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Cultural Leaders’ Reflections on Cultural Participation and Preliminary Research

This report was prepared for the Philadelphia Cultural Benchmark Project, a collaborative project between Research for Action, Audience Insight LLC, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Social Impacts of the Arts Project (SIAP). It draws from two focus groups with cultural leaders in an attempt to gain an organizational perspective on cultural participation and to get feedback on the preliminary findings from the Benchmark Project. The report provides some overall observations about what the cultural leader focus groups revealed, observations made by the leaders themselves on a range of activities/definitions of cultural participation presented, leaders’ reflections on the implications of the expanded definition of cultural participation/range of activities for programming and increasing cultural participation, and factors that were identified as creating challenges to carrying out programs and increasing cultural participation.