Community Arts Support Grant

The proposed opportunities will have been offered - concerts and auxiliary activities will have taken place as planned. Audience and participant surveys will indicate the effect activities had on the participants. School children, through their teachers, will have let us know what they learned. If we have new/additional people in our audiences, it will indicate that their appreciation for chamber music has been enhanced. Sometimes we hear about results: once a young musician was coached in a master class, making immediate improvements in her playing, and went on to win a competition shortly thereafter; another time a young child decided after hearing a Family Concert by a guitarist that he would take up the instrument, and he was still studying several years later. Outcomes such as these are always gratifying but cannot easily be predicted. Providing opportunities for musical growth, however, can be guaranteed.We always collect anecdotal evidence at the concerts themselves; board members mingle with the audience and collect feedback. We also survey our audience periodically to get written feedback; in the coming year we will be increasing the number of surveys and will be asking more thoughtful questions. At schools, we seek feedback from teachers; in the past this has been less organized than we would like, so we plan to work with the teachers to develop ways to find out more specifically what the children actually learned. At Whitney we have already added evaluation methods, which help track not only information useful to the Chamber Music Society but also information useful for Whitney Senior Center itself.