Reports

This report, summarizing activities and events from the 2021-22 fiscal year, attests to the enduring importance and longevity of the Arts Ed Collective. Read more about how culturally sustaining and healing-centered approaches to arts education are working to transform public education and County systems.

Creative Wellbeing is an approach for fostering communities of wellness, especially for systems-impacted youth, those who are vulnerable to becoming systems- impacted, and the adults who support them. This approach provides culturally relevant, healing-centered, arts-based workshops for young people under 25 and professional development coaching for youth-serving adults—educators, service providers, and community based organizations.

The 2020-21 End of Year Report provides an overview of how the Arts Ed Collective now formally extends beyond public education and aims to change the social conditions and broader public systems that impact where and how young people access learning in and through the arts.

To learn more about the emerging field of Healing Centered Engagement, especially as it relates to arts based youth development, please download our zine Healing-Centered Engagement—Reflections and Insights from the Field.

An evaluation of the initial implementation of Creative Wellbeing was conducted by Harder+Company Community Research. 

The 2019-20 End of Year Report provides an overview of how the Arts Ed Collective has adapted our work to support partners, youth, and families during the COVID-19 pandemic. This summative report on activities between January and June 2020 addresses the ways in which County agencies, school districts, and community-based organizations are pivoting to remote programs and services to ensure that youth across the region engage in quality arts education.

These are difficult times for our collective impact initiative and for the youth whose creative needs we aim to meet. With Arts Ed Collective staff working remotely and our operations running, we continue to support the field through ongoing programs, and we are adapting our work to support partners, youth, families, and the general public in response to the dynamic challenges posed by COVID-19.

Building Creative Career Pathways for Youth: A Field Scan for Los Angeles County identifies existing pathways and programs already serving LA County Youth ages 14 to 24, especially those who face barriers to work. Through labor market analysis, review of the literature, and stakeholder engagement, the authors identified four types of creative career pathway programs and related services, identified barriers, challenges, and opportunities, and developed recommendations for implementation and improvement.

This report outlines the Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative, an 18-month public process that led to the development of 13 recommendations to the LA County Board of Supervisors to ensure that everyone in LA County has equitable access to arts and culture, and to improve inclusion in the wider arts ecology for all residents in every community.

A Portrait of Los Angeles County is an exploration of how LA County residents are faring in terms of well-being and equity. It examines well-being and access to opportunity using the human development framework and index, presenting American Human Development (HD) Index scores for LA County places and demographic groups and exploring a range of critical issues, including health, education, living standards, environmental justice, housing, homelessness, violence, and inequality.