This year’s Annual Convention explores the role of the arts in creating and sustaining healthy, vibrant, equitable communities. It is organized around five core themes:

• Culture and Community: The boundaries of the “community” to be served and the “culture” to be supported are broader than currently at play in a lot of arts programming. These sessions will explore case studies and spark conversations about how nexus organizations, arts institutions and artists, and others are pushing at those boundaries and supporting a broader spectrum of artistic enterprise.
• Equity and Engagement: The nature of engagement and equitable policies and practices in the arts can lag behind the demands of the communities. Where are our bright spots, and what are our challenges. These sessions will explore equity in action, and will highlight innovative, genuine ways that arts groups are deeply engaging with the full breadth of their communities.
• Investment (Including and Beyond Grantmaking): Supporting the full creative spectrum extends beyond simple grant investment, and requires more flexibility and thought about formal investment as well as the informal investment of time, resources, etc. On scales large and small, nexus organizations—local arts agencies, foundations, other agencies, and more—are borrowing models or crafting new ones from scratch designed to make the distribution of funds more equitable, the likelihood of success higher, and the systems that need changing more visible. These sessions will bring success to the fore, and will offer opportunities to grapple with some of the challenges.
• Cross-Sector and Community Partnership: The visibility and value of the arts increases when they are tied to parts of community and individual life that are visible and valued, making partnership crucial. But what makes a successful partnership, and how (among all of the challenges that any arts group is facing today) can we identify where to put our energy, how to maintain and grow a connection, and how to create common goals? Given that new community visions cannot happen in a vacuum, these sessions will explore what being part of the interconnected reality of today’s community looks like.
• Communicating Our Value: If our fate is tied up in how much people value what we do, then we need to place more of a premium on the communication of that value. These sessions with stretch all the way from marketing and promotion to communications, advocacy, public will-building, and policy—all of the steps along the way to creating a strong and sustaining value proposition for the arts.