Improving Public Services by Improving Technical Assistance to Grantees

About the Program

Category: Arts, Culture and Historic Preservation (Best in Category)

Year: 2016

Like many County government agencies, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission serves residents largely through intermediaries. We do this through grants and contracts with nonprofit arts organizations, artists and arts educators. To ensure that the services our intermediaries provide directly to the public are of the highest quality, the Arts Commission offers technical assistance and capacity building (TA/CB) services to them. In 2014 we launched a program to improve our TA/CB services. We collected data to calculate total staff time and full costs of our TA/CB services for a single year. We also conducted a survey of recent TA/CB participants to learn who we are serving best and where we could improve. The process of conducting this study helped us break through internal silos and we are now working across divisions more effectively. As a result of this study the Arts Commission established a Professional Development (PD) Task Force. This group, made up of representatives from all divisions, is responsible for continuing to improve our TA/CB/PD activities and coordinating across divisions. We are taking action on all recommendations from the study. We have also published an interactive online toolkit (http://www.lacocbat.org) that other departments can use to replicate this study. This program is an example of how a small County department can have an outsize impact by strengthening the work of our intermediaries and sharing our work across the County.