In 2018, the New York City-based Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund launched its Arts in Health initiative. Backed by an initial $10 million commitment, the effort supports organizations using the arts to address health issues that impact New York communities, including mental health stigma, trauma and aging-related diseases.
At the time, the idea that the arts could improve health outcomes wasn’t novel. “Obviously, there were organizations providing art therapy and hospital-based programs,” executive director Rick Luftglass said in a recent conversation. But the practice wasn’t a top priority for many arts grantmakers, and even less so for those without a history of arts-related giving.
Then the pandemic hit. Countless people found refuge in the arts while outfits like the World Health Organization, Grantmakers in the Arts, Grantmakers in Health, Mindful Philanthropy, the National Organization for Arts and Health (NOAH) and NeuroArts Blueprint, where the Illumination Fund’s founder and president, Laurie M. Tisch serves on the advisory board, persistently touted the links between the arts and health. The question was no longer if the arts provide health-related benefits — that was irrefutable — but how proponents could best push the field forward.
The momentum continued to build, and Tisch concluded that the time was right to take a deep dive into the impact of Arts in Health and “synthesize our learnings so organizations and funders have something tangible to work with,” Luftglass said.
On Thursday morning, the Illumination Fund published the result of this exercise: “The Role of the Arts in Healthcare: Transforming Lives, Creating Community,” a deeply researched report providing an overview of the Arts in Health program, case studies of grantee partners and insights into how Tisch and stakeholders conceptualize impact. To coincide with the report’s release, the Illumination Fund announced it was more than doubling its commitment to Arts in Health to $25 million.
Having presented findings from the report to over 300 arts and healthcare professionals at NOAH’s annual conference in late October, Luftglass believes it will empower organizations to launch or strengthen programs and attract new funders.
“To have evidence that shows that partnerships go beyond the idea that the arts are inherently therapeutic — that is where there is encouraging potential for more investment in the field,” he said.
Catalyzing the field of arts in health
Philanthropist Laurie M. Tisch is deeply involved in a wide range of issues, including the arts in New York City. She is a former co-chair of the board of trustees at the Whitney Museum of American Art, former vice chair of the board of trustees at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and serves on the board of directors at the Juilliard School.
Laurie’s late father Bob started Loews Corporation with his brother Laurence. Forbes pegs her real-time net worth at $1.6 billion.
Tisch launched the Illumination Fund in 2007. In addition to Arts in Health, its program areas include Civic Engagement, Access to the Arts and Jewish Life.
In April 2020, I spoke with Luftglass after the Illumination Fund joined the NYC COVID-19 Response & Impact Fund and announced it would expand its Arts in Health program. “Though we did a lot of research and kicked a lot of tires before choosing our first grantees, once we got up and running, we started to see huge leaps,” he said.
Beyond tracking how its funding was advancing grantees’ work, Tisch and Illumination Fund staff were fostering collaborations across the program’s cohort, advocating for the field and learning valuable lessons. The new report encapsulates this work from 2018 to 2023 to — and I’m quoting Tisch from the introduction — “inspire health organizations, arts organizations, foundations, philanthropists and government agencies to expand the field by exploring opportunities at the intersection of the arts and health.”
Differentiating between arts and non-arts funders
The report, which the Illumination Fund created in collaboration with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors as well as leading healthcare professionals, artists and researchers, kicks off with essays by Tisch, Luftglass and others, before providing an overview of its partnership with NYC Health + Hospitals.
Next, the report presents snapshots of over two-dozen grantees operating in the fields of mental health and age-related diseases. This is where the rubber meets the operational road, as readers from organizations focused on the arts, mental health and neurological conditions can study grantees’ program offerings, partnerships and metrics to calibrate their work and more effectively make the pitch to funders.
As far as the latter audience is concerned, it’s worth making the distinction between arts and non-arts grantmakers. Arts funders usually don’t require reams of spreadsheets to be convinced that a musical performance or dance class can be a lifeline for incarcerated youth or survivors of domestic violence.
In contrast, program managers at organizations that do not have a footprint in the arts space are busy enough tending to their existing grantees, and even if they want to branch out into arts-related giving, they need to measure a program’s impact, and making a credible assessment of the arts experience falls outside their purview. As a result, a mental health funder will opt to focus on sector-typical interventions like advocacy, research and increasing access to clinical services — and let art funders handle the connection between the arts experience and healing.
“The big challenge that we’ve seen over the last seven years is that there are so many silos — healthcare funders, arts funders, healthcare reporters, development officers,” said Jan Rothschild, who, as president of the arts and culture consulting firm Rothschild & Associates, has worked with the Illumination Fund to develop communications around the Arts in Health initiative since 2017. “Arts in Health breaks through those silos across artistic, healthcare and funding disciplines.”
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Articulating impact
Given non-arts funders’ understandable tendency to stay in their own lane, one of the more trenchant pieces of analysis in the Illumination Fund’s new report is Luftglass’ essay on page 25 laying out how leaders consider impact across three “levels.”
The first, “grantee-determined impact,” identifies and measures what’s important to the grantees, rather than having the Illumination Fund unilaterally define the metrics. Grantee partners that “work in different communities may look at success differently, so we look to them to define what’s meaningful,” Luftglass told me, echoing the sentiments of funders that seek to share power by allowing grantees to define metrics.
Second, the Illumination Fund tracks “cross-cutting impact” to identify patterns and shared goals across its grantee cohort, such as how organizations are collectively increasing access and building leadership pipelines. This level of impact allows leaders to “take a bird’s-eye view so we’re able to see those connections across the field,” said Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund Program Officer Kira Pritchard.
The third level of impact considers how the Illumination Fund is contributing to and amplifying the work of its grantees.
Luftglass provided an example of this level in action, recalling that grantees said videos would help them convey their impact to their audiences. In response, the Illumination Fund hired a videographer and staff worked with grantee leaders to create a series of short videos. One video profiling Arts & Minds, which partners with museums to serve people with dementia and care providers, includes commentary from Studio Museum in Harlem Director and Chief Curator Thelma Golden attesting to the organization’s impact.
Add it all up, and the report enables grantmakers interested in arts and health to think strategically about how they can measure impact, grow the field in their geographic region and help grantees attract additional funding. “I don’t imagine Arts in Health will be replicated [by readers] in whole,” Luftglass said. “But funders who care about particular issues embedded within the report, whether it’s mental health or aging-related diseases, will see there are all sorts of ways into the work.”
An expanded commitment and a “Roadmap for the Future”
I chatted with Luftglass a few days after he spoke at NOAH’s 2024 conference in Houston. Having been familiar with the organization since 2017, Luftglass was struck by how much the conference has changed — for the better — in recent years.
“I went to the conference in Austin in 2018 and there were 50 to 75 people in the room,” he said. “A lot of them were individual artists, therapists or people from hospitals.”
Fast-forward to late October. Luftglass spoke to over 300 individuals in person and virtually. What’s more, the composition of the audience had diversified considerably. “There were arts administrators, social workers, mental health professionals, different kinds of clinicians,” he said. “The variety of who’s now seeing the value of the role of the arts in health is incredible.”
Also in attendance were leaders from 16 Arts in Health grantee organizations, including Common Threads Project, Darkness Rising and Sing for Hope, as well as Pritchard, who likened the field’s evolution to that of creative placemaking, which the Kresge Foundation defines as “the integration of arts, culture and community-engaged design into community development.” Arts in healthcare “is about finding connections across different areas,” Pritchard said. “There’s a hunger to connect across these different silos.”
All of which brings us back to the Illumination Fund’s announcement that it was increasing its commitment to Arts in Health to $25 million while simultaneously releasing “The Role of the Arts in Healthcare: Transforming Lives, Creating Community.”
“At a time of unprecedented health and mental health challenges, the arts offer innovative and compassionate solutions to enhance care and community wellbeing,” Tisch said in a statement. “We are thrilled to expand our commitment in the field of arts in health and to share this report, which amplifies the voices of healthcare leaders, artists and community members who are seeing the extraordinary power of the arts to improve health.”
Looking ahead, the report lays out the Illumination Fund’s “Roadmap for the Future,” which seeks to “amplify the transformative power of the arts in healthcare through several key strategic directions,” including innovative partnerships, community-centered approaches, and research and evaluation.
Luftglass told me there are “a couple of other major grants in the near-term pipeline that we will announce in February and more over the course of 2025. Some are building on existing grantees, some are new. We currently have 30 grantees in the cohort and plan to go deeper with them, as well as look for other opportunities.”
Better yet, NOAH’s 2025 conference will be held in New York City and many of the Illumination Fund’s grantees will be on hand to share their work with audience members. Given the growing interest in the intersection of arts and health, it isn’t a stretch to imagine that next year’s attendance figures will comfortably eclipse those from October’s convening.
“We are seeing a sea change of beliefs and opportunities,” Luftglass said. “We hope that this report will feed into it and have a catalytic impact for our organizations and the field.”
