In the mid-1990s, cuts to educational budgets were forcing many schools to restrict students' exposure to and participation in the arts.  In order to counter this trend, the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation created ArtsSmarts.  ArtsSmarts was founded in 1998 on the premise that engaging young people in artistic activity is critical to their evolution as creative thinkers and that a creative intellect is a crucial asset for young people as they navigate their way in the new knowledge-based economy of the 21^st century.

In its first year of operation, ArtsSmarts worked with 7 organizations to initiate over 100 projects.  The projects ArtsSmarts supported focused on breaking down walls - the walls between schools and communities, education and cultural sectors, artists, and teachers, arts organizations and community organizations; the walls around subject areas in the curriculum; and the walls around artistic disciplines.

This created opportunities to test different approaches at a relatively low risk of failure.  Some projects did fail, while others came up with transformative ideas.  The local projects that succeeded began to inform a new way of teaching and learning which later shaped the development of the ArtsSmarts program model.

While ArtsSmarts spread through schools, regions and provinces across the country, it also began to shift the relationships between the arts, education and community sectors leading to local and provincial multi-sector partnerships and policy action.

In 2004, ArtsSmarts experienced a large growth spurt which significantly impacted its overall dynamic.  The increase in the number of partners from 7 to 15 influenced and clarified the importance of leveraging multiple sources of funding from local sources.  These new program and partnership models enabled ArtsSmarts to play out and evaluate changing its role from sole funder to funder-catalyst and facilitated partners to evolve from funding recipients into program developers.

Over this 10 year period, ArtsSmarts provided seed monies to a wide range of local projects reaching more than 350,000 young people in 2,500 schools involving 5,000 artists, 14,000 educators and thousands of community volunteers. From 1998-2005, ArtsSmarts was administered by the Canadian Conference of the Arts and from 2006-2008 it was administered by the Canadian Education Association.  

In 2008, ArtsSmarts transitioned to become an independent, charitable organization.  Today, ArtsSmarts is a leading learning network comprised of pan-Canadian partnerships led by a committed Board of Directors and a Partner Council.