A pilot program of CA for the Arts funded by the Music Man Foundation

Recognizing that all politics, and thus advocacy, are local, CA for the Arts launched The Regional Arts Infrastructure Network (RAIN), an innovative new program to build advocacy capacity in communities across the state. 

Local advocacy is under-resourced and often relies on sporadic ad-hoc volunteer efforts driven by leaders of already-underfunded arts nonprofit organizations. 

CA for the Arts understands that local relationships are key to effective advocacy and, as a statewide organization, we can’t replace that relationship building in communities but we can leverage its organizational connections, resources, and scale to help build more sustainable advocacy groups across California. 

Empowering regional advocacy is key to: 

• Achieving systems-level change in how the arts and culture sector are valued; 
• Sustaining the political engagement of arts advocates; 
• Increasing public investment in systems that support artist well-being and cultural organizations; and 
• Building a distributed power base grounded in localized self-determination. 

RAIN strengthens, trains, and empowers emerging local arts advocacy networks, catalyzing constituent-driven regional policy change and local investment while building more effective and sustainable cultural advocacy infrastructure for California.

Effective Collaborative Advocacy

BUILDS EQUITY: Grassroots community voices are equipped with tools and infrastructure to engage and implement advocacy platforms. 

CREATES AWARENESS: Localized, constituent-driven advocacy is the most effective way to build power for the creative sector. 

SUPPORTS CHANGE: With adequate resources, a regional network can establish consistent channels of dialogue with their elected officials, building relationships, sustaining ongoing engagement and support for solutions unique to local conditions and focused on drawing more resources to a community.

Our long-term vision for RAIN is to have an effective advocacy partner in every county across the state. Creating a network of organizations that share CA for the Arts’ values and advocacy best practices, working in tandem. CA for the Arts will support these organizations with training, consultation, toolkits and templates for advocacy action, as well as infrastructure support. At the same time, having a local advocacy partner in every region will strengthen CA for the Arts in its statewide advocacy efforts. 

The RAIN program is currently in the design, development, and ideate stage. As the program grows RAIN services will include: community mobilization and engagement strategies, comprehensive training to activate local leaders to mobilize constituents to be effective arts advocates, foster connection and community of practice with other affiliates and advance statewide initiatives to synthesize disparate voices into a stronger whole, along with providing campaign templates and toolkits, and, access to CFTA’s advocacy database to support their own local, state and federal campaigns. 

Thanks to generous support from The Music Man Foundation RAIN is currently in a year-long pilot stage working with two advocacy organizations in strategic regions of the state. In early 2023 we began working with the Sacramento Arts Regional Alliance (SARA) and the San Diego Regional Arts and Culture Coalition. With each group we started by doing an assessment of what their needs are, and what their advocacy goals were for the year. 

For SARA the focus of our work is facilitating a series of convenings with coalition partners to develop a structure to collaborate effectively on advocacy for the region. 

SDRACC is concentrating on developing a policy framework as they broaden their focus from the city of San Diego to the full county.  

During the course of the year our work with these organizations will not only help them work toward their goals, it will also help us shape and develop RAIN as a program. Learning from our hands on work, what the field needs and how we can most effectively offer support. Our goal is to create a program that can be adapted to the needs of each unique region.

For more information on RAIN, please contact Program Manager Teri Ball teri@californiansforthearts.org or 916-905-5397.