As many of you know, Culture + Community is a research and strategy collaboration with our partners at LaPlaca Cohen, Yancey Consulting, and NORC at the University of Chicago and a brilliant group of advisors. It’s about keeping the cultural sector in dialogue with its communities and participants during and after the pandemic, with the goal of informing deeper equity, relevance, and justice. Funding for the 2021 work — which also includes a qualitative exploration with Black and African American adults around the U.S. — is generously provided by the Wallace Foundation, Barr Foundation, Terra Foundation for American Art, William Penn Foundation, and FocusVision. We believe that the arts and culture field must seize the opportunity not just to recover and restart but also rethink and transform, and that a shared, large-scale picture of human assets, needs, experiences, attitudes, and behaviors in connection with culture can help the field become more equitable, pluralistic, and inclusive.

We’ve just posted a new site with updated info about the project, including an FAQ page and sign-up link for cultural organizations interested in participating. While you’re there, you can also view reports and media from the 2020 survey, such as the Culture Track Key Findings Report and our in-depth analysis of BIPOC perspectives, Centering the Picture.  Please click the image below, or visit sloverlinett.com/CCTT.

This 2021 edition, Culture + Community in a Time of Transformation (#CCTT and #CultureTrack on social media) explores the experiences, needs, attitudes, behaviors, and hopes of people in all kinds of American communities. In an effort to contribute to a well-rounded overall picture for the field, CCTT differs from other pandemic-era cultural research studies in several intentional ways:

• We’re studying the broad U.S. population, including (but not centering) the affiliated audiences and supporters of culture.
• We’re asking questions about relevance, service, equity, and belonging, in addition to restarting and resilience.
• We’re taking a wide, inclusive view of culture, including small and BIPOC-serving organizations in diverse settings and many forms of engagement.
• We’re looking at the “users” of culture rather than the organizations or providers (since practitioners are already being surveyed by many researchers).

We enter this next phase of research with respect, humility, enthusiasm, and gratitude. Please don’t hesitate to reach out; we welcome your thought-partnership at this pivotal moment in the evolution of culture in this country.