Animating Democracy has been busy issuing concept papers from its Arts & Civic Engagement Impact Initiative. The initiative is a serious effort toward quantitative measurement of the arts' impact on social change. Its working group is convening and writing about research in the field and how to make it useful in the real world. This year, AD published online three Impact Initiative reports, including a solid framework for the discussion by Chris Dwyer of RMC Research. The Urban Institute's Maria Rosario Jackson wrote "Shifting Expectations: An Urban Planner’s Reflections on Evaluating Community-Based Arts," and Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert of the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania wrote "Civic Engagement and the Arts: Issues of Conceptualization and Measurement" from the point of view of the social sciences, humanities, and public policy. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham