To advance our mission and answer important questions about the health of arts and cultural organizations, we are building a database that allows us to create a data-driven model of the US arts ecosystem.  This will be an ongoing effort that will evolve over time.  In this section, we describe our efforts to date along with initial results.

The Arts & Culture Ecosystem features a complex and interdependent set of relationships among: 1) arts organizations; 2) their communities, reflecting the people who live there, the artists and arts and cultural organizations, and local complementary or substitute businesses and organizations; and 3) the cultural policies that influence the production and consumption of arts and culture (see Figure 1). 

Figure 1: Modeling the Arts & Culture Ecosystem 

To understand what drives the performance of individual arts organizations that reside in distinct communities around the country, we attempt to model all of these different factors.  Doing so requires collecting, integrating, and aggregating data from a variety of sources.  At present, our data collection covers fiscal years 2007-2013 and our most current results focus on performance in 2010-2013.

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