Washington State Arts & Culture Sector Report
Arts and culture are foundational to the communities we call home. A film can shed light onto an unknown story. A mural painting can bring unanticipated delight to an evening stroll through the neighborhood. An elementary school choir performance can instill a newfound confidence in its young performers. Arts and culture are a means by which people share, engage, and find connection. They support well-being and give neighborhoods their distinctive character.
Arts and culture therefore occupy a place alongside other essential sectors such as parks and recreation, libraries, schools, and civic institutions that make a place worth living in. When all these sectors flourish, communities are more cohesive, more resilient, and more equitable.
Healthy arts and culture organizations are essential to this vision. But when an organization struggles, the impact ripples outward: programming weakens, partnerships erode, community access recedes, and artists and culture bearers lose the channels to develop and share their work. Communities lose something irreplaceable. In 2022, Allen Family Philanthropies partnered with ArtsFund to launch the Community Accelerator Grant (CAG) program, providing unrestricted funding to arts and culture organizations across Washington state. The goal was to quickly support post-pandemic recovery, with a focus on reaching organizations that typically have less access to large-scale philanthropy. Since then, we have continued CAG due to need and demonstrated impact, investing $30 million over three years to more than 1,000 unique organizations across all 39 counties of the state.
Several years of program data reveal two things: how grant design shapes who actually receives resources and how small organizations, which are often invisible in broader data sets, are faring. For example, organizations with annual budgets under $1 million saw staff capacity decline faster relative to staff capacity at organizations with larger annual budgets. Yet there are some potential bright spots. Organizations that received reoccurring CAG awards saw a greater diversification of revenue. When organizations have funding for multiple years, they are better positioned to innovate, grow their audiences, and pursue their missions.
These findings are informing how we work, and we hope they will also encourage additional investigation and consideration. Ensuring equitable access to vibrant arts and culture requires sustained commitment and action from funders, policymakers, and communities together. We all need to show up. In this spirit, we offer this report as a first step and hope it will spur additional data, funding, and audience support for arts and culture organizations throughout our state.
Anh Nguyen | Director, Arts, Youth and Communities at Allen Family Philanthropies