The Local Arts Policy pages of this website were designed and created as the final product of a semester-long graduate thesis project for eleven students from Carnegie Mellon University's H.John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Each thesis project, known as Systems Synthesis must be in conjunction with a "real-world" client. In this case the client was Americans for the Arts. From the Systems Handbook:

The major goal of the Systems Synthesis project course is to provide students with the skills necessary for structuring, managing, and carrying out projects in an organization. Textbooks and lecture courses cannot provide these skills. Instead, students need to acquire them through first-hand project experiences in relatively small groups with the guidance of seasoned faculty.

Systems Synthesis projects must also contribute significantly to solving or ameliorating important problems of the public sector, non-profit sector, or arts organizations. Systems Synthesis has potentially enormous benefits for service to public and non-profit organizations with the resources of nearly 22,000 student hours and approximately 2,500 faculty hours of project work per year!

About the Research
The research for the project was guided by the following problem statement:

Our aim is to empower arts organizations nationwide with the information necessary to implement and sustain dedicated arts funding through local tax initiatives.

Through research pulled from academic resources, publications, actual policies, and the stories of people who have been involved with such initiatives, we will investigate:

1. Implementation of the policies,
2. Evaluation of the policies, and
3. Comparison of non-arts policies that may suggest alternative opportunities.

Upon analysis of the data collected, we will provide our client, Americans for the Arts, with a ready-to-distribute, comprehensive tool to be utilized by arts leaders across the country.

The research was conducted from September 2004 to November of 2005 and included:

• Collecting and analyzing 48 arts policies from cities, counties, and states across the country
• A web survey on policy evaluation with responses from 250 arts leaders
• 21 in-depth personal interviews of individuals who had worked to implement local policies in their areas
• Extensive demographic data collected from 70 randomly selected cities in the United States with populations over 100,000.

The research is neither comprehensive nor scientific. Its purpose was to identify the questions and issues arts leaders should be aware of before becoming involved in local policy matters that affect the Arts.

About the Advisory Board
The Project was monitored by the client, a faculty advisor from the Heinz School (Jerry Coltin, Director of the Master of Arts Management Program), and an 11 member Advisory Board made up of arts leaders, artists, local politicians, and academics. The Advisory Board included: Rene Piechocki (Artist), Jeanne Pearlman (The Pittsburgh Foundation), Lisa Hoitsma (Gateway to the Arts), Marilyn Coleman (Dewey & Kaye Inc), John Weinstein (Allegheny County Treasurer), Bill Peduto (Pittsburgh City Councilman), William Robinson (Allegheny County Councilman), Sarah Tambucci (Arts Education Collaborative), Donald Amendt (Pennsylvania Rural Arts Alliance), Christine Taylor (Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council), and Krista Campbell (Center for Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon).

About the Students
The students who contributed to this project are working on their Masters Degree in Public Policy and Arts Management. The degree program for Public Policy and Management is overseen by the H. John Heinz III School for Public Policy and Management, and the degree in Arts Management is administered by the Institute for the Management of Creative Enterprises (IMCE) - a joint unit of the Heinz School and the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University.

The team of students included: Brad Carlin, Jin-Hee Chung, Melissa Ezarik, Yu-Fei Hsu, Nancy C. Lu, Michelle L. Mace, Mike Mucha, Colin O'Donohoe, Suzanne Onasanya, Bill Updegraff, and Shiyuan Yuan.

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