Democracy is not limited to participation in the political system, important as that is. 
The irreducible core of democracy is what writers sometimes call “voice”, the capacity
to find a perspective, develop it, and express it to others. In a democracy citizens have voice. They participate in the making of their culture – in their homes and neighborhoods, churches, workplaces, and communities. Inspired by Whitman’s vision, the Center for Arts Policy investigates the many ways the arts contribute to community vitality and the practice of democracy. Though the arts are but one way that people make culture, they are particularly powerful because they can contribute so profoundly to the development and expression of voice. 

Since Whitman’s time, an enormous, diverse, and robust arts system has grown up. 
Our commercial arts sector is among the largest industries in the country. More than
a quarter million students major in the arts, and forty thousand get degrees in the arts every year. Non-profit arts organizations have multiplied exponentially. Tens of millions
of Americans make art informally in living rooms and garages, parks, churches, and community centers. Growing numbers of artists make work in public schools, and in community arts programs, storefronts, parks, YMCAs and even prisons, on walls
and in performance.

Unlike some nations, the U.S. does not have a formal cultural or arts policy that
has directed the growth of this system. Our arts system is organized by a set of assumptions, beliefs, and norms that guide decisions and comprise an implicit arts
policy.  It structures the way we define the arts, the ways they are organized, practiced, consumed, marketed, financed, taught, sustained and developed. The Center investigates this implicit policy and makes it explicit. We advance policy ideas designed
to democratize the arts, understand how they contribute to community vitality and the practice of democracy, use the arts to build community and develop the voices of all citizens, and provide full and inclusive opportunities for participation and expression.  Most of our work engages three themes we believe have the highest significance to our mission:  the arts in community building, the arts in education, learning and development; and the arts as a system. 

The Center is among a small group of cultural or arts policy centers in the U.S., and the only one at an arts college.  Columbia College Chicago is an urban liberal arts institution focused on the arts and communications that offers innovative degree programs with a "hands-on, minds-on" approach in the visual, performing, media and communication arts to 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students.