The Creative Learning Network Anchor – an antiracist partnership bridging young artists, professional teaching artists, and youth-serving organizations to strengthen the creative learning ecosystem in Southwestern PA – is seeking to hire a planning consultant and an external evaluator for project work in 2023.

Planning needs and consultant role 

Arts Ed Collaborative seeks to hire a planning consultant with deep expertise in inclusive facilitation and liberated practices. The goals for the engagement include articulating the assets each organization brings to the partnership, identifying additional supports needed from one or more additional partners, securing a commitment to join the anchor from at least one new partner, codifying how the CLNA will operate moving forward, and mapping out a set of activities based on findings from the evaluation. We would want the planning consultant to design and facilitate meetings, create space for all partners to fully contribute to the planning efforts, and document work from these sessions as it evolves.

A successful planning process will include time and space for all partners to reflect, imagine, and co-create together. The planning consultant will document each session and record the evolution of our collective thinking. The CLN Anchor partners will submit the culminating plan to The Heinz Endowments as a multi-year funding request in time for the August 2023 deadline to support the Creative Learning Network in 2024 and beyond.  

Evaluation needs and consultant role

Arts Ed Collaborative seeks to hire an evaluation consultant with expertise in culturally responsive evaluation practices. CLNA requires focused evaluation attention in order to reach its full potential. Specifically, we are seeking an external evaluator to conduct a front-end evaluation and a process evaluation. The front-end evaluation would synthesize data about the Creative Learning Network that is already available to us (e.g., RAND’s report on arts partnerships in Allegheny County, Pitt’s Creative Learning report, Pitt’s current transformative evaluation project, GPAC’s data from a teaching artist town hall, etc.) and collect additional information as needed. This will help the anchor identify the current lay of the land (e.g., a network analysis), available resources, and needs. The process evaluation will focus on how the CLNA itself is operating and interacting with the broader network.

The evaluator will address a set of evaluation questions developed by the anchor such as:

• What antiracism and/or equity approaches have emerged from CLNA and how are they going?
• To what extent do CLNA partners navigate power dynamics and decision making in an antiracist and liberated manner?
• To what extent does focusing on teaching artists strengthen the Creative Learning Network?
• What is the reach/scope of the CLN?
• To what extent is the network accessible? Equitable?

The evaluator will provide monthly updates to the CLN Anchor partners to support ongoing learning in addition to a final report at the close of the engagement that include recommendations for the Creative Learning Network.

Submission process

Interested parties are asked to submit the following by October 31, 2022:

• A company description
• Resumes for all consultants who would work on this project
• Descriptions and/or artifacts from two past projects that demonstrate past experience with the kind of support sought by the CLNA team

Please submit all material to Yael Silk at silky@artsedcollab.org and a member of the CLNA team will follow up in November.