Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC) has launched a new online version of its award-winning Artist as an Entrepreneur Institute. The business-planning course provides artist professionals with business skills to enhance their creative propensity. The free, online version of the course caters to emerging artists seeking to make a living with their craft as well as offering refreshers for established artist ventures.  

The program includes videos curated from across the web, which are supplemented with tailored activities, templates and reflection questions. Content is organized in several digestible sessions encompassing everything from mission statements to accounting. Each session aims to help participants gain skills to build out their business plan without losing their artistic integrity. The course considers all creative disciplines, even as it delves into a particularly sensitive topic for artists: the art itself as a product or service.

“We’ve heard many reservations artists have around their business practices as stifling, elusive or even contradicting their creative process,” says Megan Van Voorhis, chief operating officer at CPAC and founder of the course in a statement. “The course is not teaching writers how to write better, or musicians how to sound better. It’s designed to help artists find the balance, moreover, the parallel between their business and creative processes. Ultimately we want them to flourish and thrive on their own terms.”

The course was originally conceived in 2003 as a series of cumulative workshops by CPAC and the Council of Smaller Enterprises. The in-person course continues to run via the Akron Area Arts Alliance at Summit Artspace and by the Broward County, Fla. Cultural Division.

“Helping artists sustain themselves is critical to a healthy city,” adds Valerie Schumacher, director of CPAC’s artist services. “Throughout our programming, we are seeing how contemporary arts and culture is telling the stories of today and helping us reflect on our own world. These benefits among the many others are impossible without the artists who create that work.”

CPAC officials believe providing content that artists can access at anytime, free from judgment or time obligations, as one of the primary reasons for building out the course online to supplement the in-person workshops. The course is a cumulative process and can be taken from start to finish using the numbered sessions. With this new content, artists can refresh their skills in a particular area in which they are less comfortable, or they can return to the material as they test and implement new business strategies.

Get started with the online courses here.