National Art Education Association

The National Art Education Association (NAEA), founded in 1947, is the leading professional membership organization exclusively for visual arts, design, and media arts education professionals. NAEA’s vibrant community includes educators working from pre-K through the university level; teaching artists; arts administrators; art museum educators; and over 54,000 students who are members of the National Art Honor Society. Members hail from all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, US military bases and possessions, most Canadian provinces, and over 25 foreign countries. NAEA’s mission is to champion creative growth and innovation by equitably advancing the tools and resources for a high-quality visual arts, design, and media arts education throughout diverse populations and communities of practice.

NAEA hired Lord Cultural Resources (Lord) to facilitate the development of a new strategic plan to coincide with new NAEA leadership. Lord helped the client team review their previous strategic pillars and evaluate them with a variety of their core constituencies, including: Board, Staff, Division Directors, the Strategic Planning Steering Committee, an Advisory Committee from peer organizations, and members. Hired pre-pandemic to optimize NAEA’s annual in person conference, Lord quickly pivoted upon the outset of Covid-19 to create alternate methodologies to engage stakeholders online and ensure robust input at multiple levels. The resulting plan updated the strategic pillars to reflect current and future needs of NAEA constituents – for example, by ensuring equity, diversity and inclusion ran through all other pillars. Upon the successful conclusion of the strategic plan, NAEA hired Lord to facilitate visioning for new Core Values.