Additional funding has come from the Nebraska Arts Council, Nebraska Humanities Council and the Nebraska Art Association. Prairie Visions' target group is Nebraska educators, students and communities. The Consortium of 97 school districts stretches from Gering to Bellevue and from Santee to Holdredge. The Summer Institute is the main vehicle for professional development and curriculum design in arts education. Since its first session in 1988, Prairie Visions has served more than 1,300 art specialists, educators and representatives of arts agencies and educational organizations, including 270 of Nebraska's arts specialists.
Graduates come from districts that embrace half of Nebraska's public school population.
The program started from a need for a statewide staff development program for teachers in the arts. The goal was to establish the visual arts as a regular academic discipline alongside core subjects such as math, language arts, science and history. Subsequently, the program has expanded recently to include the performing arts. The broad base of partner school districts and organizations have had an impact on policy at many levels throughout the state. In many documented cases, districts saw the impact of the arts and hired art specialists to expand and the work being cone by classroom teachers.