Arts Resources for Children and Youth in Philadelphia—1995-1997

From 1995 to 1996, Mark Stern and Susan Seifert collaborated with the Central Philadelphia Development Corporation on a study, commissioned by The Pew Charitable Trusts, of arts resources for children and youth in Philadelphia. The kids' art study was the team's first opportunity to use mapping as a way of examining the character of the city's cultural resources.

While undertaking this study, Stern and Seifert made a discovery that had implications for their later work. In examining the correlations between the density of cultural resources and census variables, they found that census tracts with many arts resources were more likely to have both above-average poverty rates and above-average proportions of professionals and managers in the labor force. They first thought they had made a mistake but finally realized that there were many Philadelphia neighborhoods that had both of these characteristics—neighborhoods they characterized as "pov-prof." "Re-presenting the City: Arts, Culture, and Diversity in Philadelphia (SIAP Working Paper #3, April 1999)"—explored this form of diversity in greater detail.

 

 

 

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  • Publication
    Arts Resources for Children and Youth in Philadelphia
    (1997-04-01) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan C
    This report, commissioned in 1995 by The Pew Charitable Trusts, presents findings of a study of arts and cultural resources for children and youth in Philadelphia. The purpose of the project was to examine access to and opportunities in the arts for young people and assess the strengths and weaknesses of the citywide system. The project used two perspectives to assess resources. First, the research team developed a geographic data base of existing nonprofit youth arts providers and arts in the public schools. This was combined with US census data to examine the geography and socio-economic context of existing services. Second, the team conducted over 40 interviews with cultural organizations and city agencies to understand relationships among different providers as a network of children’s arts resources. Appendix A lists the 229 nonprofit youth-serving cultural organizations in Philadelphia and identifies the 47 providers that participated in the qualitative phase of the study.