Our Approach & Framework
Our Approach
Our approach is grounded in four principles:
Access
We remove financial, physical, and social barriers to creative participation.
Agency
Artists have choice in what they create, how they participate, and where their creative practice takes them.
Community
We build connections among artists, audiences, cultural organizations, and the broader creative community.
Opportunity
We connect artists to meaningful opportunities to create, develop, share, earn, and lead.
We meet artists where they are, recognize their strengths, and create pathways for them to determine where they want to go next.
Our Model
Our Creative Pathway provides a flexible, artist-centered framework for helping seniors and adults experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity access creative practice, develop their skills, build connections, pursue creative income, and take on leadership opportunities. Our Creative Pathway recognizes that artists have different interests, goals, skills, and circumstances. It is not a required sequence or a ladder that every artist must climb. Artists may enter at any point, move between stages, pause, return to earlier stages, or pursue multiple pathways at once.
The goal is to ensure that every artist has meaningful opportunities to determine where they want to go creatively and access the support and opportunities to get there. At its foundation is the Artist Collective: a creative community and ecosystem where artists have access to space, materials, resources, relationships, experiences, and opportunities.
Our Definition of Success
At Daybreak Arts, success is not defined by a single outcome. Instead, we look at success across six areas in our Creative Pathway Framework: CREATE, DEVELOP, CONNECT, SHARE, EARN, LEAD. In this model, success looks different for every artist. For one person, it may mean having a consistent place to create and identifying as an artist. For another, it may mean developing a body of work, exhibiting publicly, performing, earning income, teaching others, or taking on a leadership role. The goal is not for every artist to reach the same destination, but to expand the choices and opportunities available to each artist.
When we measure participation, our goal is to measure whether participation creates meaningful opportunities for artists to move forward. That means looking at both reach and change: who participates, how often they participate, what they experience, what they create, who they connect with, what opportunities they access, what income they earn, and how their role within the creative community develops. The ultimate measure of success is whether more artists have the access, resources, relationships, recognition, agency, and opportunities they need to pursue meaningful creative lives. Daybreak Arts exists to expand what is possible for artists.