Pennsylvania Council on the Arts: Four Decades of Making a Difference

For more than forty years, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (PCA) has funded community arts programs, improved arts education, and make the arts more accessible and widely available for all Pennsylvanians. Despite years of budget cuts and dwindling resources, the agency continues to play a crucial role in ensuring the health and vitality of arts throughout the Commonwealth.

Here in Southeastern Pennsylvania, the PCA has worked hand-in-hand with the Cultural Alliance to fund local arts projects and programs through the Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts (PPA) program; helped develop the PA Cultural Data Project (which is instrumental to our Portfolio series and other research efforts); and provided crucial support when the Alliance hosted the Americans for the Arts 2008 Annual Convention in Philadelphia.

This partnership has benefitted hundreds of artists and organizations throughout the region. Last year  through the PPA program, the Cultural Alliance was able to distribute nearly $95,000 in Project Stream grants to 47 nonprofit arts groups and performers from around the region. Projects selected included the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center’s Philly Photo Day, a free community arts event where everyone in Philadelphia is asked to take a picture on the same day and is later invited to a reception for an exhibition where every single photo is on display; Girls Rock Philly’s Girls Rock Camp, a two-week music day camp program for girls ages 9 through 17; Lower Merion Vocational Training Center’s artist-in-residence program, which couples teaching artists with groups of 20-30 artists with disabilities; and Music For All Seasons, which provides interactive musical programs that address issues of social interaction and quality of life for children in a Philadelphia domestic violence shelter.

The Council also partners with local arts education organizations to help fill the void left by cuts to arts instruction through its Arts in Education Division. In the Greater Philadelphia Region, the PCA is working with the Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership to help foster educational improvement through creativity and artistic practice. Together they are providing valuable research on how to best integrate arts into K-12 classrooms in the Philadelphia School District and developing pilot programs in four schools which will use arts education to help build math and science skills for second through fifth grade students.  

To ensure that the arts are truly available to everyone, the PCA partnered with the Pennsylvania chapter of VSA, Art-Reach, the Cultural Alliance and PNC Bank to help establish and promote Independence Starts Here!. This program has helped to ensure that most large and mid-sized theatres in Philadelphia now offer programs for people with vision and hearing impairments.

On February 7th, Governor Tom Corbett will address the citizens of Pennsylvania and present his budget priorities for the coming year. With a projected $800 million budget deficit expected for FY2012-13, funding for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and its wonderful programs are extremely vulnerable. What happens when a state loses its arts agency? We all lose.

Please take a moment to sign up for our Advocacy Action Center, and join us on Twitter on February 7th as we follow the Governor’s budget address. In the coming weeks we’ll be ramping up our advocacy efforts on behalf of Pennsylvania’s arts and cultural sector.  You can expect thoughtful analysis along with up-to-date communications and action alerts. Your help is crucial. The time to join is now.