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The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage

About The Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative

Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative (PCMI) grants have provided much needed resources for individuals and organizations from a wide variety of fields to achieve greater organizational health. Over the past eight years, PCMI has awarded $5.4 million in project grants and professional development grants to 167 different organizations.

The current program guidelines mark a new chapter and refined direction for PCMI. The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is committed to fostering and supporting work of excellence, imagination, and courage that addresses a broad and diverse range of communities. As a program of the Center, PCMI does not see organizational development as an end in itself, but rather a set of activities that propel and support continuous improvement in an organization’s programming and ability to effectively engage audiences. While its core tactics—planning and implementation grants, professional development programs, and technical assistance—will remain the same, going forward PCMI will work in concert with the six Artistic Initiatives and focus its support on organizations that have demonstrated a history of programmatic excellence, and will help them build administrative and adaptive capacity to meet the challenges of a changing economy, ever-shifting audiences, and an increasingly competitive cultural sector.

To do so, PCMI will help organizations to better understand their business models, conduct strategic planning that addresses both the business and the programmatic drivers of the organization, implement effective marketing and audience engagement strategies, and improve financial stability.

PCMI works in three areas:

  • Providing support for organizational assessment, planning, organizational development, and professional development to improve management functions that propel program quality and audience engagement;
  • Providing information, workshops, and other educational services to improve management capacity among cultural groups in the region;
  • Pursuing strategic partnerships and other opportunities to ensure that managerial and programmatic excellence are intertwined goals, strengthened simultaneously, to provide outstanding cultural services to people in the five-county region.

PCMI staff work closely with staff of the Artistic Initiative programs to achieve the overarching goals of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Management