In 1989, a group of Central Florida civic leaders made a bet — that the arts weren’t just a cultural nicety, but a genuine engine of community vitality and economic growth. Thirty-five years later, United Arts of Central Florida has proven them spectacularly right. Since its founding, the organization has invested more than $200 million in the arts, science, history, and culture of our region — and shows no signs of slowing down.
What United Arts Does — and Why It Matters
At its core, United Arts of Central Florida is a regional arts agency that pools resources from individuals, businesses, and government partners and deploys them strategically across Lake, Orange, Osceola, and Seminole Counties. Think of it as a clearinghouse for cultural investment — one that brings discipline, equity, and efficiency to the question of which organizations get funded and how.
The numbers tell a compelling story. United Arts operates on a $9.6 million annual budget, investing more than $8.3 million of that directly into local organizations each year. Its most recent grant cycle awarded $2.45 million in operating support funds to 62 nonprofit cultural organizations — the kind of foundational, unrestricted funding that arts organizations often struggle most to secure. These aren’t project grants with strings attached. They’re investments in organizational health and long-term sustainability.
The beneficiaries span the full breadth of Central Florida’s cultural life: from marquee institutions like the Orlando Ballet, Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, and Orlando Shakes to community anchors like the Enzian Theater and the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park. More than 70 organizations in all — each one part of a regional ecosystem that United Arts has spent 35 years carefully cultivating.
The Economic Case the Arts Keep Making
Skeptics have long questioned whether public and philanthropic investment in the arts is worth it — a question that United Arts answers with data, not sentiment. The organization has documented a $264.9 million social and economic impact from Orange County’s arts and cultural organizations alone. That figure includes jobs, visitor spending, supplier purchases, and the broader multiplier effect that flows through local economies when cultural institutions thrive.
Arts attendance drives restaurant reservations. Theater programming fills hotel rooms. Gallery openings animate downtown corridors that would otherwise go dark. The arts don’t just enrich communities — they subsidize them, quietly and consistently, in ways that rarely make headlines but show up clearly in economic development data.
United Arts also points to a less quantifiable but equally important return: quality of life. A region with a vibrant arts ecosystem attracts and retains talent, makes neighborhoods more livable, and gives residents — especially young people — a reason to stay. In a competitive environment for workforce attraction, that’s not a soft benefit. It’s a strategic advantage.
Jennifer Evins: Leading with Vision
Since joining United Arts in 2021 as President and CEO, Jennifer Evins has brought a sharp strategic lens to an organization with deep roots and ambitious reach. Evins came to Orlando after leading the Chapman Cultural Center in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where she built a reputation for connecting cultural investment to community revitalization in tangible, measurable ways.
Under her leadership, United Arts has deepened its commitment to both equity and impact — asking not just which organizations deserve support, but which communities are being reached, and whether the full spectrum of Central Florida’s cultural identity is reflected in the organizations receiving investment. It’s a harder question to answer than a grant rubric alone can capture, and it requires exactly the kind of thoughtful, relationship-driven leadership that Evins brings to the role.
The organization’s staff of 13 punches well above its weight class, managing a grant portfolio, a suite of professional development programs, and the ongoing work of making the case — to donors, to policymakers, to the public — that arts investment is community investment.
Beyond Grants: Building Capacity and Access
United Arts’ grant programs are well known, but its capacity-building work deserves equal attention. The organization’s Community Impact Grants — competitive awards of up to $5,000 — fund cross-sector collaborations between arts-based and non-arts-based organizations. These grants are designed around a simple but powerful insight: that some of the most transformative cultural work happens at the intersection of the arts and other sectors — healthcare, education, social services, civic engagement.
Individual Artist Grants, also up to $5,000, support artist-driven projects with direct public benefit — a recognition that artists themselves are cultural infrastructure, not just the organizations that house them. For a working artist in Central Florida, a $5,000 grant can be the difference between a project that happens and one that doesn’t.
United Arts also administers Orange County Venue Subsidy Grants, most recently awarding funds to 33 arts and cultural organizations — helping to offset the cost of performance and exhibition space, which remains one of the most persistent financial challenges facing mid-size arts organizations in growing metro markets.
35 Years In — and the Work Continues
The civic leaders who launched United Arts in 1989 couldn’t have anticipated the Orlando of 2026 — a global tourism destination, a tech and defense hub, a genuinely diverse metro region of nearly four million people. But their foundational conviction holds: that a great city requires a great cultural life, and that building one requires sustained, coordinated, strategic investment.
United Arts has been that investment vehicle for 35 years. The $200 million milestone is meaningful not just as a number, but as evidence of what’s possible when a community decides the arts are worth betting on — and keeps making that bet, year after year, regardless of the economic climate or the political winds.
If you haven’t attended a United Arts-supported event recently, you almost certainly will — whether you know it or not. The next time you’re at the Orlando Philharmonic, the Enzian, a community theater, or a neighborhood gallery, there’s a good chance United Arts of Central Florida helped make it possible.
That’s what 35 years of getting it right looks like.