LED TMU Collaborates on $2.5M Arts Impact Partnership Grant

Over its seven-year timeline, TAIP aims to:

  1. Enhance visibility of the social and cultural impact of arts-based initiatives.

  2. Develop new data frameworks to better understand how the arts contribute to equity, migration and integration, environmental resilience, and health and well-being.

  3. Advance FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) metadata standards to improve the accessibility and interoperability of arts impact data across organizations.

Through this collaboration, LED is helping bridge the arts and technology—ensuring that the future of arts impact is supported by ethical, equitable, and interoperable digital systems.

The Arts Impact Partnership (TAIP) has been awarded a $2.5 million Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Grant, bringing together a wide network of arts-based researchers and organizations committed to understanding and amplifying the impact of the arts.

This major initiative, co-led by Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and Mass Culture, brings together 67 researchers (including 11 from TMU) and 33 partner organizations from across Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Australia. The cross-sectoral leadership team includes Professor Natalie Alvarez, joined by co-directors Sarah Bay-Cheng (University of Toronto), Owais Lightwala (TMU), Shawn Newman (Skills for Change), and Robin Sokoloski (Mass Culture).

As one of TMU’s collaborators, the Lab of Excellence in Digital Asset Management (LED) is proud to contribute its expertise in metadata innovation, digital infrastructure, and information accessibility to support TAIP’s goal of developing a sustainable system for measuring and communicating the value of arts-based projects.

About the Project

Sponsored By

This project is funded by the Office of the Vice-President for Research and Innovation at TMU under the 2024-2025 Undergraduate Research Opportunities (URO) program.

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