Ashé Cultural Arts Center

The Ashé Cultural Arts Center will conduct research on the role small museums and community-based archives play in the welfare of their communities, the value they bring to the local cultural economy, and potential models for their financial sustainability. In partnership with external consultants and the Southern University at New Orleans, the project team will conduct data analysis of the local cultural heritage funding landscape, and facilitate a discovery and design workshop and interviews with practitioners to identify both successful strategies and barriers to financial sustainability. The project focuses on organizations preserving the histories and culture of marginalized people to identify the ways in which they contribute to community health and vitality, resulting in a model for research that observes national funding trends and defines a process for translating national data to useful local data.