The World Health Organization (WHO) defines social prescribing as “a means of connecting patients to a range of nonclinical services in a community to improve their health and social wellbeing.” Under this model, a patient grappling with anxiety or loneliness can get a prescription to volunteer for a local community organization, participate in an exercise class or attend a symphony. 

The practice has been adopted in at least 20 countries, including the U.K., where it has been embraced for decades. But though it’s relatively unknown in the U.S., social prescribing, particularly as it applies to arts and cultural experiences, is gaining traction in this country, thanks to early adopters rolling out programs statewide (Mass Cultural Council) and regionally (the Virginia-based Benjamin Goldberg Foundation), plus Bloomberg Philanthropies, which has been funding research into the practice for over two years.

Should the practice continue to win adherents, it could represent a seismic shift in how funders think about supporting arts and culture organizations. 

Arts patrons perceive the value of the arts experience from different vantage points. Some, like the musician Herb Alpert, are guided by “what feels right.” On the other hand, foundation leaders evaluating a pool of applications may pore over attendance figures or more qualitative assessments, like how a performance boosts a sense of connection among audiences.

Non-arts grantmakers, like those focused on public health, may recognize that the arts experience can heal, but they can’t cut a check on intuition alone — and in most cases, they don’t. As a result, development officers end up relying on support from a limited pool of donors and foundations committed to arts and culture.

Social prescribing solves this dilemma by having a medical professional prescribe a play, dance class or symphony that can clinically improve a patient’s condition. By legitimizing the arts experience, it allows arts organizations to make a compelling pitch to a set of previously disengaged funders tackling the mental health crisis, the obesity epidemic and other priorities.

“That prescription validates the patient,” said Mass Cultural Council Executive Director Michael J. Bobbitt, who has overseen its groundbreaking social prescribing work since joining the council in 2021. “We want to act as a catalyst because in my mind, everyone should have access to arts prescriptions. We’re saying, ‘Here’s a model that has scalable potential and can benefit everyone.’”

How MCC’s initiative came together

Let’s start by discussing what social prescribing isn’t. Imagine a foundation makes a grant to an opera company to cultivate community engagement. It’s a worthwhile endeavor and its impact can be measured to some extent, but it can’t be classified as social prescribing. 

According to the WHO, the “social prescribing pathway” consists of three stages. First, a primary health provider assesses a patient’s needs. Next, the provider refers the patient to a “link worker” who develops a personalized wellness plan. Lastly, the patient participates in activities laid out in the plan and reports back to the primary healthcare provider and link worker. Not coincidentally, the MCC’s statewide model mirrors the WHO’s “social prescribing pathway.”

MCC receives most of its funding from the state of Massachusetts’ annual budget. Other public sources include state gaming revenues and the National Endowment for the Arts. IP normally doesn’t profile funders that almost exclusively rely on public funding, but in this case, the key takeaways are less about where the money comes from and more about how the MCC rolled out a social prescribing model that other funders can replicate.

The story begins in 2018, when MCC leaders connected with the U.K.’s Theatre Royal Plymouth’s Mandy Precious. At the time, Precious was doing social prescribing work with populations battling addiction, and the relationship led the MCC to contact practitioners in Canada and the U.K. In late 2019, MCC began working on guidelines to inform Phase I of its Social Prescription Pilot. 

During this phase, the MCC selected eight arts and culture organizations after considering a set of eligibility guidelines. They included how the organization’s proposed program addressed a priority health issue (e.g., Parkinson’s disease), what needs in the community the program addressed, and how connecting with medical professionals, social workers and new participants fit in with the organization’s expanded mission.

Phase I launched in January 2020. Phase II (2020-2021) expanded the program to 12 organizations that had existing partnerships with professional care providers. Phases III and IV (2021-2023) were supported by a Social Prescription Taskforce and Social Prescription Consultant Dr. Tasha Golden, who co-created “Arts on Prescription: A Field Guide for U.S. Communities.” 

It was also in Phase IV that MCC hired consultant Amy Bantham and tasked her with finding an entity that could scale social prescription across Massachusetts. Over 1,940 prescriptions were issued across the pilot’s four phases.

Understanding the social prescribing model

In June of this year, MCC announced it had selected the Atlanta-based Art Pharmacy to come north to scale what it called the nation’s first “statewide arts prescription solution.” The solution includes Mass General Brigham, which, according to Art Pharmacy CEO Chris Appleton in an email to IP, will “partner with Art Pharmacy to leverage the many benefits of arts-based social prescribing.” 

Here’s how the arrangement works. A patient gets a referral from their doctor. Next, the patient gets a call from one of Art Pharmacy’s “care navigators.” After talking with the patient about their healthcare needs, the navigator draws up what Bobbitt called “12 doses of culture,” such as a concert attendance or a dance class. 

The care navigator books the ticket, sends reminders to the patient, reaches out to the patient after he or she has the experience, and relays the information to the referring doctor. “The patient does that 12 times, and at the end of the year, they might get a refill,” Bobbitt says. 

In an email to IP, Rick Luftglass, the executive director of Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, which we named 2022’s Arts Funder of the Year for showing how the arts can address mental health stigma and care, stressed the importance of prolonged patient engagement. “It sounds easier than it is — writing prescriptions can be a one-way, single transaction, but in order to see health benefits, there has to be consistency and follow-up,” he said. “That will require exceptionally strong partnerships between the health providers and the cultural partners.”

Luftglass said that while the Illumination Fund has not directly supported social prescribing for the arts, a number of grantees in its Arts in Health initiative “have been exploring approaches or testing the waters,” including the Mark Morris Dance Group, which has shown that its Dance for PD program can improve balance and motor skills for people with Parkinson’s disease.

It’s also worth noting that under MCC’s model, third-party payers pay Art Pharmacy and Art Pharmacy pays the organizations providing the arts experience. 

To be clear, philanthropy can galvanize social prescribing with seed funding. The MCC, for instance, provided its pilot program arts organizations with upfront grants of $10,000 per year. But philanthropy lacks the resources to fund what Bobbitt considers a scalable social intervention like seatbelts or school lunches. “Mental and physical health are healthcare issues, so healthcare should pay for it,” he said.

Healthcare’s involvement benefits arts organizations in another important way. Bobbitt reminded me that arts leaders “aren’t equipped to track the kinds of mental health measurements that healthcare can.” By flexing this core competency, healthcare partners can fuel a virtuous cycle in which participating arts organizations can make a data-driven case to arts and public health funders.

Social prescribing can also benefit healthcare providers. Bobbitt cited research showing that 77% of patients who receive an arts prescription participate in the experience. A patient who makes progress after filling their prescriptions may, over time, see their doctor or visit the emergency room less frequently, thereby saving the provider money. Paying for arts prescriptions also makes the provider’s insurance plan more attractive to individuals shopping for policies.

Lastly — and most promisingly from a funding perspective — Art Pharmacy CEO Appleton attested to social prescribing’s broad appeal. The organization, which is partnering with Stanford University to offer arts prescriptions to the university community, “works with arts funders and non-arts funders alike, each with their own unique incentives,” he said. “Non-arts funders, especially those focused on mental health, have an especially important role in scaling this evidence-based solution.”

Now for the inevitable reality check.

Social prescribing has taken off in countries with national healthcare systems, like the U.K. and Canada, that are centrally managed, have more simplified billing processes and provide universal coverage. In contrast, the vast patchwork of private and public entities that make up the U.S. system is “much more complex, and there are unique challenges around financing and stability,” Luftglass said. “In the U.S., philanthropy is the starting point, but the ultimate goal is that health providers, systems and insurers — whether private insurers or Medicare and Medicaid — see the value and are willing to invest.”

Time will tell if social prescribing is stymied by factions in the labyrinthine U.S. system. In the meantime, momentum continues to build. In April, the New York Times’ Christina Caron wrote a piece noting that entities like Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield in New Jersey, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and nonprofits like Utah’s Project Connection are exploring how social prescribing for the arts can improve patients’ quality of life and reduce health disparities. 

Philanthropy’s to-do list

While MCC’s model underscores how an arts funder can support the development of a social prescribing program in a state with 7 million people, the Virginia Beach-based Benjamin Goldberg Foundation (BGF) provides an instructive case study for funders interested in taking a regional approach.

Launched in 2018, the foundation, whose namesake was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a rare form of cancer, when he was five years old, began by focusing on bringing healing arts to children, caregivers and the community. “This mission naturally led to our social prescribing initiative, aimed at improving access to healing arts as a means to address social determinants of health in Hampton Roads [in Southeast Virginia] and beyond,” said BGF Medical Advisor Dr. Sheetal Ajmani in an email to IP.

On September 25, the foundation held its inaugural Social Prescribing Roundtable Convening in Hampton Roads, gathering a cross-sector of stakeholders to create a strategic roadmap for social prescribing implementation, collaboration and funding. It created the Hampton Roads Social Prescribing Network, which will meet quarterly beginning in December 2024 to foster ongoing collaborations. And its leaders are in early discussions with local healthcare systems to launch the region’s first pilot program in healing arts prescriptions.

Ajmani said philanthropy can move the field forward, saying, “Funding operational resources for educational events, collaborative opportunities and pilot programs helps build sustainable frameworks within communities. It can also play a crucial role in supporting data collection, providing evidence to healthcare systems, insurers and potential investors on the community, clinical and economic benefits of social prescribing.”

One funder that’s bankrolling research around social prescribing is Bloomberg Philanthropies, which has been at the forefront of making empirically driven connections between the arts and outcomes in areas ranging from economic vitality to public safety. In October, Kate D. Levin, who oversees the funder’s Arts program, told me that for the past two years, Bloomberg has supported the EpiArts Lab and its efforts to explore social prescribing and the impacts of arts and cultural engagement on population health outcomes. 

“Depending on the issues — loneliness, depression, particularly for often older populations — arts participation turns out to be a very effective way of creating change,” said Levin, whose employer cites Public Health as one of its primary funding areas. “There’s a growing recognition about the relationship between the arts and health.”

“There is definitely a movement brewing”

After speaking with Levin, I reached out to Grantmakers in the Arts President and CEO Eddie Torres to get his take on the practice. In addition to alerting me to MCC’s efforts, Torres said that “for social prescribing to work, people need to advocate to their government for it, and funders need to advocate as well as support artists’ and organizations’ advocacy and lobbying.” 

He referred me to his 2020 post explaining how arts funders can advocate for the field and this page laying out GIA’s public policy and advocacy work.

I’m happy to report that funders’ advocacy efforts are playing out in real time. On February 8, 2025, the BGF will curate its annual Healing Arts in Medicine conference. This year’s theme, “The Wave of Social Prescribing,” will convene national leaders to explore research, clinical applications and pilot programs advancing arts in health.

Of course, philanthropy shouldn’t be the only entity advocating for social prescribing. It behooves nonprofit arts leaders to cold-call their foundation program officers and kickstart a conversation. Bobbitt stressed that funders that want to get the ball rolling should zero in on healthcare professionals. “Get them excited, get them reviewing the science and data on the arts’ benefit to health first, and then bring the arts sector into the room,” he said. “The arts sector won’t need convincing — the healthcare sector is where most of the work should start.”

Five months after MCC’s statewide arts prescribing initiative went live, Bobbitt and his team are hoping to scale it even further across Massachusetts by, among other things, encouraging state officials to include arts prescriptions in state employees’ healthcare plans. When Bobbitt isn’t working to expand social prescribing, he’s frequently responding to a barrage of messages from individuals all across the civic sphere, suggesting that over time, non-arts funders should be drawn to organizations providing a healing arts experience.

“We’ve heard from various agencies working with vulnerable communities, including housing authorities, veterans affairs and addiction services,” he said. “Every fifth email in my inbox is about social prescribing. There is definitely a movement brewing.”