ON-GOING RESEARCH

A project of Creative City: Block By Block funded by SSHRC

Toronto Arts Foundation, in partnership with Art Starts, OCADU and York University, launches an Arts Impact Study to better understand how Toronto residents interact and engage with the arts at a local level.

Margo Charlton, Research Manager, Toronto Arts Foundation

margo@torontoartscouncil.org ♦ 416-392-6802 x 201

October 2012 Update

After months of interviewing close to 200 artists, residents and representatives of arts groups and community organizations, we are sifting through mounds of information. We are looking for themes, trends, commonalities and differences.

We have unearthed the expected and the unexpected; the known and the unknown. We heard about large public festivals and quiet acts of individual creation. We talked to people who are keeping traditional arts alive and to others who are mashing up art forms to create new forms of expression. Malvern, St. James Town and Weston Mount Dennis are full of creativity!

The inspiring stories are accompanied by sobering information about challenges and barriers to the arts. There is never enough money, time or space, and there are endless pressing social needs competing for limited resources.

The people we met are tenacious and resourceful, proud of their communities, and working hard to make change. The impact of the arts on lives and communities is a multilayered story full of complexities, creative tensions, inspiration, and hope.

By the end of the year we will have a draft report in place and in the spring of 2013 we will return to the communities to get input before finalizing the report.

~ Margo