Connecting Californians
Finding the Art of Community Change
An Inquiry into the role of story in strengthening communities

A Potential Program Design

Three core values — engagement, inclusion and inquiry — informed program design. Projects would bring together local collaborations of artists, humanists, organizers and residents and their civic and religious organizations. The program would explore the role that a cultural organizer plays in promoting and sustaining these collaborations: facilitating relationships, coaching collaborators and encouraging local leaders to emerge. A group of California universities would be partners to the program, helping to turn practice into knowledge. All involved would participate fully in the program’s evolving design.

The Participating Cohorts

The three cohorts of participants would interact fully throughout the life of the program.

• Local Community Partnerships from communities across California would form the heart of the program. The artists in each partnership might include theater, folk-art and/or performance-based groups, as well as musicians and visual artists; there would be oral historians or other humanists; community activists might include organizing, community-development or popular-education groups. Local community-based organizations of other kinds would anchor the partnerships. Focusing on the development, public presentation and interaction with locally meaningful story, Local Community Partnerships would actively engage diverse groups of residents in issues and aspirations important to their communities. The Partnerships would be organized in regional clusters to enhance learning.

• Cultural Organizers. Central to the inquiry of the program would be the role that a cultural organizer plays in promoting and sustaining the interaction among local collaborators. The program’s cultural organizers would work regionally to assist a cluster of Local Community Partnerships to develop their projects’ themes and goals. Cultural organizers would be trained in negotiation, facilitation and coaching skills and would study learning theory and the history of aesthetics. Working collectively within their cohort, they would help identify local and statewide leadership, would encourage learning among the community partners and the program as a whole, and would provide analysis to all program participants.

• University Partners. Teams consisting of faculty members and students from a number of California universities would help develop and codify the practice and methodologies of the cultural organizer. The university cohort would participate actively in the statewide learning and teaching network.

	Great Leap in Los Angeles is a community-based performing arts organization whose mission is to create, produce and present works that give expression to the Asian American and multicultural experience. Photo by Shane Sato

Asking organizers, artists, humanists, community residents and university students and faculty to reach toward one another in community partnership, the program would encourage participants to stretch beyond their customary ways of working. A yearlong project-planning period, a two-year implementation period, and a fourth year devoted to reflection and assessment would form the arc of the program design. An opportunity fund separate from the project budget would be available for grantees to propose collective activities that addressed unforeseen issues and new opportunities.

Hypothetical Projects

Real work in community is always more complex, interesting and rewarding than anything that can be imagined by program designers. But the following hypothetical efforts can illustrate the kind of Local Community Project envisioned by the program.

• Community-based organizations encouraging civic participation among farmworkers seek to build relationships between workers and growers. The organizations partner with artists from both communities: musicians, writers, photographers, muralists, performers. Reaching out through informal and formal associations, they bring together workers and growers to share family histories. With guidance from the artists, these histories are turned into a dramatic performance and accompanying photographic and painting exhibit that tours libraries, museums and schools in the region, providing the catalyst for scores of community meetings. As a result, an institutional network is created in the region, governed by an advisory body of workers and growers, producing annual plays and other community events that engage residents.

• A city neighborhood is concerned about youth gang violence. A community-based arts organization goes to the local high school, drawing together a group of Asian and Latino youth. In workshops, they develop a play about two immigrant families, Asian and Latino, who build a relationship through the common experiences of disruption, loss and renewal through the naturalization process. The play is performed in the community as a centerpiece of a civic participation campaign led by the youth to encourage adults to naturalize, register to vote and be counted in the Census.

• A region is being rocked by conflicts between environmentalists and managers of the timber industry. In an attempt to bring people into dialogue, the local Chamber of Commerce partners with a theater company, conducting extensive interviews and group meetings with people on all sides of the issue. Hundreds of stories are collected about the relationship of people to the land, from which a dramatic piece is developed. The play focuses on a third, mediating perspective: that of the timber industry worker and his family. The play tours the community, performed by residents in local parks, with audience discussion and story circles following each performance. Encouraged by the outcome, the Chamber selects another issue, repeating the process in the following year.

Core Values and Key Objectives

Three key objectives would follow from the program’s core values, guiding program design and evaluation.

• Engagement

  Successful projects would focus on local community expression and problem solving and engage a broad range of residents in every aspect of the project. Civic participation would be a key objective.

• Inclusion

  Successful projects would reach across dividing lines in the community. The strongest projects would reach the farthest and operate in an equitable way. Boundary bridging would be a key objective.

• Inquiry

  Successful projects would have authentic interest in learning purposefully: trying new ideas and approaches, asking questions and seeking answers. Evaluation, documentation and communication would be pursued in the spirit of learning. Building knowledge from practice would be a key objective.

Program Learning

All three cohorts would be connected through face-to-face and electronic learning communities throughout the four-year program. The intent would be to develop a statewide field of practice that connected local efforts with one another and with intellectual and physical resources. Gatherings, publications, ongoing conversations and regional and national networks would support and enhance the program’s work and findings. Knowledge born from the program would be linked to regional, state and national conditions that encouraged it to spread.

Goals and Anticipated Outcomes

Each Local Community Partnership would develop specific goals and outcomes, contributing to the following broad outcomes sought by the initiative:

• More participation among community members in complex public discourse, problem solving and cultural production, and the development of an institutional infrastructure to sustain and deepen this participation.

• The development of new relationships, characterized by trust and mutual understanding, among people and organizations representing diverse elements of communities; the development of new leaders who maintain these relationships.

• A vibrant critical dialogue about and practice at the intersection of community, the arts, the humanities and community organizing.

• Greater public understanding of local issues and knowledge of local life, both its natural and human history.

• A sense of community-owned public space sufficient to promote the development of civic culture.