Converging Streams: The Community Arts and Sustainable Community Movements

By Dorothy Lagerroos and Patricia A. Shifferd

APPENDIX: Parallels in the Fields of Community Arts and Sustainable Community Development

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I. Sustainable Community Principles

1. Abstracted from Andres R. Edwards, "The Sustainability Revolution: Portrait of a Paradigm Shift." New Society Publishers, 2005
   1. Ontario Roundtable on Environment and Economy
      A sustainable community is one that:
      1. Recognizes that growth is ultimately limited by the carrying capacity of the environment.
      2. Values cultural diversity.
      3. Has respect for other life forms.
      4. Has shared values amongst the members of the community promoted through education.
      5. Employs ecological decision making at all levels: governmental, business, personal.
      6. Makes decisions in an open manner, including perspectives from all community sectors.
      7. Makes best use of local efforts and resources.
      8. Uses renewable and reliable sources of energy.
      9. Minimizes harm to the natural environment.
      10. Does not compromise the sustainability of other communities.
      11. Does not compromise the sustainability of future generations.
      
      
   2. Minnesota Principles
      1. Global interdependence: Economic prosperity, ecosystem health, liberty and justice are linked worldwide.
      2. Stewardship: Today’s decisions must be balanced with the needs of future generations.
      3. Conservation: Essential ecological processes, biological diversity, and environmental life-support systems must be maintained.
      4. Indicators: Clear goals and measurable indicators must guide public policy and private actions.
      
      
   3. The Earth Charter
      1. Respect and care for the community of life
         1. Respect the diversity of life.
         2. Care for the community of life with compassion.
         3. Build democratic societies that are just, participatory, sustainable and peaceful.
         4. Secure Earth’s bounty and beauty for future generations.
      2. Ecological Integrity
         1. Protect and restore ecological systems.
         2. Prevent harm and apply a precautionary approach.
         3. Adopt patterns of production, consumption and reproduction that safeguard regenerative capacities.
         4. Advance the study of sustainability.
      3. Social and Economic Justice
         1. Eradicate poverty.
         2. Ensure human development in a equitable and sustainable manner.
         3. Affirm gender equality and equity.
         4. Uphold the right of all (including indigenous peoples and minorities) to a natural and social environment supportive of human dignity, health, and spiritual well-being.
      4. Democracy and Peace
         1. Strengthen democratic institutions.
         2. Integrate sustainability principles into education.
         3. Treat all living beings with respect.
         4. Promote a culture of tolerance, nonviolence, and peace.
      
      
   4. The Hannover Principles
      1. Insist on the rights of humanity and nature to co-exist in a sustainable condition.
      2. Recognize interdependence of design with the natural world at every level.
      3. Respect the relationships between spirit and matter.
      4. Accept responsibility for the consequences of design on humans and nature.
      5. Create safe objects of long-term value.
      6. Eliminate the concept of waste.
      7. Rely on natural energy flows.
      8. Understand the limitations of design.
      9. Share knowledge in order to constantly improve.
      
      
   5. The Five Principles of Ecological Design
      1. Solutions grow from place.
      2. Ecological accounting informs design.
      3. Design with nature.
      4. Everyone is a designer.
      5. Make nature visible.
      
      
   6. The Sanborn Principles
      1. The human habitat shall be designed in a ecologically responsive manner.
      2. Build healthy, sensible buildings.
      3. Habitats should be socially just.
      4. Habitats should be culturally creative, allowing all to maintain individual cultural identities while integrating into the larger community. All population groups shall have access to art, theater and music.
      5. Beauty is necessary for the soul of humans and for individual creativity.
      6. Buildings should be physically and economically accessible.
      7. Habitat design shall include continuous re-evaluation of premises.
   
   
2. From Minnesota Sustainable Communities Network Web site
   Sample criteria for evaluating the sustainability of community ideas and projects
   1. Community Development: How well does an idea contribute to a sense of community among neighbors and to key features that make a community strong—its residents, businesses, government and institutions?
      1. Civic engagement: Encourages the participation of all affected people in decision-making, and supports the civic values of trust and cooperation.
      2. Use of local resources: Respects and uses local people and their knowledge, and local energy and materials.
      3. Accessibility: Allows for transportation and information access within and outside the community while fostering alternatives to single-occupancy car use.
      4. Quality of life: Improves individual opportunity for a sense of fulfillment in life, and brings beauty in physical designs.
      5. Public safety: Improves the community’s sense of security.
      6. Education: Supports learning and skill development for people of all ages.
      7. Community history: Respects the values, traditions, and historical elements of the geographic area.
      8. Community identity: Helps citizens feel a sense of belonging to the community and fosters commitment to the geographic locale.
      9. Neighborliness: Supports good human interactions and relationships among diverse people within the community.
      
      
   2. Ecological Health: How well does the idea take ecological opportunities and limitations into account?
      1. Carrying capacity: Keeps levels of pollution, consumption and population size within the environment’s ability to handle them.
      2. Ecosystems: Maintains or enhances ecosystem functions (watershed quality, biodiversity and habitat-including wildlife corridors).
      3. Resource use: Reduces reliance on toxic chemicals and nonrenewable resources, and uses renewable resources at a rate that can be maintained over time.
      4. Land use: Uses land prudently, assuring quality wild and productive lands and compact urban development featuring pedestrian- and transit-oriented mixed-use development (for people of all ages) with access to green space.
      5. Waste reduction, reuse and recycling: Reduces resource consumption, focuses on preventing waste and pollution, locally reuses and recycles materials, and responsibly manages waste.
      6. Energy: Promotes use reduction, renewable energy and greater efficiency in the use of energy resources.
      7. Clean water: Reduces water use, water pollution, waste-water and storm-water generation.
      8. Clean air: Prevents and reduces air pollution.
      9. Healthy buildings: Promotes healthier indoor environments through improved air quality, lighting and space use.
      10. Peace and quiet: Reduces noise and light pollution.
      
      
   3. Economic Health: How well does the idea take the economic well being of the community into account?
      1. Meaningful work: Provides for rewarding volunteer work and paid work opportunities at living-wage jobs.
      2. Business variety: Promotes diversification of the local economy in terms of business type and size.
      3. Economic vitality: Improves opportunities for new and existing businesses, emphasizing smaller, locally owned businesses and value-added industries for local products.
      4. Economic self-reliance: Links area businesses, products and services, and resources and customers to increase the recycling of money, barter labor and other resources within the community.
      5. Economic feasibility: Is sound from a financial and human-resources perspective and includes incentives for public acceptance.
      6. Pricing: Strives to price goods and services to reflect the full social and environmental costs of their provision.
      
      
   4. Social Equity: Does the idea promote greater equity within the community and with people outside the community, as well as between present and future generations?
      1. Who gets the benefits: Distributes the various benefits of the idea fairly within the community.
      2. Who pays the costs: Does not place an unfair burden on any group within the community
      3. Fairness to other communities: Does not unfairly impact people in other parts of the city or region, or in other parts of the world.
      4. Fairness to future generations: Considers the well being of those community members who will inherit the impacts.
      5. Affordability and access: Promotes fair and affordable access to housing, services, and opportunities within the community.
      
      
   5. Connections, Trade-offs and the Long Term: How well does the idea consider the connections among issues, make balanced trade-offs where necessary, and seek to understand its impacts into the future?
      1. The seven-generations test: Considers impacts on the community 175 years from now.
      2. The big picture: Takes into account the links among social, economic and environmental issues.
      3. Public-private partnerships: Elicits support from businesses, local government, and citizen organizations.
      4. Trade-offs in the community: Seeks to meet social, economic and environmental goals simultaneously. When it can’t, it makes reasoned and balanced trade-offs, informed by the community’s core values.
      5. Trade-offs outside the community: Includes a mechanism for reaching as cooperative a solution as possible where there is conflict with the goals of other communities or organizations.
      6. Improvement over time: Includes adequate feedback mechanisms that will tell citizens whether goals are being met; allows for future course corrections.

II. Principles of Community Cultural Development

1. The CAN Report, Community Arts Network, 2004
   1. Democracy: all people’s voices must be heard and dialogue between and among groups is fundamental
   2. Social Justice: Equitable access to resources for all people and equitable treatment of all people is essential, whether the arena is environmental equity, racial equity, economic equity, legal equity, gender equity or countless others.
   3. Diversity: Communities, places, and cultures are unique and shape people and their behaviors and relationships; diversity is essential for democracy; and its opposite—the uniform, generic, the monolithic—is a dangerous social state to be avoided.
   
   
2. Principles of the Institute for Community Cultural Development, Intermedia Arts Minneapolis, Minn.
   1. Excellence
      1. A responsibility to identify and maintain your own high standards and principals
      2. A responsibility to provide programs that adhere to the highest standards of practice, materials and design
      3. A responsibility to support the development and sustenance of high standards and principals in the community
   2. Respect
      1. An awareness of the positive and negative manifestations of rank, authority and power
      2. An understanding of the interdependence of community issues, sectors, systems and citizens
      3. Being respectful – outward and inward
      4. Being aware that you don’t know where you are
      5. Being a both a learner and a master
      6. An awareness of the value and integrity of your own work
      7. A commitment to caring for yourself and your colleagues
   3. Accountability
      1. Honoring the history and leadership of your own practice
      2. Honoring the history and leadership of your community and the community in which you work
      3. Working with a clarity of intention, communication and follow through
      4. Answering truthfully to those you work with and those your serve
      5. Committing to community ownership of the processes and products of your work together
   4. Sustainability
      1. Assuring that that the processes and programs that benefit the community continue to be useful to the community
      2. Assuring that the resources and capacities needed to sustain those benefits are provided.
      3. The continued support of workers in community development and culture
      4. An understanding that the value of the work must be integrated and embedded in the life of the community.
   
   
3. Mission of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC): Public art is to be used as an organizing tool, in order to:
   1. Address contemporary issues.
   2. Foster cross-cultural understanding.
   3. Promote civic dialogue.
   4. Examine what is memorialized through public art.
   5. Provide a vehicle for community betterment through citizen participation
   6. Reflect the lives and concerns of America’s ethnically and economically diverse population.
   7. Assure that the voices of disenfranchised communities are heard.
   
   
4. From a sermon delivered in Gunnison Colo, February, 2006, by Maryo Gard Ewell, Community Arts activist and thinker:
   

   So, in my professional life since then, my passionate devotion as an arts worker has been to those big ideas, those moments in which creative people have said, “Let’s bring together folks who don’t know one another, folks who may not even think they can agree, within the framework of a creative situation. Let’s invite them to fashion something interesting and beautiful, which includes a multitude of points of view, which lets them be vulnerable to one another, which lets them learn from one another, and which, then, results in respect and reverence for the sacred in one another.”

   Recognizing our differences through our creativity, we can be made strong, as poet Vachel Lindsay said nearly a century ago, "by the vision of a completely beautiful neighborhood and the passion for a completely democratic art."

5. Statement of purpose of the National Guild of Community Schools of Art: Involvement in the arts is essential to individual fulfillment and community life. The vision: that all Americans understand and appreciate the value of the arts in their lives and in the lives of their communities.
   
   
6. Adams and Goldbard, "Creative Community: the Art of Cultural Development" unifying principles:
   1. Active participation in cultural life is an essential goal of community cultural development.
   2. All cultures are essentially equal, and society should not promote any one as superior to the others.
   3. Diversity is a social asset, part of the cultural commonwealth, requiring protection and nourishment.
   4. Culture is an effective crucible for social transformation, one that can be less polarizing and create deeper connections than other social-change arenas.
   5. Cultural expression is a means of emancipation, not the primary end itself; the process is as important as the product.
   6. Cultural is a dynamic, protean whole and there is no value in creating artificial boundaries within it.

III. Values of the Cultural Creatives
from Paul H. Ray and Sherry R. Anderson, "The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World" (Three Rivers Press, 2000)

1. Authenticity and consistency among action, belief, words
2. Engaged action and whole-process learning: intimate, engaged, sensory, visceral
3. Idealism and activism
4. Globalism and ecology
5. The importance of women
6. Altruism, self-actualization and spirituality
7. Rejection of:
   1. Materialism
   2. Social inequalities of race and class
   3. Failure to care for elders and children
   4. Narrow analyses and fragmentary media coverage
8. Lifestyles that include:
   1. Books and radio
   2. Arts and culture
   3. Stories and systems
   4. Authenticity and care in consumption of home and interior design, food, and cars
   5. Vacation travel and leisure that are educational and experiential
   6. Holism in everything

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