Leadership Initiatives

Arts in Healthcare
The Arts in Healthcare is an international movement that works to infuse the full spectrum of the arts into healthcare settings, including design, visual, performing and literary arts, resulting in programs and healthcare environments that are welcoming and uplifting for caregivers, patients, their families and visitors.

Careers in the Arts
The Arts Endowment seeks to address barriers and advance training and career opportunities in the arts for individuals with disabilities-- in the strong belief that inclusion must be ever present in our vision and that all Americans have the opportunity to create and participate fully in the arts.

Arts& Aging
Lifelong learning in the arts educates and engages older adults as teachers, learners and as creators, thereby contributing to individual, community and public life.  The National Endowment for the Arts seeks to involve older Americans in on-going, excellent, participatory arts experiences. This includes increasing the sensitivity of professionals and practitioners, both in the fields of aging and the arts, to the need and value of quality arts experiences for, by and with older persons.

Universal Design
Universal design is design excellence that makes the environment usable by everyone throughout the lifespan. It goes beyond minimum access codes and standards to address the right of people – from childhood into their oldest years - to comfortably use spaces, products and information in an independent, inclusive and equal manner.  The Arts Endowment works to educate designers, city planners, developers, educators and consumers on this important design process -- that contributes to livability, individual worth, to a sense of community and to the quality of life.

Arts in Corrections
The Arts Endowment strives to bring the arts into non-traditional settings, including correctional institutions. Taking the arts into corrections provides artists with income and opportunities to develop their art, as well as providing quality arts programming for persons who would not otherwise have such opportunities.  And the following should be somewhere in the "arts in corrections" section.  Arts programs led by professional artists have proven effective in enhancing both youth and adult inmates’ self esteem, as well as their basic skills, including social, reading and writing.

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National Endowment for the Arts · an independent federal agency
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20506