National Guild for Community Arts Education

The National Guild for Community Arts Education (Guild) works with a broad range of individuals and organizations to ensure all people have opportunities to maximize their creative potential. The Guild accomplishes this by developing leaders, strengthening organizations, and advocating for community arts education. The Guild envisions a nation in which arts education is accessible and considered essential for human development and healthy communities.

Founded in 1937, the Guild is the sole national service organization for community arts education. We are guided by our core values of leadership, equity, community, and creativity. Current programmatic initiatives focus on grounding community arts education beyond the pandemic in ways that prioritize communities historically marginalized by racist, ageist, and ableist systems. 

The Guild’s progress towards building a foundation for anti-racism has included the development of the Guild’s first ALAANA (Asian, Latinx, African American and Native American) Network, establishing racial equity as a core value, and creating a Racial Equity Committee as a standing committee of the board. In the past year, this work has accelerated in intention and action. We have undergone our first-ever racial equity organizational assessment by an outside consultant, and created racial equity guiding principles and policies which will be developed into an implementation plan.

The Guild’s network of 400+ members include neighborhood music schools; arts and cultural centers; and arts education divisions of universities, theater and dance companies, museums, and parks and recreation departments. Our members serve 2.5 million students each year, employ 16,000 teaching artists, and reach an additional 8 million people through performances and exhibits.