Looking Ahead: A Next-Step Agenda
Many of the children and youth in these arts and humanities programs also visit other community institutions. Strategies to link cultural programs with schools, public agencies and other community organizations are greatly needed to develop coordinated responses to interrelated problems. Such a linking of services and providers would reap the added benefit of allowing scarce resources to yield greater returns.
The needs of families and children are usually multiple, changing and varied. However, in most cases, community services are organized narrowly to respond to specific problems. A common consequence of this segmentation is that children and their families must go to different agencies to receive different but related services. Thus, families receive fragmented and insufficient assistance.