In the latest installment of our Let’s Talk series, AMT Lab Lead Researcher Natalie Larsen interviews Jeff Poulin, Founder of Creative Generation, about all things arts advocacy.

[trailer] Jeff Poulin: Because I really do believe that those abilities, it's like a cycle, we build the creative capabilities in young people so that they can be creatives that they can be arts managers, so that they can go out there and create the world that they want to see. But they can also take charge of that world and advocate for the changes they want to see.

Natalie Larsen 

Welcome to another let's talk episode of technique arts, the podcast series for the arts management and technology laboratory. The goal of our Let's Talk series is to exchange ideas, bring awareness and stay on top of the trends. My name is Natalie Larsen. I am the staff writer and lead researcher for AMT Lab. And today I'm talking with Jeff Poulin, about advocating for justice in and for the arts. So Jeff, it's great to be joined by you today, I want to start by just asking you to talk a little bit about yourself and your background in the arts and arts advocacy.

Jeff Poulin 

Sure thing, so my name is Jeff Poulin. I am a teaching artist and arts manager, and what a lot of folks call a social entrepreneur. My background is probably not unlike many people that ended up in the arts management sector, I was exposed to the arts at a really young age, because of the public investments in my hometown, I had the opportunity to start dancing, and really was able to pursue all of my interest through the K-12 school system and dance and music and theatre and visual art, and had some pretty early success actually did a tour when I was just 16 years old and learned early on that my real passions were around arts management, I loved being on stage, but I loved making it all happen so much more. However it was when I was touring, actually, that I saw the experiences of young people all across the country that were very different than mine, I realized how lucky I was to have the opportunities that I had, because of that investment in the arts and cultural infrastructure of my town. And it fueled a passion in me probably combined with some like teenage angst to really make a difference and to improve what was going on. So I began advocating, I didn't call it that at the time, I didn't exactly know what I was doing. But I got involved with some youth organizations and actually advocated for young people to sit on our State Board of Education, which still is a round to this day.

And it was actually through that process that I employed some of my own creative skills, I use theater games to activate young people and make them more comfortable talking to legislators, we used performance art, music, visual arts, spoken word, to communicate really complex messages to those decision-makers. And now, you know, at in my mid-30s, I can look back and say, That was such a solid foundation for what I do today as an arts manager, social entrepreneur, and an advocate for arts and cultural and creative education for young people. Because I really do believe that those abilities, it's like a cycle, we build the creative capabilities in young people so that they can be creative so that they can be arts managers so that they can go out there and create the world that they want to see. But they can also take charge of that world and advocate for the changes they want to see.

In fact, what I've learned through my own story, and through working with others as an arts advocate and arts manager is that when we do that, we end up with just a better society, because people are creative people are problem-solving. And they're able to play and imagine new futures that they never could Well, that's awesome.

Natalie Larsen 

That sounds like some really incredible work. And you touched on like the educational aspect and arts, how arts and education play just such a critical role for student development in all kinds of areas, like you mentioned, problem-solving, cognitive processing, just all sorts of skills that they can gain from that. So I want to start by asking, how can we as arts managers, whether we're in an organization or an independent artist, how can we best advocate in the education system?

Jeff Poulin 

So I have some pretty strong beliefs about advocacy in the arts and full disclosure for about seven years of my life, I worked for a national arts service organization advocating for the arts and arts education, broadly and American policy and previously worked in other policy contexts abroad. And through that experience, I learned one thing, and that is that advocacy is our professional responsibility. Advocacy, a lot of people think has to do with lobbying the government and meeting with elected officials, when in fact advocacy is simply about making the case and convince Seeing other people to get on board with a common message or a unified goal. And it's kind of like going back to my roots and dance, it's muscle memory, the more we do it, the more it becomes more comfortable. The budget is being cut, or there is a negative circumstance that is eliminating the arts in some scenario in the world.

And so as arts, arts educators, arts managers, artists themselves, we are the experts on the things that we want to see regarding the arts and education policy regarding public funding for the arts regarding the rights of artists in intellectual property or tax law, right? We know how that impacts us. The members of art artists, they don't know they don't live that maybe there's a few of them that might identify as artists, but none of them are working living artists, or none of them are worrying arts administrators or managers or educators or anything like that. And so they don't have that same lived experience. And that is what advocacy is actually about.

It's a democratic process, where we go and we tell them about the impacts of what it is that they're debating, so that they can have informed decisions on the future of whatever it is whatever law or, or code or public policy that they're working on. And so we often think of that lobbying angle, which is regulated, and there is certain, there are certain sets of rules around how we go about doing that. But the reality is, unless you're doing it every single day as part of your profession and making money from it, you don't need to worry about that. So I would say, as artists and arts managers go out there, talk to people, whether they be philanthropists, public officials, elected officials, or other types of decision-makers, like say, a university president, or a big organization leader, or even the most influential person on the block, tell them about the arts and the impact that they've had in your lives, and get them on board with this big message. It's about movement building. It's not necessarily about the laws, those do change. But it's actually getting everyone on board, what we actually know is that take arts education, for example, nine out of 10 Americans believe that the art should be part of a well-rounded education.

Yet, when it comes time to debate, the public funding for the arts, in schools or other policies around teacher credentials, or testing or what have you, people kind of forget about it. So it's about raising their consciousness because everyone wants their kid and in art class and in the band and in the school play. But they don't see the connection between some of these other maybe harmful policies. As an example, people rail against the No Child Left Behind Act from, you know, night from 2001. And the reality is, though, it put a lot of things in place that did hurt the access to the arts, but it also kept the arts as one of the core academic subjects that had to be taught. So there was this, this dichotomy. And the problem is though, we failed to have a discourse about it, no one really connected those dots are the ones that did it was a very small community.

And so it's really about how do we actually build that awareness and get people on board so that when those key moments happen, people can activate and they know what to say. So what can we do as advocates as artists and arts managers? Do whatever day you see your, you know, city elected official, I don't know your aldermen or whatever, at the Starbucks, go talk to them about the arts, you see that person that has an influence over something in your community, go talk to them about the arts, if people have a challenge that they're trying to solve community cohesion, public beauty...

Natalie Larsen 

I think it's great that you brought up that it can just be sharing your story talking about the arts to the people around your community.

Jeff Poulin 

Yeah. And you know, as we do that, it's really important to kind of build that muscle, right? If it is a muscle memory, how do we actually build the muscle in the right way? I mean, you think of like a bodybuilder, right, you don't want to only work out your arms, because then you're going to topple over, right? Because your legs aren't gonna be strong enough to hold you up. It's kind of the same thing. You know, there's a lot of things, a lot of narratives that have been built about the arts that come from, you know, the culture wars of the the early 90s, or that have even been perpetuated from our own field itself. You know, there's a tie, right between arts learning in schools and certain academic achievement, right, like the relationship between music classes and test scores in math. Okay, but some of the research that I've done, actually shows that when we advocate using some of those points around economic development, raise test scores, the language of these gatekeepers that control funding or public policy, we actually sort of lay the groundwork for her own challenges, because then all of a sudden, in order to justify why the art should be part of schools, or to justify why there should be public investment in the arts, we have to quantify it by test scores or economic having murals, it's not about whether they go stare at the mural and then go spend money on dinner. Or kids just enjoy being creative. And they're able to flex their creativity in new and different ways that aren't necessarily a fill in the dots standardized test.

And so, I often challenge people who may be an arts advocate to really think about the narratives that they're putting forward. Because for about three or four decades, our own field has laid the groundwork for the very challenges that we run up against. So we need to both speak the language but also control the narrative. And so one of the things that we can do that's a simple exercise is, as we talk with in our own field, is question those outcomes that we're actually discussing, think bigger, think bolder, use our own creativity, right? That's what we do, theoretically. And let's put it into practice to envision just new ways of talking about this, that will actually lay the groundwork for us to succeed.

Natalie Larsen 

Yeah, that's an excellent point as well. We think a lot I think about, like you said, quantifying or thinking about the economic impact of the arts in order to just justify why they should be in our schools and our communities. I'm curious, what is your take on different studies that try to quantify the economic impact of the arts?

Jeff Poulin 

You know, I think they're both necessary and important, and can also be problematic, right? There's a number of studies out there, I think of the Conference Board's study that was called Ready to Innovate that found that you know, most CEOs view creativity as the number one thing that they hire for, or, you know, other studies that do quantify the economic impact of the arts and the relative, you know, GDP increase from satellite accounts, the federal government, like all of these different things exist, and I'm sure you can drop the links in the chat to these, these types of studies.

And I think they're really important for making the case because people love numbers. But what we can't forget is in advocacy, it's also about the story, right? The numbers convinced the mind, but the story is convinced the heart and if you really want to get people on board, it is about sort of changing the heart. I think back to a lot of my experience in Washington, DC, or in state capitals, or even other capitals in other countries, where, you know, young people will go and play music. And you see legislators, elected officials, government staffers flocked to go witness that moment, because they literally see a phenomenon happening, right, they witnessed a transformation where they see a young person go from, you know, kind of teenager that's, you know, maybe a little angsty, maybe a little off the wall, and really find their space as this artist and transform.

It's like a, you know, caterpillar to a butterfly. You don't get that when you put a report in front of someone. And so I think it's about honing how we bring them together. And I'll just give you an example. We've seen a transformation in advocacy for the arts. In the last several years, there were these grand narratives about economic impact and academic achievement and these things that you can simply measure by metrics that are already in place, and questions about things like community development, or the justice system and reforming that. And thinking far outside the box, especially around how the arts or creativity broadly, when applied can change those systems. So in a study that I actually conducted in 2019, we looked really specifically at the role of, of young artists and how they were applying their creativity towards different causes that they cared about. And it's interesting because parallel and we're recording this here in the middle of February, so just a few years ago, yesterday was the anniversary of the shooting. And those kids from Parkland, Florida, came to Washington DC and led one of the largest marches on Washington since the time of Martin Luther King. And they were theater kids, they're musicians.

And what they did is they got on that stage and they activated a group of 10s of 1000s of people to advocate for changes to their legislate legislators about something they cared deeply about school safety and gun violence. But they did it through music, and theater. They were using their rhetoric skills that they learned this room, they were making music that was compelling had a message and a call to action. That's not what we talk about when we talk about learning the basics and principles of music or theatre in schools. We're not necessarily learning that when we memorize Shakespeare or Chekhov, what we have to think about is how the arts in these environments can be applied, and then what the outcome is. So instead of just looking at the immediate impact, right, you learn a skill, you perform it on a test, we're going one realm outside of that, to think about how it's actually applied.

And we've seen the same thing happen in the realms of the justice system in the realms of food security, climate change, economic community development, and even economic development, that we're not just saying, hire artists, we're actually saying build creative skills so that people can create new jobs that could have never been imagined. So this shift in narrative is actually going full circle back to the shift and advocacy, because it's no longer just about bringing famous artists, to your state capitol, or to Capitol Hill or to your Mayor's office. It's actually about showing how everyone is impacted by arts and culture and creative opportunities. That totally changed the way our entire system works in this country. And we've seen that happen all around.

Natalie Larsen 

Yeah, I think we just get so moved by the arts by whether it's a painting, a song, a play. I think you're absolutely right. When people read a report, they think, Oh, that's great. But when they actually experience something artistic, or creative, that's where they there is like, an internal change.

Jeff Poulin 

You know, it's really interesting in all of my work, meeting with, you know, city officials and state legislators, or, you know, members of the US Congress, even folks in the White House, it's fascinating, because that emotional response that you were talking about is the most compelling evidence. When we saw the arts as part of the 2015 signing of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which is our governing law for education in this country, President Obama got up and spoke about how he witnessed the transformation of an arts magnet school, where the young people were learning the civil rights history of this country, through jazz music and hip hop. It was an incredible moment because he was able to relate to that as a parent, he was able to relate to that as a, you know, homemade musician himself, you know, he sings in the shower, he sings all the time. And we're able to see that change.

 And, you know, it's hard to divorce advocacy from politics, particularly when you're talking about public policies. But the arts are a thing that's actually unifying. You know, we saw different senators, you look at Senator Tim Kaine from Virginia or Senator Lamar Alexander from Tennessee, they bond over music, they were playing dueling pianos in the state capitol, as they're allocating funding for the arts, the arts are a bipartisan issue. And so, again, it's something that we need to understand the power that we actually have in the arts, we often fall into this victim spiral of the arts are the first thing cut and there's not enough money. And you know, woe is me, it's so hard when, in reality, we have a tremendous body of assets that are behind us. The general public supports the arts, that's one, a lot of our legislators are artists or have seen firsthand the impact of culture in their own communities.

They understand what that means. We know that, you know, the arts are actually not always the first thing cut, we can dispel that myth myth right now, it's librarians and social workers that are cut from schools before the arts. And so we have to understand our own positionality. In order to effectively advocate.

Natalie Larsen 

I want to pivot a little bit we've talked a lot about the positive impact of the arts that can that they can have on an individual or community. But as we mentioned earlier, not everyone has that access. So DEAI topics are huge in the arts right now, of course, in arts organizations, especially. So how do those intersect?

Jeff Poulin 

Well, they intersect a tremendous amount, I think. First, let me go back to the concept that advocacy is a muscle advocating for diversity, equity, access and inclusion, or I might just call it justice is an advocacy effort. So the same skill that we're talking about in advocating for say arts funding can be applied within our own organizations, our own communities, with issues of social justice, that we're able to actually employ that case-making ability. instead of it just being for the arts, we're actually talking about justice oriented arts or equitable access to the arts, or the fight for greater diversity and inclusion, within the arts or even through the arts. And that's a really important distinction in a lot of my work today, we talk about the intersection of justice with advocacy.

So not only are we advocating for the arts, we're also advocating for issues of justice. And we're also using the arts to advocate for those issues of justice. So we're able to create kind of this beautiful tapestry, with the skills that we have as artists and creatives. And as advocates, towards this North Star, I think we can all get on board, that we want a more just world. In fact, that's actually the you know, mission statement of the organization that I run now is that our end goal is a more just world. And that's because that's what people strive for.

Now, how we get there might be different. Maybe some people believe that it's public funding, maybe some people believe that it's private funding that's incentivized through tax credits. These are positions of two political parties in the country, right. At the end of the day, though, the goal is still the same. We believe that everyone should have access to this, how we get there might be different. And that debate is healthy and fine in a democracy. So we just need to sort of take a step back, and figure out how we can both advocate for diversity, equity, access and inclusion, advocate through it in order to achieve those goals, and ultimately have sort of this better arts ecosystem.

Natalie Larsen

Yeah, and I think in the last few years, especially I could be wrong. But in the last few years, from what I've seen, the arts have really been used as a tool to promote justice we've seen, we see, we saw it, we saw that after the murder of George Floyd, a lot of songs, a lot of murals to kind of fight against police brutality.

Jeff Poulin 

That's exactly true. I mean, we have seen that and that has also been the case, through every social movement in history. Artists are at the center, whether it be the civil rights movement in the 60s and 70s, the resistance of the Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic that was happening in the 80s, the arts were a part of it. But that's why we have to have these conversations about diversity, equity, access and inclusion. Because if young people never develop an artistic literacy, how are they ever going to tackle the issues they care about in that way? We had a very robust arts learning infrastructure that helped people, those artists at the center of the civil rights movement, or the war resistance, or the fight against AIDS, that were able to carry those messages forward in creative ways, by actually limiting arts learning for young people, by accident, actually limiting access to artistic and cultural experiences in communities that always fall along economic and racial divides. We're literally removing the opportunity for those people to advocate for the changes they want to see in the world.

The UN has actually cited the United States for the school to prison pipeline. We've made the case before that, in doing so they're actually removing artistic learning opportunities, because the schools that are in youth prisons don't have the arts, too, as a social justice issue as a civil rights issue. Our own Secretary of Education said that the status of the arts in America's public schools is a civil rights issue, because the disparity falls along racial lines. So we have to in the arts advocate for those changes first, because if we want to see those global changes towards a more just world, we have to tackle the access issue within our own sector, because it falls along those lines.

And it systematically denies the cultivation of those creative capabilities that allow for the social justice issues to be tackled through the arts like now, I think we're going you know, in the right direction, I think those changes are there, as we've just talked about, but it is a responsibility, and it's a consciousness that, you know, arts managers, particularly those, I mean, you all are in school right now. You have to learn that now so that in your career can be part of the conversation. We've spent the last several years like with the murder of George Floyd of, you know, waking up our consciousness as a sector. And that's not okay. We need to begin with that. 

Natalie Larsen

Absolutely. Well said, that was fantastic. Another kind of critical issue in the US in particular, but also globally, is the issue of digital inequity. And I'm just kind of wondering how the arts maybe can play over role in promoting digital equity, whether that is access, literacy, or maybe kind of co-advocacy efforts?

Jeff Poulin

Yeah, I think there's a couple of, of key things here. So I'm going to parse that question into two, I think digital is something that has caught on particularly with the pandemic. One little-known fact that if you're sort of a Washington insider, you learn very early on when you start to have friends that work on Capitol Hill, is that our members of Congress, for example, they keep up a list of key issues that they care about. And there's someone in the office who literally tracks the amount of phone calls and emails or social media posts that come to the member of Congress, for or against a certain issue.

 And they deliver that report to the member at the end of the week, let's say we got 300 phone calls in favor of Project X or 400. And you know, opposed to project Y. And it helps them make an informed decision. And so the increase in digital engagement, just writ large, means that we need to have an increased digital footprint when it comes to advocacy, because there are people out there who are are doing it. And if we don't do it also for issues in arts and culture, we're going to be left behind. So I think the increase literacy of digital engagement of just people in general, is an asset and something that we need to harness in order to advocate for the arts.

The second part of that though, about digital or media or news literacy is absolutely essential. In fact, I was actually speaking at a conference, the namely conference, the National Association for media literacy education, back in like 2015, or 16. And it was as the National Core Arts Standards were being released. And you know, I think everyone that was like, What are you doing, you know, you're representing the RS is about media literacy, education. Why are you even here. And it was because we were drawing a connection to the new art form that was written into these public policies, media arts, the idea of designing media, through the lens of artistic literacy is absolutely essential.

 Young people are more news literate, more media literate, more digitally literate, when they understand how to create it, they understand perspective and how facts can be manipulated, they understand presentation and how views can be changed with perspective, they understand that when they make something, they learn how to interpret something made by others, in the same way. So in the way that we talk about the ability in visual art to read a painting being visually literate, so if there's a gold Halo, you know, it goes back to, it's probably something that has to do with a deity, right? godlike features. But it doesn't say that doesn't there's no label that says God with an arrow, but there's a gold halo on someone. apply that same logic to media arts and media literacy, all of a sudden, when you're creating digital media, you understand how to be literate in other people's digital, digital media and how to discern what is true and what is not.

So you can read through and make sense make meaning out of the day luge of, of information coming at us every single day. So in a sort of post truth world are in a world where, you know, facts aren't entirely facts all the time, we need to increase that. And we can actually do that as part of our arts learning opportunities for people it can be part of the increase of, of awareness. In fact, one of the case studies that I did back in 2019, was on the Bangladesh Institute for theatre arts, that actually worked with some international development agencies to increase news literacy by literally playing theater games in villages all across Bangladesh. And it was such a cool project, because what they were doing, were teaching those skills to be able to tell what's fake news and what's not using theatre, who would have ever thought that like our State Department is putting money into theatre in another country in order to do that. But you're right, we're in a globally connected world, you have to build those skills in order to have a more cohesive society.

Natalie Larsen 

Yeah, one thing that just came to my mind was STEAM education, which is STEM with the addition of the arts. And I think that's something that I've, I've heard conversations here and there and I've read, you know, things here and there about it. But I still think it's kind of a, for lack of a better word, a niche thing in the arts advocacy realm. I don't know what's your take, what's your take on that?

Jeff Poulin 

Well, I have a lot of feelings about STEAM, especially a lot of my work in in Washington was during sort of the height of the steam movement. And to be perfectly frank, I think STEAM was an advocacy tactic. I think it worked. I think there was a tremendous amount of money being put into stem side Technology, Engineering and Math when that term sort of came to be, and the stem folks talked about how creativity and innovation were essential, but without an artistic or creative process, as part of that, think about the scientific method. When you get to the end of it, you have to change it up, you have to create something you have to innovate, that was missing, right, that's missing in STEM. So you do need STEAM, you need the integration of the arts with that.

Now, some of the research that I've actually done more recently, in fact, creative generation just completed a project with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and our friends over at Wolff Brown, another consulting firm. And we put forward a new model that we called an enriched understanding of arts integration. Now, arts integration is a pedagogical approach and creative learning that intertwines the arts with other academic subjects.

How do you know third graders retain the names of planets better when they dance the solar system? Right? Okay, really basic, you know, that's sort of a silly example. But there's really strong ways like we were talking about before, with President Obama witnessing the teaching of history through jazz and hip hop music. Now, we argue in this new body of work, that there's sort of a new approach, let's move away from those buzzwords of steam, or what have you. And actually just talk about talk about the role of the arts in education and human development. Right, the arts can be part of teaching and learning, right? If you're not drawing what you see in the microscope, you're probably not having a very good science class. In the same way, that if you're in a literature class, you should be acting out the Shakespeare play that you're reading, right? That increases our understanding and knowledge of those concepts.

But the spectrum goes all the way to civic engagement and participation, through literacy, like we were just talking about. So there's an element here, about thinking of the role of the arts and culture and creativity in almost every element of the human experience. And that can be done very intentionally. When we think about the arts at the table in economic and community development, we think about the role of the arts, and creativity in transportation. And it all sort of boils down to the idea that we're building creative capability in people in order to solve the challenge challenges of the future that we can't even imagine today. So whether it be the arts and stem to make steam or arts integration, like dancing the solar system, what we know is that almost every element of what we do as humans is better when there's creativity applied. And so my big thing now,

Natalie Larsen 

To that note, I feel like a lot of other issues that we're facing right now, like climate change, gun violence, all healthcare, all these, like really major issues, of course, tend to overshadow the arts, because the arts just seem like this little teeny thing that is considered a luxury, and is not considered like an essential, not all the time, of course. So, I mean, we talked about this a little bit already. But is there anything more you'd like to add to, to how the arts are kind of a part of everything that we as humans need to advocate for?

Jeff Poulin 

Yeah, I think there's two elements to this: direct role in provision for the arts or culture in those different elements. So in healthcare, we know that arts therapies, dance therapy, music therapy, visual therapy, and more are part of it. You know, there's tremendous studies about soldiers overcoming PTSD through visual art and things of that nature. We also know that in transportation, right, like, there's really great solutions to beautifying and creating transportation infrastructure that people want to engage in, right, and subway systems and things like that, um, when, and we've already talked about the role of, you know, tackling issues of gun violence through advocacy in arts and culture. Now. There's part of the art that is a piece of that solution, when applied that matches some of those sort of high art forms. I just did air quotes around that. Dance Music, theater, visual arts, so forth.

But there's another element of having artists or people with creative capacity to solve those problems. We've been doing transportation the same way in this country for a really long time. What if we put a bunch of creatives at the table to think differently about how we might tackle an issue of city congestion? And I'll give you an example. They did this in New York City. They realized that humans were running in to each other a lot in Times Square, so they redesigned Times Square. After some observations with some theatremakers, they were able to see that people when crossing Grand Central Station, which has a central ticket booth, were able to navigate not run into each other, therefore, they weren't mad at each other because they were open hall with nothing in the middle. People were choosing the most direct route and running into each other.

These are observations from theatremakers. Think about that theater game, you know, when you walk through the space, and you have to navigate and interact with people. When you bump into people, you get mad, and people get angry. Bob a central point that you're avoiding, like at Grand Central, you are mad at an inanimate object and not other people. It was theatremakers that were able to observe this. And when they reconstructed Time Square, the visit New York City today, there's a bunch of just things in the way. So people have to bob and weave through applying that theater game in order to overcome the challenge. Now, if someone said, Okay, here's a couple million dollars to redesign Time Square, would you ever say okay, hire a bunch of theater makers? No, you wouldn't. You'd pick an urban designer, you do whatever? Well, the beauty of it is, when we apply that creativity, when we apply those creative skills that are harnessed through the learning in the arts, we're able to come up with totally new solutions that we would have never envisioned before.

So I think yes, we absolutely need to use artistic practice as part of the solution and healthcare and school reform and you know, name your big sector of society. But we also just need to both integrate artists and creatives, but also just build arts and creative skills in everyone so that you have lawyers and accountants and urban designers that have those creative capabilities already, that they understand each other and diverse cultures, that they're able to communicate in new and different ways. And in my opinion, that's a way that we achieve a more inclusive and a more just society.

Natalie Larsen 

There are so many more questions I want to ask you, but we are short on time. So I'll just kind of end with this. Is there anything that maybe we didn't touch on that you wanted to bring up? Or are there any, like resources that you'd want to share with?

Jeff Poulin 

Sure there's a tremendous amount of research that's been there. And I think we can, you know, compile a number of the studies and things that we've talked about today, I'll do a shameless plug at Creative Generation, we just released a new resource called Case Making and Systems Change and arts and cultural education, which you can view online at www.creative-generation.org/casemaking.

Natalie Larsen 

Fantastic. So we'll post links to those in the in the transcript of this podcast. Jeff, thank you so much for being here and for talking about such an important topic. 

Jeff Poulin 

Thank you.

Natalie Larsen 

Thank you for listening to tech and the arts. Be on the lookout for new episodes coming to you very soon. If you found this episode informative, educational, or inspirational, be sure to send it to another arts or technology aficionado in your life. You can let us know what you think of this podcast by visiting our website amt-lab.org That's AMT-Lab.org or you can email us at amtlabcmu@gmail.com. You can follow us on Instagram at Tech and the arts or Facebook and LinkedIn at arts management and technology lab. We'll see you for the next episode.