About Lifetime Arts

Credit: Herb Scher

Lifetime Arts’ mission is to catalyze and connect the people, funding, practical strategies, and bold ideas necessary to embrace all older adults as creative and social learners.

 

We do this by…

  • Providing training, consulting, and information resources to organizations, agencies, and teaching artists who want to develop programming, undo ageism, and grow their leadership 

  • Developing new and existing national, state, and local cross-sector partnerships

  • Seeding creative aging programs

  • Documenting and communicating impact to scale the work

  • Convening creative aging leaders across sectors 

 

We envision a world where arts education is embraced as a human right and as an essential factor in older adults’ health and well-being.

 

A world without ageism and age silos, where all ages are fully respected, valued, engaged, contributing, creating, collaborating, and learning from each other.

 

Lifetime Arts fully embraces “positive aging” — with the arts at the core. Rather than perceiving aging as a period of inevitable decline and loss, “positive aging” proponents celebrate growing older as a time of life ripe with the potential for personal growth, enhanced well-being, and civic engagement.

Lifetime Arts envisions a network of teaching artists and arts organizations trained to create and deliver meaningful programming for and with older adults in a variety of settings.

We see a community where teaching artists and their community partners share a vision for positive aging, bringing complementary strengths to designing and implementing arts programs for older adults while creating new resources to improve the quality of life among a growing segment of the population.

We envision networks of community, arts, social service and government leaders who understand the value of arts participation for older adults, who work together to initiate, plan and deliver effective arts programs in their communities.

We see increased opportunities for older adults to discover or re-discover their creative capacities and for teaching artists and arts organizations to expand their reach.

Through the implementation and dissemination of model creative aging programs, and Lifetime Arts’ capacity building and resource initiatives, we envision a shift from the routine, passive entertainment offerings of community organizations to the implementation of programs that actively engage older adults in in-depth learning.

Because creative aging is at the intersection of health, senior services, and community arts, we envision new funding streams becoming available to support the work.

How We Work

Through a variety of programs and services, we build the capacity of organizations and institutions that serve older adults (or should serve them) to plan, implement, and sustain successful arts education programming. We work with multiple national, state, and local partners to shift “senior” programming away from passive entertainment towards in-depth learning, and to recognize and combat ageism and its effect on program design and delivery. We advocate for community-based programs that decrease social isolation, build new community partnerships, employ teaching artists and expand the reach and impact of arts and cultural organizations.

Our Impact

Since 2008, we have provided professional development, training, and coaching for over 3,000 teaching artists and 350 arts, cultural and community organizations across 42 states.