ARTS-BASED COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
Municipal and community development organizations have worked for decades to create ways for local residents to become involved in projects. But these techniques often meet with skepticism and the community engagement process can be difficult. Arts-based community engagement practices are now coming in to serve alongside traditional engagement methods to help organizations create broader and deeper strategies for engaging local communities.
A local artist paints a mural with community members to imagine what an underutilized highway underpass can become.
Have you ever been to a community engagement event? What was it like? Did it involve sticky dots, post-it notes and many diagrams? Sound familiar? We have all been there!
Often our “business as usual” community engagement strategies work really very well for some people but they don’t work well for everyone, in fact, they often don’t work for many of the communities that municipal and community development organizations are trying to serve. For folks who are less comfortable interacting in a city government context, or have been excluded for other reasons, different strategies and ways of entering into the conversation can make a huge difference.
Arts and culture strategies can be incredibly powerful engagement tools for getting at communities’ root values, concerns, and beliefs. Often in engagement contexts, longtime frustrations and misunderstandings can overwhelm the surface questions the engagement seeks to address. Good arts-based engagement brings individual and community narratives to the surface, meeting people where they are at, and sparking emotional and relational connections, that over time, build the trust that is needed to bring new ideas to life.
key concepts
Arts-based engagement can reach a broader and more diverse cross-section of the overall community, through inclusive and innovative methods that are distinct from traditional engagement strategies.
Arts-based engagement helps participants cross cultural and communication bridges. Through the arts, diverse participants can learn to share and hear each other differently, increase understanding, and manage conflict.
Arts-based engagement gives more diverse groups a stake in the process of community change.
key resources
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Animating Democracy. “Arts & Civic Engagement Tool Kit: Planning & Designing Arts-Based Civic Engagement Projects.” Animating Democracy: Americans for the Arts, n.d.
Artscape. “A Guide to Engaging the Community in Your Project.” Artscape DIY, n.d.
Cleveland, William. “Arts-Based Community Development: Mapping the Terrain,” n.d., 12.
Crane, Lyz. “Building Worlds Together: The Many Functions and Forms of Arts and Community Development,” n.d., 18.
Evans, Amy. “An Artist’s Way of Seeing: Community Engagement in Creative Placemaking,” n.d., 8.
Hodgson, Kimberley. “How Arts and Cultural Strategies Enhance Community Engagement and Participation,” 2011, 8.
Kubisch, Anne C., Patricia Auspos, Sydney Taylor, and Tom Dewar. “Resident-Centered Community Building: What Makes It Different?” National Civic Review 102, no. 3 (September 2013): 61–71. https://doi.org/10.1002/ncr.21128.
Lewis, Ferdinand. “Participatory Art-Making and Civic Engagement,” n.d., 17.
Lobenstine, Lori. “Social / Justice / Practice: Exploring the Role of Artists in Creating a More Just and Social Public.” A Working Guide to the Landscape of Arts for Change. Washington DC: Americans for the Arts: Animating Democracy Initiative, 2014.
National Arts Policy Roundtable. “The Arts and Civic Engagement: Strengthening the 21st Century Community.” Americans for the Arts, March 23, 2018. https://www.americansforthearts.org/node/100566.
Pate, Ronald. “Narrative Processes in Urban Planning: A Case Study of Swamp Gravy in Colquitt, Georgia,” January 1, 2000. https://doi.org/10.15760/etd.469.
Ross, Caroline. “Exploring the Ways Arts and Culture Intersect with Public Safety.” ArtPlace Field Scans. ArtPlace America/Urban Institute, April 2016.