The Goal of Community Art Workshops for Health Education

Past Tom Borrup

This extract from the book The Creative Community Builder'southward Handbook: How to Transform Communities Using Local Assets, Arts and Civilisation (2007 Fieldstone Brotherhood), makes a compelling case that cultural projects are non simply a luxury simply play a fundamental role in reviving the fortunes and boosting the prospects of poor, minority and other disadvantaged communities.

Civic institutions, like museums, public galleries, community art organizations, performing art institutions, arts councils and public arts organizations accept a rare opportunity to lead significant change by engaging specific groups to help devise and carry out creative community-edifice neighborhood programs. But it needn't always be the institution that takes activeness. The selected stories shown below offer inspiring examples of how private artists can also make a deviation.

Tom Borrup was director of the innovative Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis for more than 20 years, and is a nationally recognized leader in cultural and community development work. He wrote this book with Partnership for Livable Communities.

The Creative Community Builder'southward Handbook can be ordered from the publisher, Fieldstone Alliance. For more information see www.communityandculture.com or world wide web.livable.com.

The links betwixt the economic health of a customs and the quality of its social bonds are becoming increasingly clear. Robert Putnam and other sociologists have supplied convincing evidence that strong social connections are necessary ingredients of economic success.

In looking for the ingredients that affect the concrete well-being of people in different kinds of places, Dr. Felton Earls, a Harvard professor of public wellness, conducted an all-encompassing, xv-year study in neighborhoods beyond Chicago. His inquiry plant that the single-nearly important gene differentiating levels of wellness from ane neighborhood to the side by side was what he called "collective efficacy." He was surprised to observe that it wasn't wealth, admission to healthcare, crime, or some more tangible cistron that topped the list. A more elusive ingredient--the capacity of people to human action together on matters of mutual involvement--fabricated a greater divergence in the health and well-being of individuals and neighborhoods.

The communities profiled here found opportunities for people to come together in creation and celebration of civilisation. They developed their social capital by cooperating, sharing, and seeking and finding shared goals, and by developing ties on a cultural level. These connections serve these communities well in their other endeavors--from economic development to civic participation to salubrious living.

1. Promote Interaction in Public Space

Public spaces and marketplaces are essential ingredients in every community. Public space provides opportunities for people to meet and be exposed to a diverseness of neighbors. These meetings often have place past hazard, but they too can come through active organizing. The art of promoting constructive interaction amid people in public spaces has been about forgotten in many communities. Planners, architects, and public administrators have focused more than on creating aesthetic places and on providing for the unimpeded movement and storage of automobiles than on creating places that encourage social interaction. More recently, public officials have been even more concerned with security and maximizing their power to observe and control people in public spaces.

William H. Whyte asserted that crowded, pedestrian-friendly, active spaces are safer, more economically productive, and more conducive to healthy borough communities. "What attracts people nearly, it would announced, is other people," he wrote. Since the 1950s, city planners, developers, policy makers, and transportation engineers accept built and modified communities in just the contrary vein.

While the design of public space influences its employ, Project for Public Spaces notes that eighty percent of the success of a public infinite is the result of its "management," referring to how the space is maintained and activities programmed. In other words, fifty-fifty in the all-time-designed spaces for public interaction, activities need to exist planned, and the space needs to be clean, secure, and well maintained, or information technology is unlikely to serve people well.

Public art administrators and cultural planners of all kinds can be significant players in designing, managing, and programming public space. Increasingly, artists are being tapped to collaborate with architects, landscape architects, engineers, and city planners in the design and creation of public spaces, buildings, roads, highways, and public transit facilities.

Equally important equally the space, piece of art, or event is the process past which it is created. A puppet parade may simply be a group of artists marching in the street, or it may be the outcome of a lengthy, community-broad process involving hundreds of residents who brainstorm themes, construct and paint the puppets, program the activities, and march together with their families and neighbors.

Success Story #1

Providence, Rhode Island: WaterFire

Igniting A New Urban Spirit

WaterFire, a public art consequence in Providence, Rhode Island, brings unprecedented numbers of people together on a regular ground to share a profound experience. At the same time it instills pride, belonging, interaction, and human connection. Created past a public creative person, WaterFire involves hundreds of volunteers and supporters, and it has get part of the community's collective identity.

Congenital at the convergence of ii rivers, Providence covered its polluted downtown waterways in the 1950s with roads, rails yards, and expanded parking lots. In the early 1990s, the city uncovered, or "daylighted," the rivers and lined them with public promenades and pedestrian-friendly parks.

WaterFire, a public fine art consequence that takes place on the downtown waterways, became the needed catalyst for revitalization. The event involves music, performances, ceremonial bonfires, boats, and ritual and, when information technology is staged, transforms about one mile of Providence'south downtown. Ane hundred fire baskets, or braziers, are placed at regular intervals in waterways that wind through the center of downtown. Filled with fragrant local firewood and prepare afire at dusk, they're fed late into the nighttime by black-garbed "burn tenders" who brand their way from burn down to burn down in small boats. Powerful and mesmerizing music, conducted through an elaborate speaker system, seems to emanate from the flames.

Artist Barnaby Evans conceived WaterFire as a i-fourth dimension event in 1994, simply citizens immediately recognized the power of Evans' spectacle, in which fire evoked a ritual experience and the flames symbolized the renaissance of the city. Their support, seconded past the city's mayor, led to the institutionalization of WaterFire equally a community ritual in 1997.

Evans created WaterFire Providence in 1997 as a nonprofit organization to acquit on the public art event. Today, twenty-five events, or "lightings," are held each year, jump through fall. Each event attracts as many as 100,000 people to downtown Providence's public spaces. Multiple partnerships with social service, teaching, arts, and civic groups help promote other causes through the event and provide a steady stream of volunteers, weaving a fabric of community through multiple levels of participation.

Visitors now come from around the world, and local residents volunteer for and attend the event once more and again. By working across public, business, and nonprofit sectors, the city revived its economic system. Possibly more importantly, WaterFire additional the customs'due south spirit and self-image beyond what anyone could have imagined.

www.waterfire.org

2. Increase Civic Participation Through Celebrations

Creating the kind of connections between people that lead to collective civic activity is a claiming for any planner, organizer, or community architect. It?due south a lot of difficult work and there's no secret formula, but it'southward an essential ingredient in a democratic society. Annual or seasonal events such as festivals or farmers markets can exist specially effective in communities with great social, ethnic, and economic diversity. The processes used to plan and carry out these events are at least as important as the events themselves.

Success Story #2

Delray Beach, Florida: Cultural Loop and History Trail

Keeping Anybody in the Loop

Planners and a multitude of artists involved in the Delray Embankment Cultural Loop establish inventive means to connect a wide range of people for the commencement fourth dimension through customs-based cultural organizations. This process crossed ethnic boundaries and helped people celebrate together in a rapidly growing area of southward Florida.

Situated on the Atlantic coast almost Palm Embankment, Delray Embankment is an unusually diverse suburban community. There are numerous arts and cultural organizations in the community that offer exhibitions, performances, and classes and an equal number of historic groups and sites. Many churches and other places of importance serve as sites for ritual, ceremony, and social activity.

The Delray Cultural Loop and History Trail began as a 1-time upshot on a weekend in November 2003. It consisted of a i.iii-mile rectangular route that led participants to sites representing all the city's major ethnic groups. In doing and so, it showcased the community's rich and diverse cultural heritage. Partnerships between cultural and community-based groups rooted in the African American, Haitian, Anglo, and Latino communities were important to the event'due south success.

The cultural loop tour included fourteen churches, six borough institutions, and xx-iii additional celebrated sites, all welcoming passersby. A variety of artists projects--on utility poles, trees, sidewalks, and kiosks--lined the manner. Each told a story of the people and the place. A vacant lot was occupied past the Open Door Project, displaying over one hundred used doors, painted and collaged in preceding weeks past people of all ages through workshops let by artist Sharon Koskoff. The spectacular collection of doors symbolized the people and events that helped open up the doors of diversity and opportunity for individuals and the customs.

A "dark-green" market featuring fresh, locally-grown foods, holiday arts and crafts show, and outdoor art fair were other attractions along the route, and Old School Firm Foursquare virtually the heart of the rectangle featured music and amusement. Miami-based artist Gary Moore set up up a temporary barbershop in a vacant business firm in the African American neighborhood, offering free haircuts and a glimpse into the world of Blackness hair for travelers on the loop.

Delray Beach'south Cultural Loop connected people in celebration of their ain diverseness. Although chop-chop growing and predominantly prosperous, Delray Beach has ongoing healing and span-building work to practice. The cultural loop was a unique issue that helped locals to exist tourists discovering their own hometown using familiar public spaces. At the same time, information technology gave visitors access to the diverse cultural riches and history of this southward Florida beachside community.

world wide web.delrayconnect.com www.delraybeach.com

three. Appoint Youth in the Community

Including young people as meaningful contributors in the social and economic aspects of community edifice must not be overlooked and cannot be left to schools and parents alone.

Engaging youth has a dual benefit: it brings more than adults into the flick. Research in civic date by the League of Women Voters indicates that the gene most likely to get people more involved in community diplomacy is helping to better conditions for youth. "Issues related to children, including mentoring and coaching, and pedagogy are those about likely to mobilize the untapped reservoir of volunteers."

Success Story #3

Boston, Massachusetts: Artists For Humanity

Creative Entrepreneurs Earn Respect

The Artists for Humanity programs in Boston does merely that. It provides avenues for youth to go socially conscious and engaged entrepreneurs who bridge economical and cultural differences. Youth build confidence and gain business experience while working with professional person artists every bit mentors and instructors.

Artists For Humanity (AFH) began in 1990, when Susan Rodgerson, an contained artist, worked with students at Boston'south Martin Luther King Middle School to pigment a mural. After information technology was complete, vi students asked her if they could paint something else. That summer they showed up at her studio every twenty-four hour period equally she establish things for them to paint, eventually turning their attention to designing and producing T-shirts to earn money. In 1992, Rodgerson and the six students incorporated as a nonprofit. While they secured more commissions and product sales, the group adult studio product activities in graphic design, commercial photography, silk-screen printing, sculpture, theatrical gear up blueprint, ceramics, and painting. The organization after added warehouse infinite for offices and a gallery.

In 2004, AFH opened a country-of-the-art, environmentally friendly "greenish" facility with 23,500 square feet of studio, gallery, performance, and part infinite in Boston'south Fort Signal Channel Arts Commune.

The organization works with youth primarily between the ages of fourteen and 18 from all parts of the city. Fundamentally, it is based upon a small business model, concentrating on what young artists can creatively produce, rather than post-obit a social service model that attempts to address their shortcomings. Immature artists are paid and participate in client meetings and contract negotiations. AFH is careful not to describe boundaries between commercial arts and fine arts--art as personal expression and art as a product for auction. By embracing both, the organization encourages youth to tap their intrinsic creativity.

Artists For Humanity operates equally a structured, paid apprentice program to pair teens with experienced artists in a wide range of fine and commercial arts for production development and services to the business community. Participating youth correspond the entire urban center and come primarily from low-income neighborhoods.The plan employs roughly eighty young artists in its microenterprise programs each year and serves over three hundred through drop-in programs. The young artists receive an hourly wage and accept the opportunity to earn a 50 pct commission on each private work they sell through the gallery, shows, or negotiated contracts. T-shirts, murals, graphic pattern, and fine art works are the principal earned-revenue sources. While AFH has earned over $one.7 million since 1996, foundation grants and corporate sponsorships still account for the largest share of the system'due south upkeep.

world wide web.afhboston.com

four. Promote the Power and Preservation of Place

When people become involved in the design, cosmos, and upkeep of places, they develop a vested interest in using and maintaining these spaces. When they take a true sense of "buying" or connectedness to the places they frequent, the community becomes a improve place to live, piece of work, and visit. The residents' feelings of respect and responsibility for the place bonds them to that place and to each other. No architect or boondocks planner can design or build a place that does that.

"The sooner the community becomes involved in the planning process the better--ideally earlier any planning has been done," write Kathy Madden and Fred Kent of Project for Public Spaces in the book How to Plough A Place Effectually. "And people should be encouraged to stay involved throughout the improvement endeavour so that they get owners or stewards of the place as it evolves."

Citizen involvement in public decision making is likewise ofttimes reactive and negative in graphic symbol. People are inclined to involve themselves when the status quo is threatened. Simply citizen interest is best when customs members and grassroots organizations accept the lead.

Success Story #4

Minneapolis, Minnesota: Promise Customs

Building the Urban Village

Hope Customs in Minneapolis stimulates the creative juices of its citizens in shaping and uplifting their customs'due south self-image. The system has not simply made people believe great things are possible but also it has already achieved many bully things. Through an asset-based community-organizing strategy and "listening process," Hope Community brought people of multiple ethnicities together in small-group dialogues. Hope has organized 3 major listening projects--each including more than 3 hundred adults and youth--focused on jobs and instruction, the meaning of community, and the design of a park. In fact, the organization has designed an entire neighborhood with concern for children every bit the unifying factor based upon what it learned from listening. Engaging people through their cultural traditions and involving artists as catalysts accept become key parts of Hope's strategy.

The Phillips neighborhood but south of downtown is the poorest and virtually racially various of Minneapolis's eighty-six neighborhoods. Information technology serves as home to a long-continuing and politically organized Native American community, as well as burgeoning Latino and East African immigrant communities. Promise Community, Inc., is a customs development corporation steeped in a tradition of "creating not just housing simply community." Every bit of 2005, Hope owned and managed 89 units of housing and over six,500 foursquare feet of community infinite, with plans in motion for 250 more units and 20,000 square anxiety of new commercial space.

Promise embraces active listening and a cultural focus in all it does. In 1997, Hope began its Listening Project to help learn near residents' ideas on educational activity and jobs. More than thirty dialogue groups helped deepen Promise'due south relationships with the community and its understanding of these issues. A larger projection with over three hundred participants, including many youth, later focused on the meanings, struggles, and hopes people attach to neighborhoods and communities.

These discussions led into a project to redesign Peavey Park, an underutilized, crime-ridden park that the Minneapolis Park Board had scheduled for an overhaul. The listening and visioning procedure enabled Promise to appoint broad-based participation and to recognize that building customs was the central purpose of the park. Promise arrived at the design through a series of artistic workshops that were after translated into a formal design and adopted by the Park Board.

As Promise brought together what it learned with its core activeness of creating a safety surroundings for children, it embarked on a bold projection to envision a larger community it called Children?s Village. The arrangement commissioned professional planners to draw upwardly designs for this sixteen-block surface area and presented them to city leaders and the media. In 2003, Children's Village Heart opened. It is a four-story, thirty-unit, low-income housing complex that includes offices for a staff and a community center. It sits prominently equally the first of four developments at the intersection of two major urban center thoroughfares. When consummate, these well-designed centers of community activity will indicate a massive turnaround for a neighborhood long infested with drugs, poverty, and hopelessness.

www.promise-community.org

5. Broaden Participation in the Civic Calendar

Some people have argued that social capital letter--the volunteer organizations and efforts that provide the mucilage in whatsoever community--has eroded steadily over the past two generations, as seen by the drops in participation in social and civic groups. This crisis may really be one in which the old tools for involving people in borough issues are no longer sufficient to come across new challenges. The tools may have lost effectiveness as the population diversifies.

At the same time, many social, civic, and cultural functions have been "professionalized" in ways that exclude participation of ordinary citizens. From community to community across the United States, professional person arts organizations have grown up where voluntary groups once stood. This trend has severed the practise and experience of the arts from twenty-four hour period-to-day life. Participation in cultural activities (as opposed to spectatorship) connects people to each other and to their community institutions, providing pathways to other forms of participation. Thus, arts and culture tin can create opportunities for political expression, community dialogue, shared cultural experiences, and borough piece of work.

Within the arts, there is a vital even so lesser-known field of practice that strives to develop cultural agreement and civic date. Community-based arts practitioners bring members of a community together to solve problems, build relationships, and get involved in means that rebuild social capital.

Success Story #v

Danville, Vermont: Danville Transportation Enhancement Project

Where Artists Run across the Route

In rural Danville, Vermont, artists and highway planners engaged citizens to solve a road construction dilemma. The Danville Transportation Enhancement Project establish a unique way to identify and resolve touchy issues of values and aesthetics.

Danville is a community of 2,200 people in the northeastern part of Vermont. Information technology sits on U.S. Highway Route 2, role of the National Highway Organization and one of the major e-w roads across northern New England. With the White Mountains as a backdrop, Danville boasts some of New England's most unspoiled and spectacular scenery.

The town is anchored by a classic hamlet light-green with a Civil State of war monument, bandstand, distinctive school, full general shop, courthouse, and churches. The Danville Village Comeback Society was formed in 1896 to beautify the town. The following twelvemonth information technology placed an elegant stone watering trough on the green, an amenity however in use today. The order also installed street lamps and planted rows of shade trees on the greenish and along the streets surrounding it. The past one hundred years have brought little modify to the boondocks and its appearance.

The purpose of the Danville Transportation Enhancement Project was to plan for the redevelopment of a portion of U.S. Highway 2 through the town's village center. The Danville project needed to find a mode to upgrade route weather condition and meet federal highway requirements, while respecting the aesthetic, economical, and cultural fabric of the community.

Highway expansion in a rural surface area, where the well-nigh valuable currency is often artful, can exist difficult and controversial, pitting residents, businesses, local officials, and state officials against each other. Many quaint towns and villages have lost all sense of place and have been economically and socially devastated by such expansion. The Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans) is a leader in the national motion among transportation agencies toward context-sensitive blueprint solutions and public involvement. Vtrans aims to bring communities together early on in the planning procedure to help design environmentally responsible transportation infrastructure that promotes safety and efficiency while preserving the community'south vision of itself.

A local review committee was formed equally part of the legislated highway planning process. Two artists were selected--landscape architect David Raphael every bit atomic number 82 artist and sculptor Andrea Wasserman--to joining the local review commission. The Danville project implemented the principles of context-sensitive design and the fourth dimension-honored Vermont traditions of public meetings, ceremonious discourse, and representative commonwealth. Artists, working closely with engineers and residents, infused the procedure with creative problem solving and openness to new ideas.

Raphael and Wasserman led customs meetings, interviewed residents, and circulated questionnaires. They helped residents envision the future of the village and its primal green, and they took the community through a review of preliminary VTrans designs. The civic date process was the near of import aspect of the project. It was purposefully inclusive, sensitive, engaging, and ongoing. Having artists, rather than highway engineers, lead the procedure seemed less threatening to community participants, and they were more effective at devising satisfying alternatives.

A terminal blueprint and enhancements were presented to the Danville community in belatedly 2002. Construction and completion are scheduled through the latter part of the decade. Enhancements include gateways with signage, lighting, landscaping, granite posts, and sidewalk markers to alert motorists that they are entering a village center. Streetscape designs reinforce the village character and improve aesthetics and pedestrian comfort.

Almost as of import equally the road design, a number of related activities emerged from the customs procedure, especially those involving youth? -- projects that got started right away. They include a pupil photography project that led to postcards and a Danville agenda. Other students carved rock figures to exist embedded along iii miles of concrete sidewalk. Youth planted seedlings in the project'due south right-of-way, and they designed tile markers, a ceramic playground mural, and clay cutouts of hands to hang in the village greenish.

Putting a team of artists at the helm of highway design may seem risky. However, when the most difficult part of highway construction is sorting out and negotiating individual and community values, feelings, and aesthetics, it makes sense--and it works. The Danville Transportation Enhancement Project fabricated anybody an expert in highway construction. In then doing, the Danville project met the needs of local residents and the state highway department. Community members of all ages gained a new understanding of the part and possibilities of highways, too as a greater understanding of what they can do when they work creatively together.

www.danvilleproject.com

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Source: https://www.pps.org/article/artsprojects

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