Bringing people together: Almost without exception, the projects studied have made a significant contribution to bringing people together. At a simple level, more than nine out of ten respondents made new friends as a result of their involvement. This is such an ordinary outcome of participating in the arts that it can easily be underestimated:

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The public money has dried up, in other words, but so has a whole lot of the private money. You might not have noticed the ramifications quite yet, but you will. It’s in the increasingly ardent pleas from your local NPR station, of course, but it’s also just absence: the film festival or day camp or curated exhibition or concert series that just... See more

Art can be an emotional trigger for larger and deeper dialogues. It can blur the boundaries between things, the boundaries between us and the boundaries between the world and self. Still we rarely see art and economy as subjects deeply unified in the same study or mechanism.

On one hand, this trend is potentially devastating for the performing arts industry. On the other hand, this challenge may represent a revolutionary opportunity for these organizations to fundamentally adapt engagement methods and means to change up these experiences as we currently know them – or at least to change up business models so that they

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economy, finding that nearly 14.6 million Americans earned more than $5.8 billion in 2016 from