PROGRAM EVALUATIONS

Watch TransCultural Exchange’s Director Mary Sherman talk (and question) the use of relying on statistical information to justify arts programming at NTU CCA Singapore. [here]

In 2007, working with the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth’s Center for Policy Analysis, a survey methodology was devised and created, which appropriately evaluates TransCultural Exchange’s programs and services as well as assesses the economical, social and cultural impact of the organization’s activities. Surveys were given to attendees at TransCultural Exchange’s past four conferences. In addition to rating TransCultural Exchange’s programs – qualitatively and quantitatively – and providing demographic information, questionnaires asked for the number and kind of programs the artists participated in as a result of TransCultural Exchange’s initiatives and the effects of that participation.

In 2014 similar surveys were also sent to TransArtists’ artists’ network. This data was then cross-tabulated to access the programs’ successes from different vantage points. As the report (see link below) shows, TransCultural Exchange and similar international art exchange programs definitively stimulate economic growth, make for more vibrant, stable and tolerant societies and advance not only the arts but also cross-cultural and trans-disciplinary engagement.

The culmination of ten years of surveying and evaluating TransCultural Exchange’s programs is now avaliable through the line below (as a 308 page PDF) or as a bound paperback from amazon.com. The results provide a persuasive argument that supporting international exchange among artists produces a range of generative, sustaining and positive economic, cultural and social impacts.

Why Support International Exchange among Artists?
A Decade of Tracking the Economic, Cultural and Social Benefits of Doing So