Slover Linett is a social research practice for the arts, culture and community sector. Founded in Chicago in 1999, the firm uses the tools of research, evaluation, and dialogue to help changemakers increase equity and access, deepen engagement, and collaborate with their communities. Our projects grapple with questions in all areas of culture, ranging from programming, experience design, and community needs to marketing, audience development, outcomes measurement, co-creation, placemaking, and strategic planning. We’re empirical researchers above all, but also consultants and facilitators dedicated to justice and change; we strive to help practitioners, funders, and policy leaders make culture more responsive, relevant, and rewarding to more people.

We’ve been honored to collaborate with a variety of innovative arts and culture enterprises and foundations in the U.S., including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The High Line, Library of Congress, Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, Signature Theater Company, the Smithsonian Institution, MIT, the National Academy of Sciences, MacArthur Foundation, Los Angeles Philharmonic, the international Of/By/For All movement, and Chicago Public Radio WBEZ.

Our Chicago-based team includes social scientists from disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, and public policy, many with advanced degrees, and includes people with a wide range of personal identities and experiences. We believe that only a staff with diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds and a wide range of perspectives and experiences can successfully tackle the complex challenges ahead, and we aspire to help create a more inclusive cultural research field with every new hire.

To provide a clearer picture of our practice for applicants, examples of some current and upcoming projects include: a multi-city research effort to help make classical music radio more inclusive and diverse; research to help a unique new art museum in Los Angeles engage multiple communities, from nearby residents to international tourists; research on diversifying STEM engagement in connection with a new public-media initiative about engineering as a creative human activity; collaboration with a progressive foundation in the northeast to plan 2023 community research about creativity and arts engagement, as a follow-up to recent research and discussions with community-based arts organizations; visitor research and consulting to help several different museums of history, science and art around the U.S. develop new user-experience plans and evaluation frameworks; and, pending funding, a multi-phase study about “spatial equity” — i.e., how architecture influences who feels welcome, comfortable, safe, and engaged in the space — in partnership with several art museums and expert advisors. Applicants may also be interested in our pandemic-era national research collaboration, Culture + Community in a Time of Transformation: A Special Edition of Culture Track.

For more information, please visit sloverlinett.com and @sloverlinett on Twitter.