Recap: TAIP’s Inaugural Arts Impact Summit in Montréal!

On June 3rd, TAIP gathered in Montreal for our very first Arts Impact Summit! Hosted at Conseil des arts de Montreal, the summit brought together our co-leads for a collaborative day of strategic planning, workshopping, and community building. 

In the morning, co-leads shared preliminary findings from our ongoing literature and landscape reviews. We mapped out shared concerns and emerging thematic areas that will help us pinpoint future arts impact indicators. In the afternoon, the team shifted focus toward the next phase of our research: understanding how arts organizations think about and measure impact. We finalized our upcoming survey and focus group questions, while identifying key organizations to engage in our growing community of practice. Above all, we talked about how to ensure that our focus groups co-create knowledge in deeply respectful ways, intentionally guided by decolonial, equitable, participatory, and reciprocal principles. 

Our afternoon program concluded with a roundtable discussion on “Assessing the impacts of the arts and culture in Quebec.” Moderated by Julie Bérubé (Université du Québec en Outaouais), the panel featured invaluable insights from across the sector: Anastasia Vaillancourt (Culture pour tous),  Andrée Harvey (LaCogency), Sylvain Martet (ARTENSO), and Tammy Lee (Culture Creates).

We are immensely grateful for the opportunity to learn from Culturepédia and Culture Creates. These insights are vital as we continue working together to find new ways to describe and measure the impacts of the arts in Québec and throughout Canada.

We wrapped up the day with The Arts Impact Reception, co-organized with the National Research Group. It served as a wonderful celebration of TAIP’s official launch and provided a space to build bridges and foster meaningful conversations between researchers and art councils.

These events are only possible through strong partnerships. We want to extend a huge thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts for their steadfast support, and to the Conseil des arts de Montréal for being such gracious and welcoming hosts.