Deputy Director of Research & Senior Advisor

Cambridge, Massachusetts

From 2011–2014, Kiley Arroyo served as Deputy Director of Research for the Initiative for Sustainable Arts in America — a national research partnership of the Foundation Center, Harvard’s Hauser Institute for Civil Society, and Fractured Atlas.

She led the design of a multi-site, mixed-method research strategy examining how metropolitan cultural ecosystems evolved over two decades. The work advanced a comprehensive model of regional cultural economies, integrating demographic, financial, organizational, and participation data into a dynamic systems framework.

The initiative’s pilot in Southeast Michigan produced one of the most detailed portraits of a regional cultural ecosystem to date. The research mapped:

• Demographic change and participation patterns
• Organizational composition across nonprofit, for-profit, and informal entities
• Capitalization trends and revenue flows
• Regional funding dynamics and philanthropic investment patterns

These data streams informed an interactive platform designed to provide practitioners, funders, policymakers, and civic leaders with accessible tools to strengthen cultural policy and investment strategy.

In parallel with quantitative research, Kiley designed and facilitated capacity-building workshops across the region, engaging a diverse cross-section of stakeholders in asset mapping, capitalization analysis, demographic interpretation, and systems-level learning. This participatory process ensured that local interpretive expertise shaped the analysis and its application.

She also co-authored, with the Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy, the National Endowment for the Arts study Birth and Mortality Rates of Arts and Cultural Organizations, 1990–2010 — a longitudinal examination of organizational life cycles across six metropolitan areas. The study offered new insight into how philanthropic investment can better align with the carrying capacity of local cultural ecosystems.

This body of work laid critical groundwork for CSC’s ecosystem stewardship approach — demonstrating that cultural vitality depends not only on individual organizations, but on the interdependent relationships among capital flows, community participation, institutional design, and policy environments.