Stories & Examples

"Connecting Californians" reports on a research project completed in 2000, that explored story as a powerful means of building community. The project conducted a search in each of California's 58 counties to find projects that engaged residents in a public performance or story about local history and life. Maps were created to represent the various projects. It is a helpful model for collaborative planning and discussion regarding the arts, culture, and civil society. Although it does not offer frameworks or tools, it is a useful report sample and resource for arts and civic engagement practitioners.

Over the course of ten months, the research team interviewed more than 100 practitioners, educators and policy makers with experience in the arts, humanities and civic culture. They interviewed and convened repesentatives of projects at the intersection of the arts, the humanities, grassroots narrative and community organizing to explore the role that a cultural organizer plays in promoting and sustaining collaborations, facilitating relationships and encouraging local leaders to emerge. Participants included artists, humanists, organizers and residents and representatives of their civic and religious organizations. This report presents the findings of that inquiry and questions for the future. 

A section on program design discusses three core values — engagement, inclusion and inquiry. The report includes six comprehensive appendices. Appendix A: Three Local Projects presents brief case studies of public performances springing from the history, aesthetics and issues in three California communities. Appendix B: Evidence of Public Performance Based on Local Life offers a scan of the field.  Appendix C gives information on two focus groups. Artists, organizers, educators and funders that came together to discuss the role of story in building community. Appendix D reports on national and California interviews. Appendix E includes three research essays. Writer and critic Linda Frye Burnham interviewed practitioners and thinkers in the field grappling with issues at the intersection of community organizing, art and the humanities, producing three monographs. Appendix F is a literature review [Adapted from the Community Arts Network website.]

Art & Soul is a project of the Orton Family Foundation. The Orton Family Foundation, in partnership with the Town of Starksboro and the Vermont Land Trust hypothesize that, by getting in touch with deeper community values and connections to place, citizens will be able to improve upon traditional approaches to planning and make better decisions about the future of their communities. With the Art & Soul Civic Engagement Project they are testing whether the use of different forms of art will catalyze articulation of the unique assets of a community, in turn impacting community decision-making.  The project is being piloted in Starksboro, VT, with artist-in-residence, Matthew Perry. It is applying arts-based methods of community engagement to generate and inform conversations around values and community. Through storytelling, painting, dance, music, theater, media arts, photography, sculpture, poetry and prose and/or video, Starksboro is bringing together disparate groups of citizens to address the positive and negative aspects of the community. Townspeople will identify ways to reflect the articulated values and aspirations sparked by the story gathering and art making projects in concrete actions, policies and choices shaping the future of Starksboro and its land use. Stakeholders hold a range of expectations for the Starksboro project from fairly straightforward concrete accomplishments, e.g., an art product is produced, to community transformation, e.g. younger residents and newcomers begin to assume leadership positions. The evaluation plan attempts to capture that full range of desired expectations organized in three phases: process (short term); outcome (during the life of the project); and impact (long term, post project results).  

For each of the three phases, the evaluation plan lists the major questions to be answered in an evaluation related to desired outcomes; the indicators of desired behavioral or attitudinal change; potential data collection instruments and strategies that are appropriate for the indicators; notes about the target sample for a particular data collection strategy; timing of data collection; and, where relevant, any appropriate comparisons that might be made. The indicators can be used in a number of ways:  a beginning point for developing instrumentation; the framework for content analysis of documents and records; a frame for other types of documentation, e.g., the film documentary; and a file structure for maintaining anecdotal information about the project.

Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) is a Skid Row-based theater organization, founded and directed by artist John Malpede. LAPD has distinguished itself by its longstanding commitment to making change in L.A.’s Skid Row community, particularly regarding the homeless, through theater-based civic engagement work. Many have observed LAPD’s apparent potent effects on individuals and on social relations in Skid Row, and acknowledge its contributions to influencing structures, systems, and even policy.  

As part of Animating Democracy’s Arts & Civic Engagement Impact Initiative, LAPD and Urban Institute senior researcher, Maria Rosario Jackson engaged in field research that provides a foundation to recurrently identify, monitor, and assess the presence, density and richness of the cultural infrastructure of the Skid Row neighborhood. They undertook this research as a first step towards recommending data collection practices and tools that can help to bring into relief cultural assets in the Skid Row community, residents’ cultural needs and aspirations and the infrastructure or set of resources required to make cultural participation possible. Undergirding their collaborative inquiry are the ideas that cultural participation builds and strengthens social networks that potentially lead to increased social capital and collective efficacy; and that cultural participation is essential in helping to create a healthy environment and normative neighborhood.

Malpede and Jackson believe that with their proposed inventory of cultural vitality and recurrent information about various aspects of it, Skid Row community leaders can more effectively carry out the work of improving quality of life in the neighborhood. The framework would enable Skid Row cultural as well as community agencies that use arts and culture to see their work as part of a larger system and to create an asset-focused narrative for Skid Row that can help shift or expand the ways outsiders perceive the Skid Row community. This may enable people outside of the Skid Row neighborhood to better understand its cultural dimensions and help shift or expand the ways outsiders perceive the Skid Row community. This may, in turn, catalyze and inform new investments in Skid Row.  

Artist Rha Goddess’s Hip Hop Mental Health Project (HHMHP) seeks to contribute to shifting the cultural paradigm of shame and alienation surrounding mental illness, and satisfy a need for a SAFE place to confront the issue and obtain vital information. Through the integration of performance and dialogue, the HHMHP works to impact public discourse and values among urban communities in a way that educates about the signs, symptoms, and spiraling course of mental illness, and to explore possible solutions to the contributing life stressors of societal stigma and the difficulties of an overtaxed mental health system. A key creative component of the project is LOW, Goddess’s one-woman performance that unflinchingly depicts the very human reality of mental illness in our culture. It fuses monologue, movement, and music to tell the story of Lowquesha, a vibrant young woman, and her all-too-common journey through the mental health system.

The Hip Hop Mental Health Project is committed to engaging young urban and low-income communities of color as they are the most detrimentally affected by the disparities in mental health diagnosis, treatment, and care. Dialogues that immediately follow performances aim to create a safe space for audiences to confront issues around mental health that might not happen in another context. Through performances such as LOW and its related dialogue, HHMHP seeks to:

• educate about the signs and symptoms of mental illness and tools for recovery;
• decrease the social stigma of mental illness, especially for those of lower incomes and of color;
• explore possible solutions to some of the life stressors that influence mental health;
• increase awareness of, and access to, mental health services and support; and
• impact public discourse about mental health.

The Hip Hop Mental Health Project is an initiative of 1+1+1=ONE, a Brooklyn based nonprofit organization that utilizes the methodology of Arts Based Civic Transformation to empower individuals and communities to affect positive social change.

As part of Animating Democracy’s Arts & Civic Engagement Impact Initiative, the collaborative inquiry between Rha Goddess and evaluator Suzanne Callahan of Callahan Consulting for the Arts focused on the impact of LOW, and post-performance dialogue on audiences’ attitudes, beliefs and perceptions about mental health and illness. The assessment of impact is based on: 1) a formal evaluation conducted by City University of New York (CUNY) researchers using an IRB-approved study (Institutional Review Board); and 2) an alternative approach to audience evaluation developed in collaboration with Callahan and tested with one audience. The two studies complemented each other and allowed comparison of two research processes that asked similar questions in different ways.

For information about the CUNY study, visit the Hip Hop Mental Health Project web site.