This program is designed for business and arts students with a strong interest in making a living as an entrepreneur, operating in the nonprofit art world, or making a career in creative industries, and bridging the conventional gaps between creativity, business sense, and social engagement. An artist or entrepreneur who understands the principles of a well-run organization and can deal effectively with management issues like economics, finance, business planning, marketing, negotiating contracts, legal issues such as free speech and fair use, applying for grants, and strategic planning, we'll find, is likely to gain more artistic and professional freedom. For-profit and nonprofit organizations are different, and we want to make sure students gain knowledge of the vast range of ways they can make a living in and around the arts. By examining art, music, and theatre worlds, we will discover structures that help foster vibrant artistic communities—but also basic business and entrepreneurship principles applicable in many other contexts, including the entertainment and media industries. We'll meet business and nonprofit leaders (often artists themselves) who bring artists and art lovers together. We'll cover concepts in economics, gain critical reasoning skills, and learn about entrepreneurship, how to start a business, and management as a profession. We'll cover topics like strategic planning, tax and copyright law, prices and markets, promotion and marketing, budgeting, fundraising, job-hunting using social media, and working with employees, customers, and boards of trustees.  Financial accounting and budgeting, two skill areas covered in some depth in winter quarter, will use and develop your quantitative and symbolic reasoning skills.

Activities in the program will include options for related independent creative work and research on working artists, workshops on how to create and read complex spreadsheets and budgets, career counseling, and a rich mix of critical and creative projects, including a series of visits to local arts organizations and with Evergreen alumni active in many creative endeavors, followed by further research, analysis, and critiques. Each quarter's work will include an optional week of travel and study to a big city in the United States: to New York City during the fall and Los Angeles during the winter. Students unable to travel to these cities can pursue related fieldwork in the Pacific Northwest. By the end of the program we expect you to have developed practical skills in financial literacy and career-building, be able to think creatively about ways to connect your own artistic and wage-earning work lives, have an impact on organizations in communities you care about, acquire firsthand knowledge of a diversity of successful arts initiatives, and communicate effectively in the languages of business and nonprofit administration.