SustainArts/Bay Area: A Portrait of the Cultural Ecosystem 2015

For more than a year, the Sustain Arts research team has located, gathered, cleaned, reconciled, integrated, and analyzed more than a dozen highly relevant national, regional, and local data sets that collectively begin to tell a cogent story about the arts and cultural sector in the region. These data sets enable us to examine the interrelationships among organizations and their capitalization patterns, shifting demographics, and participation trends. By bringing these types of data together, we can begin to see how sector growth and development does or does not align with demographic changes or emerging cultural preferences. And we can begin to see whether capitalization flows favor established or emerging cultural organizations and how broadly (or narrowly) they serve the cultural needs of the community. The result is Sustain Arts/Bay Area: "A Portrait of the Cultural Ecosystem", a snapshot of key earnings from the 11 counties stakeholders agreed had the largest share of arts and cultural activity in the region: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Monterey, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano, and Sonoma. This portrait accompanies a state-of-the-art online platform that allows users to explore the data in-depth