. David Hinton

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