Policy Research on Community Arts: A Collective Endeavor

Arts, culture, and creative expression — in places ranging from museums and opera houses to community cultural centers, parks and elementary schools — are essential elements of our social fabric. They give voice to our histories, aspirations, joys and fears. They cause us to think and feel, be critical and humane. They are often integral to other issues we care about — education, youth development, economic development and the creation of social capital. They also are fundamental to values we, as a nation, claim to hold dear — democracy, freedom of expression, innovation. Still, too often, people whose job it is to be concerned with issues affecting quality of life (policymakers, urban and regional planners, policy analysts, elected officials and community leaders) have not considered arts and culture seriously alongside other policy areas. They view arts and culture as a luxury or a frill. Also, they equate the terms only with a community’s most visible cultural institutions. As a result, the breadth, depth and value of a broad array of artistic activity evident in many American communities are not easily apparent or grasped. Moreover, the conditions and dynamics of communities are not adequately understood or addressed.

So, how do we move beyond this? How do we improve our understanding of American communities? How do we position the arts (broadly defined) alongside other areas of policy — housing, employment, economic development, education — on equal footing? How do we arrive at more reliable information about the cultural assets we have, how fragile or robust they are, and what they contribute to society? The answers to these questions are complex. The responsibility for addressing them belongs to many people inside and outside of the arts field. Here I share initial findings and reflections from my work as an urban-planning and policy researcher attempting to address some of these questions.

In 1996, the Rockefeller Foundation commissioned the Urban Institute (UI) to explore the possibility of integrating arts and culture into community-level quality-of-life measurement systems — entities that provide data to community leaders, policymakers, planners and others to enable them to make more informed policy and program choices. The Urban Institute, a national policy-research organization in Washington, D.C., had a long history of addressing urban problems and informing the development of national policies and programs through research. In the 1990s, UI had launched the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP), a collaboration of UI and various types of local organizations around the country committed to advancing the collection and use of data to help shape policies and programs in support of social-improvement and community-building strategies, particularly in moderate- and low-income neighborhoods. Like most efforts to measure quality of life, NNIP focused on housing, employment, education and public safety, among other issues. Also like most indicator efforts, it did not have any focus on arts and culture. Charged with the task of beginning to fill this gap, UI launched the Arts and Culture in Community Building Project (ACIP), the first project in what is now a substantial body of arts-related work at UI. To integrate arts and culture into neighborhood-level quality-of-life measurement systems in a way that was consistent with community-building practices aspired to by NNIP participants, we had to struggle with very basic questions. How are arts and culture defined and valued at the neighborhood level? What should be measured/documented and why? What neighborhood-level data are already available for these purposes? What other kinds of information need to be collected and how?

We set out to answer these questions by consulting various sources: existing research, literature and data; policymakers and funders concerned with arts and/or neighborhood development; people involved in community-building activities at the local level; arts administrators, artists and residents in mostly moderate- and low-income communities around the country. In the first two years of the study, primarily to better understand how people define and value arts and cultural assets in their communities, we conducted 140 in-person interviews and 23 focus group discussions. These interviews and focus group discussions were conducted in Atlanta , Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Los Angeles, Oakland, Providence and Washington. D.C. Additionally, to assess the level and utility of data available for our purposes, we conducted extensive phone interviews with staff from various kinds of cultural organizations and institutions, artists’ professional and trade associations, arts-focused foundations and public arts agencies (national, state, regional and local). We also reviewed numerous documents and data-sets from these agencies.

Findings from our field research to better understand how people define and value cultural assets in their communities led to a set of principles that guide our work. They are the foundation for current ACIP efforts, have informed other arts-related projects pursued at UI, and are the backbone of UI’s Culture, Creativity, and Communities Program. These principles are as follows.

• Definitions of arts and cultural assets in a community should be based on the cultural values, preferences and realities of residents and other stakeholders in a given community. As such, arts and cultural assets can span a continuum that ranges from amateur to professional and includes the cultural expressions of diverse ethnic, racial, age and special-interest groups. Moreover, art and culture happen not only in large mainstream cultural venues but also in large and small arts- and non-arts-specific places such as parks, libraries, schools, community centers and commercial establishments.

• Cultural participation is not limited only to engagement as audience or consumer, but includes a wide range of ways in which people engage as creators, teachers, students and supporters.

• While art and culture are valuable on their own terms, they should also be understood as products and processes that carry multiple meanings and purposes simultaneously. That is, while people may value an artistic experience for aesthetic and technical qualities, they may also, at the same time, value the activity because it contributes to something else about which they care (i.e., youth development, celebration of group identity, community development, etc.).

• Corresponding with the previous point, if art and culture can carry multiple meanings and purposes simultaneously, they can rely on both arts-specific and non-arts-specific sources of support.

Ultimately, espousing a community-building approach, every community must decide for itself what specific aspects it seeks to monitor in order to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of quality of life. However, in line with the principles discussed above, we arrived at four broad domains of inquiry or measurement that we think are useful in gaining a better understanding of arts and culture at the community level. These are intended to organize our research efforts and help communities think about what it is that they should commit to monitoring. Current ACIP work seeks to advance the creation of grounded theory, the development of data collection tools and sustainable data collection practices to better articulate and document 1) the presence of arts and cultural assets; 2) cultural participation ; 3) impacts of cultural participation; and 4) the systems that allow communities to create, validate and disseminate arts and culture on their own terms. This work is carried out in collaboration with research organizations, community arts agencies, community development organizations, funders and individual artists and community builders around the country.

With regard to our research on existing data, phone interviews with arts administrators and our field research revealed that that, unfortunately, much of the data that was formally collected and available was not very useful for our purposes. This is so for several reasons, some of which I will mention here. First, in general, the definitions of arts and culture, which underlie most formal research and data collection efforts, are too narrow to capture the kinds of cultural assets that people identified in our field-work -— informal arts practices, work occurring in small arts organizations or in venues that are not explicitly associated with the arts among other activities revealed. Second, with few exceptions, existing data is not collected consistently or congruently across agencies, nor is it possible to dis-aggregate it to the neighborhood level. Third, much of the data that does exist focuses only on organizational fiscal status and audience counts without much attention to the possible societal impacts of cultural organizations, cultural programs, or cultural participation (defined broadly). Last, there does not seem to be any shared rationale for the use of information currently collected. Moreover, there is no robust body of theory about various aspects of community arts that can inform the establishment of consistent and reliable data collection practices necessary to render information that can be integrated into quality-of-life measures.

Given the state of data and research on community arts, we — people in the policy-research field whose job it is to develop quality-of-life measures and more adequately capture and communicate the breadth, depth and value of arts and culture at the neighborhood level, alongside other policy issues — have a lot of work ahead of us. But we are not starting from scratch and we certainly cannot do it alone. Our work in ACIP (and in some other projects at UI as well) illustrates how community-arts practitioners, artists and arts administrators are key stakeholders and collaborators in this process — providers and users of the knowledge and information we seek to gather. The principles and domains of inquiry or measurement discussed above are, in large part, a distillation of what we heard from arts administrators, artists, community-building practitioners and community residents around the country. The grounded theory we have been working on is derived from field work (i.e., observation, participant observation, interviews, focus-group discussions) and collaborative inquiry on community-arts practices — festivals and collective artmaking opportunities organized by Self-Help Graphics and Proyecto Pastoral in East Los Angeles, youth-development and arts practices among various organizations in the Bay Area in Northern California (Community Network for Youth Development), and programs at the Spot (a youth development organization) in Denver.

The data-collection tools and research methods we are developing — more adequate ways of capturing various forms of cultural participation and impacts, database development on cultural assets in neighborhoods, ways of aggregating and dis-aggregating existing data, the identification of nontraditional data sources, etc. — are carried out in collaboration with arts administrators, artists, sociologists, political scientists, urban planners and others. ACIP Los Angeles and Bay Area affiliates have also worked on better documentation practices to capture cultural participation and possible impacts at individual and community levels. They have developed a variety of tools — bilingual participant registration forms, focus-group discussion guides, interview protocols, administrator reflection guides, among other tools — some of which have been integrated into ongoing organizational practices. Our Philadelphia affiliate (the Social Impacts of the Arts Project at University of Pennsylvania), is reassessing some existing cultural-participation data in light of the ACIP principles. Reassessment of this data will provide additional insights into cultural participation and other behaviors of residents in Philadelphia neighborhoods. In Chicago, ACIP affiliates (Chicago Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College) convened a series of round-table discussions with community-arts practitioners and practitioners and researchers from public health and other fields to identify community-arts research and data resources and needs in Chicago. Our hope is that the digest resulting from these roundtables will serve as a starting point to address local data needs. Additionally, Chicago researchers and ACIP researchers have collaborated on some aspects of a study of informal arts practices in Chicago neighborhoods. In Providence, ACIP affiliates (The Providence Plan) have worked to expand an existing database of community arts assets in light of the ACIP principles. Also, in Boston, ACIP affiliates (the Boston Community Building Network at the Boston Foundation) currently operating a quality-of-life measurement system have committed to integrating an arts and culture focus into their system and as a result have experimented with developing a unified database of arts funding. They also have developed a survey tool to identify cultural assets in Boston neighborhoods.

Input from arts and community practitioners as well as social-science-based researchers in these research efforts is important. To be policy relevant, ultimately, the data collected has to be collected with purpose. It has to be of high quality and data-collection practices have to be sustainable. That is, the organizations that often collect information or contribute to data collection efforts (community-arts centers, artists’ organizations, community-building agencies, etc.) have to understand how the data will be used. The organizations have to be able to deliver the information on a consistent basis and the data also has to be reliable enough to inform policy and program development. Moreover, it has to be useful to people not only in the arts field, but to people in other fields that intersect with community-arts practices (community development, public safety, health, education, etc.).

This approach to arts and culture research and data collection calls for the creation of concepts, language and tools that are only possible through sustained collaboration, not only among practitioners and researchers, but across areas of policy and practice — the arts, youth development, community development, public safety, education, among others. To this end, ACIP has created the ACIP National Applied Learning Community — a network of ACIP affiliates (researchers, practitioners and funders in the arts and other fields). Over the past several years, this network has met about twice a year to update each other about their local work and together vet concepts and tools that are coming out of the project. These meetings, while fruitful, have not always been easy. Obstacles with regard to jargon/language, priorities and differing cultures of work as well as field standards have to be overcome from time to time, as have concerns about the resources required to sustain and expand on strides made through ACIP. What has kept the group together and moving forward is the recognition that art and culture are integral to community life and that this collaborative work which leads to more innovative and holistic thinking is essential for all involved to do their jobs better — understand and impact community conditions.

The challenge that lies ahead is not only the continuation of this collaborative work, but the wide sustained implementation and application of the products and tools that emerge from it. This is no simple task since in many cases, it requires that people change the ways in which they do business. Community-arts organizations and artists have to be more self-conscious and articulate about the premises or assumptions that have guided their work for years. They also have to be more deliberate and proactive about documentation of their work and consider that the information they gather could be useful to people outside of the arts field. Correspondingly, funders have to make provisions for research and data collection as a component of arts practitioners’ workload. Social-science researchers and community builders concerned with the well-being of American communities have to consider arts and culture as a valid area of interest integral to their broader concerns. They have to consider local values about arts and culture and must be open to the idea that tried-and-true social-science-based research methods with which they may be most familiar might have limited utility. Experimentation and adaptation of research methods from various fields will be necessary. Moreover, researchers have to reevaluate what relevant sources of arts information and spheres of arts practice could be. Arts practices and corresponding data in education, youth development, community development, public safety, social capital, among other fields, have to be brought into relief and understood as potentially valuable to both the arts and corresponding other fields.

The road to a more holistic understanding of American communities and a more adequate grasp of the American cultural landscape and its value in this society is not easy, but it is essential. It’s a journey many must make together, overcoming small and large obstacles along the way, traveling in faith that with each step we come closer to creating and sustaining healthy communities.

Maria-Rosario Jackson is a senior research associate and director of the Culture, Creativity, and Communities Program at the Urban Institute. Her research has focused on social policy, urban poverty, community planning, the role of arts and culture in community-building processes, and the politics of race, ethnicity and gender in urban settings.

Original CAN/API publication: July 2002