Keys to Success – Best Practices

Funding support

Funding support for youth arts in Canada comes from a mix of public and private stakeholders in health, social services, crime prevention, employment/job training, community development and cultural sectors. While a diversity of funders helps to mitigate organizational vulnerability which can stem from over-reliance on one source of funding, an analysis of the existing funding practices for local youth arts in Canada indicates the current framework contains three characteristics that function to inhibit, rather than facilitate, the continued success or growth of the sector.

First, many funding programs within the arts and cultural sector have criteria that make them inaccessible to youth arts organizations. A focus on professional artists and emphasis on traditional art forms may restrict both the types of programming that can be funded, such as hip hop or graffiti, as well as the ability for local youth arts organization to draw from local community resources or former graduates as sources of expertise.

Second, funding from partners supporting youth arts is largely project based. This constrains the ability of practitioners to establish long term planning goals, and may have the effect of shaping programming to meet the objectives of the funders rather than the community. Project based funding rarely includes sufficient resources for program evaluation, which has implications for the collection of meaningful data on the long term effects of local youth arts programming and subsequently, political and funding support. Finding project based funding from multiple sources puts significant administrative strain on limited staff resources, and often does not provide for ongoing professional development for practitioners. The lack of organizational stability that results from project based funding also results in low-wage, precarious employment conditions for staff and contributes to high turnover and staff burnout (Hessenius, 2007). A lack of core funding also leaves organizations extremely vulnerable to shifts in the political climate.

Third, despite the emergence of a cross-sectoral body of evidence of the value of local youth arts practices in addressing the complex needs of marginalized youth in Canada, the absence of a coordinated, comprehensive policy framework for the youth arts sector limits the ability of policy and funding partners to network with respect to innovative approaches, objectives, funding structures, research, evaluation techniques and best practices.

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