Creative Opportunities

Current Areas of Inquiry

  • Building equitable systems of access to arts and cultural experiences, in venues and in everyday life, with a strong emphasis on programs that provide under-resourced communities with sustained access to relevant and meaningful arts experiences.
  • Capturing a much wider set of impacts that result from arts learning, including dimensions like social-emotional growth, the development of social capital, and the cultivation of creative citizenship.
  • Developing research and evaluation designs that build participants’ strengths, offering them opportunities to create, reflect, ask questions, and experience themselves as thinkers and contributors.

Everyone imagines, but creative opportunities are often linked to income, zip code, and identity. Our work challenges that fundamental inequity.

Arts and cultural organizations, public agencies, schools districts, and foundations draw on WolfBrown’s program design, thought partnership, evaluation, and research skills, related to creative opportunities, to:

  • Develop more equitable and innovative programs that reach anyone who wants to take part. This includes community members, young people, families, artists, and cultural workers.
  • Create participatory evaluations that engage staff, artists, teaching artists, family members, and youth as co-researchers and reflective practitioners. We use data to strengthen programs and build their impact.
  • Use both qualitative and quantitative data to examine why and how programs affect the lives of participants.
  • Design and conduct evaluations and research projects that speak to the public value and impact of programs.
  • Write case studies that share nuanced portraits of programs at work.
  • Mentor emerging field leaders through projects and exchanges. We examine the assumptions of our field and build more forward-looking and inclusive practices.

In all of our projects, we work collaboratively with clients and their communities to think in innovative and candid ways. We consider the full array of results they are achieving and to identify the frontiers for their work. In many cases, we are able to present or publish results in ways that attract attention, connections, and funding for our clients and the issues they are pursuing.

Our current work stretches across the United States and beyond to collaborate with many organizations. These include Arts for Learning Maryland, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Carnegie Hall, Ghetto Film School, the William Penn Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (REACH Lab), and the Department of Education (Education Innovation and Research Program). 

Logo for Amplifying Creative Opportunities

To dive deeper into how we work and what we accomplish, explore some of our current and recent projects. You can read our newsletter titled “Amplifying Creative Opportunities” as well.

Services

  • Foundational research into the development of human creative capacities, with an emphasis on what facilitates and limits the realization of these capacities
  • Integrative literature and landscape reviews designed to inform policy choices at cultural organizations, foundations, and public agencies
  • Planning and design of initiatives that expand access to high-quality creative activity
  • Capacity-building and staff development, with particular emphasis on the design and implementation of projects that foster wider participation, more inclusive venues and programs, and creative development across the life span
  • Evaluation of programs with respect to quality, equity, and sustained pathways
  • Development of databases, dashboard displays, and visualizations that portray programs’ implementation, reach, and effectiveness
  • Support and mentorship through pathway programs for emerging leaders in the field

Project Highlights

Arts for Learning Maryland: Impact Evaluation of Multiple Programs

Bloomberg Philanthropies: Assessing the Impact of Arts Internships and Professional Training in High School Seniors

Carnegie Hall: Impact Evaluation of Multiple Programs

City Lore: Evaluation of Multiple Programs

Community MusicWorks: Evaluation of Multiple Programs

Community-Word Project

A Comprehensive Study for the Nonprofit Literary Arts Field

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art: Imagining New Futures for Arts Integration

EdVestors: Multiple Projects

FirstHand at University City Science Center

Ghetto Film School: Longitudinal Evaluation Focused on Student Fellows & Alumni

Jacob Burns Film Center: A Strategic Plan

The Kennedy Center: Developing New Resources and Completing Case Studies

Longy School: Assessing the Impact of Orchestral Music Education in the Lives of Young Children

Mellon Foundation: Multiple Projects

New Victory Theater: Assessing the Impact of Performing Arts Education in the Lives of Young Children

Office for the Arts at Harvard: A Ten-Year Strategic Plan to Envision Undergraduate Participation in the Arts

Olney Culture Lab: Reflections from The Olney Embrace Project

Play On Philly: Strategic Planning and Quality of Music Education

The Research on Equity via the Arts in Childhood (REACH) Lab: A National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab Project

Third Street Music School Settlement: Study/Strengthen/Engage: A Strategic Plan for Third Street Partners Program

William Penn Foundation: Multiple Projects