[Research Development] Guidelines for the Wallace Foundation’s Landscape Study of Community-Based Youth Arts Programs with Workforce Development Components

Background

At James Madison University (JMU), I develop detailed guidelines and analyze past awards for various grant opportunities (see Analyzing Past Awards using R, Extracting Past Awarded Grants Data from the Internet). I originally prepared this document for a JMU team, but they ultimately decided not to pursue the opportunity due to other, more pressing commitments. As a result, I have decided to share it here.

As a side note, if you are not familiar with the Wallace Foundation, I encourage you to check them out. They are a great organization dedicated to making a positive impact in communities through research and practice in the arts and education.

Introduction

Program: Landscape Study of Community-Based Youth Arts Programs with Workforce Development Components

Proposals Due: July 18, 2025

Funding Amount: Up to $1,000,000

Time period: January 1, 2026-December 31, 2027

Contact: ArtsResearch@wallacefoundation.org

Submission method: ArtsResearch@wallacefoundation.org

The Wallace Foundation is seeking to better understand community-based youth arts programs that foster both bridging and bonding social capital. They are particularly interested in programs that:

• Use the arts to support youth development and work-life skills.

• Provide paid work opportunities (e.g., internships, apprenticeships) that help youth build relationships, skills, and career interests.

To inform a future five-year initiative, the Foundation plans to commission this two-year research study to map and analyze such programs.

The Foundation anticipates that programs will, at a minimum, be working with high-school aged youth, and will offer paid work opportunities to high school-aged youth.

Scope of Work

The proposals must answer the following questions:

Program Designs

• What strategies, structures, and approaches characterize community-based youth arts programs with a paid work component?

  • How are teaching artists selected and supported and what is their role in program implementation?

Program Impacts

• What kinds of impacts have such programs had on youth (spanning well-being outcomes, arts outcomes, and education and work related outcomes), and how do they achieve and document these impacts?

  • How, specifically, do the programs help young people develop bridging as well as bonding social capital?

  • What is the role of teaching artists in achieving these outcomes?

  • How does the artform (e.g., theater, writing, visual arts) afford particular opportunities and youth outcomes?

Organizational Developmental

• What kinds of relationships, partnerships, funding and business models, professional preparation, and other supports are critical for youth arts programs to build paid work components in their programmatic offerings?

Funding

• How are programs funded or financed?

Policy Considerations

• What kinds of youth workforce and other policies are shaping or impacting the programs?

Phases of the Project

Phase 1

Conduct a landscape analysis of community-based youth arts programs with paid work components (e.g., internships, apprenticeships). This phase will result in an internal report for The Wallace Foundation, identifying various program models and strategies.

Phase 2

Select 6–8 exemplary programs from Phase 1 findings for in-depth case studies. Researchers will examine how these programs operate, their challenges, and their impact. A public report will be produced to share insights with the broader field and guide Wallace’s upcoming youth arts initiative

Deliverables

• Semi-annual analytic memos sharing emerging findings with Wallace Foundation.

• Phase 1 internal report characterizing the field, including recommendations and rationale for the selection of a cohort of exemplary programs for Phase 2 case studies.

• Phase 2 public report, characterizing the field and identifying research gaps and important questions that further research could address.

Proposal Contents and Style

Style

• 10 single-spaced pages in 12 pt font

Contents

Your understanding of the goal and benefit of the study

This section should demonstrate your understanding of and experience with the guiding research questions and purpose of this study. It should summarize what is commonly known and not known in the field, and how such a landscape study with case studies could advance positive outcomes for youth as well as the arts organizations that serve them.

A detailed research plan

Important

This should be the bulk of your proposal.

• What research questions and sub-questions will your study address? (Feel free to tweak and elaborate on the research questions provided in this RFP.)

• What kinds of data will you collect, how, and from where?

• What theoretical lenses and analytic frameworks will you use to make meaning of the data you collect?

• What are the limitations of your proposed design/process and any mitigants that might address such limitations.

• Please include a table that links research questions, data sources, analytical approach, and project deliverables.

Deliverables

Description of deliverables you plan to produce and their intended audience and use.

Qualifications of your team to complete this study.

Please include descriptions of similar landscape studies you have previously conducted.

Bibliographic references

References do not count towards the page limit.

Project timeline

Bio sketches of senior personnel

Links to 1-2 examples of a prior report you have produced of a similar nature

Excel budget and budget explanation

• Please budget for copyediting and graphic layout of the public report.

• Please budget funds for the preparation and travel of at least one person to the Wallace office in NYC to present findings in the final report, although Wallace Foundation may mutually elect to meet by zoom.

• Please budget any necessary research incentive costs for Phase 1.

IDC

In this RFP, Wallace Foundation does not specify indirect cost rate, but in other cases, they allow a 20% indirect rate on all direct costs. This is something you would need to check with program officers.

Other Considerations

Factor in all of the following in the proposal (time and budget if applicable):

• Monthly one hour meetings with the Arts Research Officer

• Monthly 90-minute meetings with the full arts team at Wallace

• Quarterly 90-minute advisory group meetings with field leaders selected by Wallace

• Semi-annual 90-minute meetings with the full arts strategy team at Wallace

• During Phase 2, all of the above plus participation in up to three 3-day convenings with the cohort of exemplar programs.

About the Wallace Foundation

The mission of The Wallace Foundation is to help all communities build a more vibrant and just future by fostering advances in the arts, education leadership, and youth development. … support their grantees (such as school districts) to create value for those they serve by developing and strengthening their work at the local level. … add value to the field as a whole by designing initiatives that address important unanswered policy and practice questions, commissioning researchers to document and analyze what is learned by Wallace grantees as they participate in the initiative, and then sharing these findings with practitioners, policymakers and influencers in order to catalyze improvements more broadly. In this way, Wallace Foundation aims to use the development of research-based insights and evidence as a lever to help institutions, beyond those Wallace Foundation funds directly, enrich and enhance their work.

Tip

The Wallace Foundation might evaluate your proposal more positively if you were to evaluate Wallace grantees working on youth arts projects, reflect on what is learned, and share best practices in the field.

Wallace is committed to supporting research that is designed and conducted with and for equity. To inform strategies for change, research proposals should use strength-based approaches and be designed to shed light on structures, systems, processes, or practices that produce or reproduce inequities or overcome them. Research itself should be equity-centered—including partnerships, processes, and methods that center the voices and perspectives of communities that would stand to use or benefit from the research. Research teams should include principal investigators and other senior intellectual contributors with relevant experience. Where relevant, theoretical frameworks should be informed by a recognition of systemic forms of exclusion or marginalization. Research methods, from data collection to analysis, should clearly articulate how the use of such frameworks will lead to new insights and understanding at both a practical and conceptual level, what the limitations of the methods are, and how they can support the development of strength-based change strategies. Recognition, in forms appropriate to the work, should be provided for all research participants.

Wallace Foundation’s work foregrounds racial equity but is not limited to it. The Foundation is concerned with the marginalization of people based on any element of their identity and circumstance.

The Foundation believes achieving equity requires constructively addressing historical, structural, and systemic causes of racial and other forms of inequity and why they exist.

The Wallace Approach

Most Wallace initiatives start with a hypothesis. Organizations participating in those initiatives test that hypothesis in projects they design. Independent researchers study the organizations’ work and determine whether and how the hypothesis holds.

The Wallace team developed a broad initiative … that could potentially lead to hypotheses future initiatives could test. … “What does it mean to have organizational well-being that is tied to–or has a relationship with—-the community’s well-being?”

Literature Review

It is a good idea to refer to two groups of literature in your proposal: (1) the literature that Wallace Foundation referred to in the RFP, and (2) the Wallace Foundation’s own reports on youth arts.

Literature Referred to in the RFP

Research has documented the important ways that community-based youth arts programs can support youth, including older adolescents. In addition to developing young people’s interests and skills in various artistic mediums, programs have been shown to develop important 21st century work skills, such as creativity, collaboration, and communication skills (Acosta et al., 2025; Halverson & Sawyer, 2022). Moreover, research has documented how such programs provide powerful sites for the development of relationships and bonding capital for young people (Osai et al., 2025; Peppler et al., 2022). Collaborative art making, whether on a stage or in a studio or community setting, provides a context for both vulnerability and self-expression that may make it especially powerful for development of identity, belonging, and connection. Indeed, a recent retrospective longitudinal study has found that strong relational bonds and friendships are one of the most enduring aspects of participation in youth arts programs (Nelligan et al., 2025).

Bonding capital—close supportive relationships—is essential to youth well-being and social and emotional development (NASEM, 2025). Bridging capital—connections with individuals from different social sectors (professional, interest-based, economic, and others) who can provide valuable informational and resource support—has been shown to positively link to long term life outcomes (Chetty et al., 2022). All young people need both bonding and bridging relationships or capital, but bridging capital has been found to be unevenly distributed across social groups. Young people from high-poverty communities have less bridging capital than their peers as well as fewer opportunities to develop it (Benzow, 2024; Lukasiewicz et al., 2019).

References

• Acosta, J. D., Pak, L., McCarthy, D., Rogers, R. C., Marcellino, W., Rabinowitz, M., … Dion, L. (2025). Stitching the Threads Together: A Cross-Disciplinary Literature Review on Youth Arts Engagement and Well-Being. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation.

• Benzow, A. (2024). A scarcity of cross-class friendships hinders opportunities in distressed communities.

• Chetty, R., Dobbie, W., Goldman, B., Porter, S. R., & Yang, C. S. (2024). Changing opportunity: Sociological mechanisms underlying growing class gaps and shrinking race gaps in economic mobility.

• Halverson, E., & Sawyer, K. (2022). Learning in and through the arts. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 31(1), 1–13. doi:10.1080/10508406.2022.2029127

• Lukasiewicz, K., Bahar, O. S., Ali, S., Gopalan, P., Parker, G., Hawkins, R., … Walker, R. (2019). Getting by in New York City: Bonding, Bridging and Linking Capital in Poverty–Impacted Neighborhoods. City & Community, 18(1), 280–301. doi:10.1111/cico.12373

• Moroney, D., & Nalamada, P. (Eds.). (2025). The future of youth development: Building systems and strengthening programs. Washington, DC: The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

• Nelligan, P., DiGiacomo, D., Chew, P., Sefton-Green, J., Peppler, K., & Mejias, S. (2025). Exploring the Long-Term Impacts of Out-of-School Arts Participation Among Marginalized Youth. IJREE – International Journal for Research on Extended Education, 12(1), 5–22.

• Osai, E., Akiva, T., Spiezia, J., Young, A., & Medrano, T. (2025). Well-being and well-becoming through the arts: A picture of mattering for youth of color.

• Peppler, K., Dahn, M., & Ito, M. (2022). Connected Arts Learning: Cultivating Equity Through Connected and Creative Educational Experiences. Review of Research in Education, 46(1), 264–287. doi:10.3102/0091732X221084322

Wallace Foundation’s Own Reports and Other Resources on Youth Arts

• The Connected Arts Learning Framework: An Expanded View of the Purposes and Possibilities for Arts Learning

• The Connected Arts Learning Framework: How Connected Arts Learning Can Expand Our View of the Impacts of Arts Education

• Stitching Together the Threads A Cross-Disciplinary Literature Review on Youth Arts and Well-Being

• Don’t Dictate, Collaborate: Achieving Equity in Arts Education

• Youth Arts Initiative: Raising the Barre and Stretching the Canvas Implementing High Quality Arts Programming in a National Youth Serving Organization

• Youth Arts Initiative: Designing for Engagement The Experiences of Tweens in the Boys & Girls Clubs’ Youth Arts Initiative

• Youth Arts Initiative:Setting the Stage Practical Ideas for Implementing High-Quality Afterschool Arts Programs

• Building High-Quality, Sustainable Youth Arts Programs

Note

For more resources, see Wallace > Resources and Wallace > Annual Reports.

History: Past Awards Cohorts

First Cohort: Relatively large organizations with annual budgets of at least $500,000 and have been in existence for at least ten years.

None of these 18 organizations are based in Virginia.

In this initiative, “there are few limits on the work Wallace will fund. If there is a clear problem an organization seeks to solve, and if the organization has a clear project with a clear rationale to solve that problem, Wallace will support that organization to design and implement its project.”

Wallace tapped the Social Science Research Council, an independent nonprofit that oversees social science research internationally, to match an early-career research fellow with each of the 18 organizations to document the organization’s history and help understand its work. “For some of the 18, these studies are documenting their history for the first time,” says Bevan, “going into the archives and interviewing community members and others.”

Second Cohort: Regional intermediary arts service organizations grounded in communities of color

Research into this cohort will primarily focus on the work of the intermediary organizations. “There will be researchers studying what equitable grantmaking processes led by these two networks look like.”

Third Cohort: Arts service organizations’s research to better understand the groups and interests they serve

Field Studies (NotebookLM summary)

These projects focus on supporting and uplifting marginalized communities through arts and cultural strategies. Each organization partners with research institutions to investigate specific questions related to their mission and community needs. Key themes include:

• Equity and Advocacy: Many projects focus on advocating for the rights and needs of marginalized artists and communities, emphasizing the importance of equity in the arts.
• Community Building: Organizations prioritize building strong, supportive communities through networking, collaboration, and cultural strategies.
• Research and Data: The use of mixed-methods research, ethnographic studies, and community-based participatory research is prevalent, highlighting the importance of data-driven approaches to understanding and addressing community needs.
• Cultural Sustainability: Projects aim to create sustainable cultural and economic models that support the long-term well-being of marginalized communities.
• Visibility and Representation: Efforts to amplify the voices and stories of marginalized artists are central to many initiatives, seeking to disrupt invisibility and misperceptions.

Arts Administrators of Color Network (Washington, D.C.)

Focuses on equity in the arts through networking and community building. Partners with Cuyler Consulting to study advocacy priorities for arts administrators and artists of the global majority.

BIG We Foundation (Memphis, Tennessee)

Uses cultural strategies to support well-being and community restoration. Partners with Sankofa Research Institute to study support for Black artists and cultural entrepreneurs.

Camden FireWorks (Camden, New Jersey)

Aims to redefine metrics for a thriving arts ecosystem. Partners with Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage to study cultural indicators for Black artists.

Cave Canem (Brooklyn, New York)

Supports the growth of Black poets. Partners with Ithaka S+R to explore organizational needs for Black literary arts service organizations.

The Center for Cultural Power (Oakland, California)

Activates and mobilizes BIPOC artists for social justice. Conducts a mixed-methods study on building narrative power and sustainability for BIPOC artists.

Centro de Economía Creativa (Puerto Rico)

Investigates management practices of Puerto Rican arts groups. Uses ethnographic, Californiase study, and survey methods to study community impact.

Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco (San Francisco, California)

Studies organizational resilience and strategies for POC-led arts organizations. Partners with Ohio State University researchers.

Clemmons Family Farm (Charlotte, Vermont)

Supports artists of African diaspora cultures in Vermont. Investigates cross-sectoral approaches to improve social capital and wellness.

First Peoples Fund (Rapid City, South Dakota)

Supports Native artists and culture bearers. Partners with NORC at the University of Chicago to develop community-informed survey measures.

IllumiNative (Tulsa, Oklahoma)

Amplifies Native voices and issues. Expands on the Reclaiming Native Truth project to build visibility and shift public perceptions.

The Latinx Theatre Commons (United States)

Works to transform the narrative of American theater. Develops a white paper on archiving and writing Latinx theater history.

Mosaic America (San Jose, California)

Cultivates belonging through inter-cultural art. Expands cultural asset mapping in urban and rural communities.

National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (San Antonio, Texas)

Advances the needs of Latino arts and culture organizations. Conducts a national assessment and develops an interactive website for findings.

The South Asian American Digital Archive (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

Creates belonging through storytelling. Investigates archival practices for arts organizations of color.

Silk Road Rising (Chicago, Illinois)

Examines the impact of arts service organizations on the SWANA theater community. Uses cultural mapping to study networks and influence.

World Arts West (San Francisco, California)

Supports grassroots dance organizations. Investigates needs and interests of culturally specific dance organizations.

Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Utica, Mississippi)

Supports community development through cultural production. Studies the role of artists as community health workers.

National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development (Oakland, California, and Washington, D.C.)

Advances equity for AA and NHPI communities. Explores community arts initiatives to address disparities.

Support Oakland Artists (Oakland, California)

Enhances local artists’ ability to thrive. Studies the impact of gentrification on Black public art and identity.

Research-practice partnerships with arts organizations of color (NotebookLM summary)

The projects focus on leveraging arts and cultural strategies to address various social, environmental, and economic issues. Key themes include:

• Environmental Justice: Projects aim to bridge environmental crises with historical and colonial contexts, using artistic practices to inform and engage communities.
• Equity in Media and Arts: Efforts to foster equity in film, media, and arts through research and innovative practices.
• Community Building and Cultural Preservation: Initiatives to support and preserve cultural traditions and stabilize communities against displacement.
• Peacebuilding through Arts: Using theater and performance to transform experiences of oppression into messages of peace.
• Youth Development: Exploring how arts centers contribute to the growth and well-being of Black youth.

Critical Ecology Lab (Oakland, California)

Focuses on the intersection of environmental crises and settler colonialism. Partners with Public History Project/Price Institute-Rutgers and Arts in a Changing America to develop a study that equips artists to address colonial, ecological, and extractive histories in the Lower Connecticut, Long Island, New York City, and Northern New Jersey estuarial bioregion.

Full Spectrum Features (Chicago, Illinois)

Aims to foster equity in the independent film industry. Partners with JusticexDesign and Inkcap Collective to design a study addressing justice and harm in storytelling, developing art-based learning tools for ethical community engagement.

Kyoung’s Pacific Beat (Brooklyn, New York)

A peacemaking theater company focusing on stories of (im)migration, queerness, and identity. Partners with researchers to understand the aesthetics and conditions necessary for peacemaking theater to thrive in the U.S.

LA Commons (Los Angeles, California)

Works to create public art through community stories. Partners with USC’s Spatial Analysis Lab to explore property rights-informed strategies to mitigate gentrification-driven displacement in L.A. neighborhoods.

Media and Data Equity Lab at Northwestern University (Chicago, Illinois)

Focuses on inequity in media and technology systems. Partners with Open Television and Detroit Narrative Agency to document barriers to film and media employment equity in the Midwest, developing a database for pay transparency and resources.

Morehouse College, The McIntosh County Shouters, The Gullah Geechee Ring Shouters, and The Voices of Gullah Singers

Addresses intergenerational transmission and economic opportunities for Gullah-Geechee Ring Shout Tradition practitioners. Partners with HBCUs and UNESCO sites to explore cultural transmission models and apply for ICH designation.

White Research & Development (WRD) Incorporated (Cincinnati, Ohio)

Investigates collaborative endowment planning for arts organizations of color (AOCs). Partners with Robert O’Neal Multicultural Arts Center and other Cincinnati-based arts organizations to document and test innovative endowment planning processes.

TERC (Cambridge, Massachusetts)

Explores how community-based dance centers contribute to the development of Black youth. Partners with dance centers in Boston, Gary, and NYC to study practices that support youth growth and social connectedness.