Toward Asset-Based Community Cultural Development: A Journey Through the Disparate Worlds of Community Building

Or
Society Isn't Reality: A View From the Train

In 2002-2003, Tom Borrup took time off from his job as executive director of Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis, Minn., to complete a yearlong fellowship at the University of Miami School of Architecture's Knight Program in Community Building, where he was immersed in New Urbanism. He did a lot of reading on the subject and also traveled extensively, visiting all kinds of community-building projects and thinkers across the U.S. and U.K. In this article for CAN, Borrup examines the similarities and differences among the fields of community arts, progressive urban and public-space design and community development, which he says are "largely unaware of each other." As I was reading this, I was happily reminded of the special attention Intermedia pays to its own community, including Art Around the Block, for which they organize neighborhoods all over the Twin Cities to bring their art out of their houses and show it in their front yards. It's part of an Intermedia program called Thicker Than Water: Art as a Family Value.™ —Linda Burnham

Riding the Amtrak Acela Express train from New York to Boston just after a February blizzard affords a stunning view of the economic and cultural development patterns of New York and southern New England over the past 350 years, and of people struggling against the elements to re-establish their daily routine. The infrastructure of urban centers such as New York, Bridgeport, New Haven, Providence and Boston stand in vastly differing conditions. Other than the colorful splashes of graffiti that shout at rail riders around the world, the view is mostly of older, sometimes abandoned economies and ways of life. Old and new industrial and transportation infrastructure stand side by side. Outside the urban areas, marshes, coastal inlets, woodlands, streams and harbors where Native Americans hunted, fished and farmed for thousands of years still resemble their earlier condition. These long-time residents were displaced by waves of immigrants who built upon their very foundations, economic and cultural, as well as physical.

Many of my own ancestors farmed, fished and carved out lives along this coastline from central Connecticut to as far north as Scarborough, Maine. There they fought each other on opposite sides of horribly violent conflicts in the 17th and 18th centuries. Just a few generations later descendants and relatives of these "red" and "white" warriors intermarried in southeastern Massachusetts, where the English immigrants learned from their Native neighbors to hunt and harvest whales (among many other things). Artifacts from my great-great grandfather's long days and nights on whaling ships out of New Bedford and Westport Point, Massachusetts, have been passed to my generation. Unfortunately, along with the objects came few stories. One tells of my "Indian" great-great grandmother, who was most remembered by her grandson (my grandfather) because she smoked a pipe, a cultural practice he carried on.

Thanks to the generosity and vision of the St. Paul Companies Leadership Initiatives in Neighborhoods Program and the staff and board of Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis, where I've been the executive director since 1980, I had the opportunity to take a sabbatical leave during 2002 and 2003. I took the opportunity to explore the intersections (and lack thereof) between respective fields of endeavor centered around building and rebuilding communities. A concurrent yearlong fellowship at the University of Miami School of Architecture's Knight Program in Community Building also afforded me exposure to a variety of policy, planning, design, development and building professionals, who, as peers, explored the literal and figurative process of building communities. While it would require a lifetime or more to fully understand and engage in the conversations of the many fields of endeavor (and schools within them) that center around the broad idea of community building, I've had time to sample a few. They include urban planning and architecture, community organizing, community development (housing, job training and economic development), civic engagement, philanthropy and what I guess is my "home" field, arts and culture.

I set off on this journey hoping to learn more about the professions and organizations that focus on building the physical and economic dimensions of communities and to find creative intersections between them and those involved in developing the cultural, social and civic dimensions of communities. In doing so, I hoped to find additional opportunities to connect these worlds and these efforts. In what follows, I try to reflect on some of the common ground and on a few of the more challenging areas I found. Subsequent and ongoing travels, research and writing focus on more in-depth profiles of some of the remarkable hybrid efforts and organizations in communities across the U.S.

Seeing Creativity as a Community Asset

Through my work, and through reading, listening and conversing with colleagues during the past two decades, I've thought a lot about how the arts contribute to (or work against) building empowered, civically engaged communities. The paradigm shift for me came when I was able to look into the community, the neighborhoods of everyday people around me, and see a vast well of creativity, culture, art and history. I no longer saw a cultural void or vacuum needing cleaning up, educating or the importation of great art and the cultural canons.

I believe that people are more engaged when they're respected for who they are and what they bring to the table. For cultural administrators, leaders and policy makers, it's more than the half-empty or half-full glass perspective. Contrary to most cultural institutional practices, I think it's about seeing opportunity to learn from the people around us, to foster exchange among them, to respect their cultural richness, and to nurture their creativity and talents. It's not about devising better packaging and marketing strategies for the artists we decide will be best for the community.

Some reluctant arrivals to the "multicultural movement" have simply substituted the idea of importing or imposing western European cultural norms with a wider menu of great cultural accomplishments, a view that still denies the self-worth and the existing cultural resources of their constituents and neighbors. It's not that masterful artistic achievements, Eurocentric or otherwise, aren't worth experiencing, it's that they're more meaningful to those who have their own sense of cultural self and self-worth.

It's about understanding that people are interested in the cultures of others and in great artists, but are likely to shut down or turn away when these works are brought to them with the attitude that they are superior to their own cultural experience. Respectfully drawing out the creative and cultural assets of each person, and of communities of people, is a first step to sparking an expansive cultural dialogue. How to do this becomes the challenge for meaningful community cultural development. And, while there are many excellent examples of this work with long histories and well-developed practices, there is but little awareness of this work within the cultural sector and next to none within the other fields or professions I mentioned. In fact, there is much misinformation, even hostility. However, I did find some rather remarkable exceptions, some of which I hope will be the subject of future writing.

In seeing the potentials in a community's creativity, urban or community revitalization or renewal is a process of working from the inside out, not a process of clearing, removal or replacement. This "asset-based" community development approach is being adopted by an increasing number of community developers and organizers in both the U.S. and the U.K. Notable community art practitioners and some philanthropists have engaged in this practice for at least three decades.

Can Do or Can't Do? That is the Question; Undoing the Culture of Denied Expectations

As the sleek Euro-style Amtrak coach glided toward New Haven this past February, I made out a distinctive graffiti message along the tracks that screamed out: "Society Isn't Reality." I interpreted this as a young person's optimistic view that they can seize the power to shape their own reality and be free of the bounds and expectations that their culture and familial situation have placed upon them. Perhaps it is making this statement in itself that is liberating to the young graffiti writer; perhaps it is the discovery that one has the power to overcome external dictates (or what feel like dictates) and to control one's destiny. Those of us with a few decades more experience might opine that no matter how much one wishes this to be possible, and in spite of incremental change that we can and do make, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

This young philosopher has taken it upon his or herself to find a semi-public space with a built-in audience for an unwelcome statement of beliefs — or at least unwelcome choice of media. By taking this initiative, she or he is more likely to become engaged in heightened dialogue around personal and social issues and to engage in more cross-cultural exchange and understanding. This is a big leap, you say. I'm just making assumptions about this presumed young person, one I imagine is dressed in baggy hip-hop style clothing. But, to me, their exhortation exemplifies larger patterns of individual and group participation in civic and cultural life.

In a less optimistic view, this graffiti writer is not liberated. Instead, a puritanical social order caused him or her to experience shame and punishment for such a wanton act. This call for recognition and sense of risk taking has instead resulted in discouragement and more intense societal pressures, and a youthful, rebellious spirit has collapsed.

Just two weeks before this train ride, I had traveled to London for the Centre for Creative Communities' conference on cross-sector collaboration, emphasizing civic engagement, education and the arts. One of the conference events was the book launching of "Can Do Citizens" by Matthew Pike, head of the Scarman Trust. With public and private funds, Scarman sponsors "Can Do," an asset-based approach to what they call community "re-generation." Can Do seeks out and supports grassroots entrepreneurs in a wide variety of sectors and fields. The act of taking initiative, the leadership potential and the likelihood that the realized idea will contribute to its respective community are paramount in their selection of projects. Pike cites the denial of ambition, discouragement and a pervasive sense of hopelessness as the key obstacles to overcome in strengthening communities. He says, "Ambition is the code for respect and recognition — the denial of expectation is thus what George Orwell would recognise as a denial of humanity itself."

Pike delineates eight forms of assets that individuals need access to in order to achieve their ambitions, one of which is "cultural capital." He goes on to say, "While there has been much written in recent years about social capital, there has been comparatively little said about cultural capital — or cultural relationships. Yet the art, the food, the music and the values that lie beneath these are of profound importance in bringing people together. There is long experience of the powerful regenerative effects of far-sighted cultural policies as well as community arts."

The Inside-Out of Community Development

I left Manhattan behind in mountains of snow and slush from what the media branded "The Blizzard of 2003." The smooth train ride gave me time to reflect on my visit the day before to a dynamic Brooklyn-based community development corporation and with its widely acknowledged executive director, Brad Lander. This CDC has found ways to excel at its traditional role in housing and job development while advocating an unabashed social justice and community-organizing mission. They actively incorporate cultural and arts programs as vehicles to build "bridging social capital" and to empower individuals and ethnic groups to exercise their voices and bring them to the table. And they are just beginning to discover an intrinsic as well as instrumental value of the arts and plan to expand these activities. Known as the Fifth Avenue Committee, this CDC is one of a very small number that is endeavoring to take down the fence heretofore separating these worlds — or that never saw there was supposed to be a fence in the first place.

Earlier in 2002, I attended the Americans for the Arts Conference in Nashville, a sizeable gathering of more than 1,000, populated by about 80 percent women (and probably half the men were gay). Directly from there I continued on to the Congress for New Urbanism in Miami, an even larger gathering described in the reverse statistic. The topic of both gatherings was community building, but in radically different ways of thinking. The latter was about constructing roads and structures, the former about nurturing well-adjusted individuals and communities of people to better communicate and collaborate with each other. The out-of-balance gender distribution of both gatherings was probably pretty representative of the professionals in each field. Actually, I'd venture to say that urban planning and architecture professionals weigh in on the male side by at least 90 percent, and almost all white.

After listening and observing at these conferences and through further travels, I noticed that arts-based community building efforts, and many female-led community development organizations, take an approach to their work that is much more "inside out," or building from the assets of the community. This "feminine" approach compares to a more traditional, or "masculine" approach that includes clearing and imposing large developments designed to bring new industries, new populations and new economic base from the outside in. This observation led me to begin looking for a feminist theory or critique of community development and community building, which I've yet to find.

Can Parallel Universes Meet?

Surveying the underlying goals, values and practices in the community-based arts movement, or what is coming to be called the field of "community cultural development," I find considerable consistencies with those of the "community development" field. With my own modifications, I borrow from "Mastering Civic Engagement," an excellent booklet published in 2002 by the American Association of Museums. The AAM authors were looking to challenge museums to articulate and practice expanded roles within their communities. I find these roles virtually identical with those practiced (although not always articulated) by community-based arts centers. They are to:

1. Consciously build social capital.
2. Create a strong, positive sense of place.
3. Recognize and engage the cultural assets of the community.
4. Unite disparate parts of the community in constructive ways and build trust.
5. Engage in issues that influence or shape community health or well-being.
6. Positively impact individual development, especially youth.

Meanwhile, Paul Grogan, an authoritative spokesperson for the community development field, in his 2000 book, "Comeback Cities," touches on a number of that field's underlying principles. From my reading they include:

1. Community connectivity and relationship building.
2. Sense of ownership in place.
3. New alliances and partnerships that match assets and strengths.
4. Grassroots leadership development.
5. Citizen control over community aesthetics and design.
6. Cross-sector collaboration.

While not exact parallels, the principles discussed within these two fields are strikingly similar.

Grasping the Value of Social and Cultural Capital

I arrived in Boston on the Amtrak Acela two days after their record-breaking February snowfall. Traveling just a few blocks from my hotel, I climbed snow banks and vaulted slush puddles to get to a program sponsored by The Boston Foundation, the unveiling of a study examining arts-funding patterns. It compares Boston's funding sources, destinations and mechanisms with nine other American cities. The report, engineered by Arts Program Officer Ann McQueen, summarized some of the region's strengths and weaknesses, and served as the launch point for a high-level and broadly based task force to ponder and issue recommendations for initiatives to establish new patterns, more in line with Boston's great cultural assets.

Paul Grogan, now President and CEO of The Boston Foundation, never really mentioned the arts in "Comeback Cities", his prideful survey of the CDC movement. During his long tenure as the head of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), the pre-eminent national funding intermediary and service organization for local CDC's, Grogan embraced the newly forming notion of social capital. LISC, and other leaders in community development, began to see that physical and economic infrastructures of communities were incomplete without a social and civic infrastructure. While wonderful in concept, how one generates this "social capital," still eludes most in that sector.

In his new role at Boston's leading philanthropy, Grogan has become an advocate of the arts. "It is basic," he says in his remarks. "Art and culture is essential to the educational, economic and social fabric of our lives."

In a follow-up conversation, Grogan confessed that if he were to rewrite his book on the key accomplishments of CDCs today, he would include some of the marvelous stories of community arts embraced and/or sponsored by CDCs about which he's come to learn.

Increasingly leaders in community development and social justice work center their thinking around people power, some using Alinsky-style community-organizing principles. Some also approach their work using the Kretzmann-McKnight asset-based models of community building. These increasingly common practices in the U.S. are similar to, although not as cross-sector in application as, the Can Do folks in the U.K. The overwhelming emphasis on housing and economic development is still the norm here. The incorporation of social capital development (and efforts to overcome snuffed-out ambition), which some see as the third leg of the stool, have yet to be fully understood and embraced.

The Bricks and Mortar of Social Capital

On the shores of Boston, to which many English subjects took the initiative to flee the church and monarchy in centuries past, sit the ivy-covered halls of Harvard University. While some of my ancestors may have helped conceive of this institution, or at least to lay the bricks for its buildings, as far as I know none ever attended. Here Robert Putnam ponders the ups and downs of civic engagement in contemporary America. Putnam's work and language concerning social capital have heavily influenced most of the sectors or professions I've visited, with the exception of architecture. His major treatise on the subject is called "Bowling Alone," keying on an increase in this sport while the existence of organized leagues has declined.

Impressed with Putnam's work, I crossed the Charles River into Cambridge to meet with Thomas Sander, executive director of Putnam's Saguaro Seminar at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Sander and I had met and presented at the same podium three years earlier at the Seaside Institute in Seaside, Florida, "birthplace" of the New Urbanist movement. At the time, I felt insignificant as I followed Sander's elaborate research statistics, charts and graphs with my anecdotes and colorful slides of murals, parades, community potlucks and families and neighbors making art together. I felt I couldn't "prove" much of anything with my stories.

In "Better Together," Putnam and Lewis Feldstein's 2003 book, they take traditional arts institutions and practices to task for their contributions to the decline in social capital. "Traditionally, however, arts institutions have done far more bonding than bridging … the system of financing and presenting the arts traditionally has reinforced entrenched patterns of exclusion." While illustrating several outstanding examples of programs that do the opposite, they say, "we are becoming a nation of arts spectators more than arts participants, and this trend is likely to accelerate…"

"Even amid these warning signs," they continue, "we believe that the arts represent perhaps the most significant underutilized forum for rebuilding community in America." To become contributors to community building and social capital, they call on arts organizations and leaders to follow three principles in their work: To look for opportunities to bridge, to revive or redesign arts organizations as community institutions and places, and to include artists and cultural institutions in community planning. "We recommend that America's cultural institutions and the people who work within them create opportunities for political expression, community dialogue, shared cultural experiences and civic work — all with an eye toward making citizen participation fun."

In "Can Do Citizens," Britain's Matthew Pike offers some similar advice that might well have been directed to the authors and readers of the American Association of Museum study. Pike writes, "…if action (is) not taken to create a 'culture of citizenship', then the full promise of institutional change would not be fulfilled. If people did not own their institutions, if they did not bring them to account, if they lacked will or confidence or simply means to act, then they would be forever no more than subjects."

Putnam and Feldstein issue five recommendations regarding the arts in "Better Together":

1. Increase Funding for "Community Arts" — activities that honor the community's own experiences and that offer more opportunities for participation in the creation and practice of artistic and cultural work.
2. Create Opportunities for Collaboration Between Arts Organizations — they cite the importance of bridging or linking audiences across economic and racial lines and of taking people beyond their comfort zones.
3. Make Civic Dialogue Integral to Artistic Productions — this includes using the "safe" space that art work can create around potentially hot issues, and providing "practice" in the experience of participatory citizenship.
4. Incorporate the Arts into Social Problem Solving — including both artists who use imaginative ways of thinking and participatory group practices, and institutional leaders, who as citizens themselves can bring much skill and expertise to bear, and sometimes institutional resources and visibility.
5. Connect Arts to Community Service — this involves bringing the "instrumental" value of the arts to bear on social work and in supporting the efforts of other community builders and human service workers

I asked Tom Sander who was listening to this excellent and somewhat radical thinking. Having attended Grantmakers in the Arts conferences for the past nine years, I haven't heard Putnam's work as a central topic of conversation, although the spirit of many of the ideas rings true with much other thinking. He had only a short list of policymakers and foundations that they had met with and none, that he knew, had taken on their ideas about the arts with any vigor or in any depth. I picked off his list the American Association of Museums and their work on the role of museums in community, which he hadn't seen. He immediately swiveled around in his chair and typed into his computer an on-line search for AAM.

Modern Architecture: Designed to Separate?

The architecture field, on the other hand, has developed something of a bad reputation amongst all stripes of "community builders." It's overwhelmingly male and white, schooled by cold modernists, and considered by many as ego-driven, subservient to the automobile, and a major contributor to the culture of fear. Newer central cities have been built to look impressively erect from a distance, to allow for the efficient flow of car traffic, and to keep building inhabitants safe from the perils of the streets. Practitioners are seen to be more concerned with making design statements than with accommodating the social needs of human beings. (Of course, there are some marvelous exceptions among individual architects!)

Fred Kent, founder of Project for Public Spaces, argues that architects and designers rarely consider human interaction and civic activities when creating public spaces, never mind the alienating and often egocentric monoliths they create for private interests. Kent is an aggressive alliance builder, seeing that public spaces should be the concern of, and of value and use to, people in all sectors and interest groups. I attended his two-day, New York-based workshop (held twice annually, and now once in London), where he demonstrates a process through which the community effectively designs or redesigns its own public spaces. Architects, like good lawyers, are then asked to navigate the technical waters to make it work. Effective public spaces are essential to civic participation and to democracy, Kent argues, and he claims that 80 percent of what makes a public place successful is not design but management and programming.

Paul Murrain, director of the Urban Programme for the Prince's Foundation in London, has a very integrated view of the role of culture and art in the regeneration of communities and in the design of new developments. A unique independent organization with significant government ties, the Prince's Foundation serves as a think tank and consultant to cities and redevelopment authorities, and conducts education and training programs for professionals, design students and school kids. When I asked him about his own training and background, he confessed to being schooled as an architect, but said he didn't like to align himself with that profession and preferred to be called an "urban designer."

England's Prince Charles is an outspoken critic of modern architecture and urban design and has a special interest in Islamic art and architecture. The entry level of the foundation's converted 19th-century inner-London industrial building is dedicated gallery space, which featured during my visit historical and contemporary Islamic design work. One of the foundation's major and especially timely programs focuses on fostering exchanges between Islamic and Western cultures through art and architecture.

A More Integrated Design Culture Emerges

The Prince's view of urban design is much in sync with America's New Urbanists, a school of planners and architects that readily admit that most of their ideas are borrowed from "old urbanism." They base many of their principles on the observations of the legendary economist Jane Jacobs and writer William (Holly) Whyte, both of whom, in post-WWII New York, chronicled human behavior in different urban spaces and the development and redevelopment patterns that began to unfold in cities and suburbs across America.

My experience as a Fellow in the Knight Program in Community Building has been very much one of immersion in New Urbanism, a progressive and more integrated way of thinking about building sustainable, transit-oriented, mixed-use and mixed-income communities, aligned with the Smart Growth movement.

As an industry, planners, architects, developers and builders generally extract themselves once a construction project is complete, and move on to the next project. The people who inhabit and function within the resulting structures and who walk or drive the streets don't always behave the way they're supposed to. Those in education, human service, law enforcement and other fields, are left to cope with the aftermath. Not that planners and architects are responsible for all the social woes that we're left to deal with — they're not that powerful — but I would have to say they're often not even playing on the same team. The New Urbanists are at least attempting a more interdisciplinary approach. But, they too, have a hard time breaking the "cultural" bounds of the professions in which they were trained.

I've listened carefully to aficionados in this field say the words: "community building." They do so with a decided emphasis on the word "building," whereas those in culture and community development place the emphasis on "community." Community building, versus community building. Subtle, but very telling. They represent two fields of professionals with many common interests and ideas but who still speak different languages.

It Takes a Village to Create a Village

Community-development practitioners have been similarly faulted. In a review of Paul Grogan's "Comeback Cities," published in Shelterforce, Brooklyn-based CDC director Brad Lander, takes Grogan to task for using as his criteria of success increased flow of capital, an improved municipal tax base and safe, clean streets. This often neglects the social and economic condition of the neighborhood's inhabitants, who, in fact, might have been largely displaced in order to achieve the successes Grogan points to. Or, they may have been moved into housing designed more as fortification against the streets than as part of a community worth living in. Gentrification and design reactions to safety concerns that contribute to social-capital deterioration are two of the elephants in the room that only "troublemakers" seem to acknowledge.

While there has been much ado about Richard Florida this past year and his research about the creative class and those who supply them a stimulating environment, I lean toward the values of the Putnam school. If the success of a community is based solely on its functioning as an economic engine, something is lacking. I'm all for creativity, diversity, tolerance and all of Florida's other indices, and for employing his work when making the case for the value of the arts to leaders in the civic and economic sectors. However, as the very nature of this paper suggests, I'm not an either/or thinker. Like a good carburetor, there has to be an optimal mix one can strive for to keep the engine running.

I have also found that many of those in the community-development profession who have embraced an asset-based philosophy and who are personally inclined towards the arts still keep the two separate in their own lives. Arts-and-culture practices and institutions have largely remained apart from community-based work. Art remains something separate from the daily work of community building or community organizing. It's almost like seeing one as work and the other diversion, albeit meaningful diversion. This has come about partly by the elitist positioning of arts and culture by its advocates, and by the long-dominant Eurocentric cultural institutional models in America. Substantial bridges between art and community building have still not been built, intellectually or institutionally. This asset-based paradigm shift still has not been made in the arts but in isolated circumstances.

I do think, however, that it is probably more difficult for those in the arts — at least the Eurocentric tradition — to make the shift to cultural asset-based thinking than it is for those in other community building sectors to think of art as potentially integral to their work. Colonialist cultural thinking and an adherence to Western canons in the academy have deeply entrenched a way of thinking about the arts as something separate from or "above" other aspects of life, a barrier that I find at times impossible to penetrate.

While certainly the cultural sector is not a monolith and clearly has many camps within it, I have not found an organized, articulated movement with the will or resources to turn hegemonic and colonialist cultural models upside down. Emerging cultural organizations based in Asian and Latin cultures, I find, are among the leaders in more integrated cultural and civic practices and ways of thinking and being in their communities. However, most are confronted with too many survival challenges to advocate for broader change, and they seem less inclined towards proselytizing.

At the same time so much wonderful community cultural work is taking place in every corner of the U.S., and appears to be increasing in quantity and sophistication. Over the years I've had the chance to see much of it first-hand, yet I'm amazed month after month with the activity and thinking chronicled and shared through the Community Arts Network. The Rockefeller Foundation, which provides one of the few significant sources of support for this kind of work through its Partnerships Affirming Community Transformation (PACT) program, experienced a two-fold increase in applications in 2002. Serving as a reviewer for this program in the fall of that year was one of the hardest things I've ever done professionally. The sheer volume and quality of work from communities large and small was absolutely astounding.

Can Fringes Coalesce Into a Movement?

The growing fields of community arts, progressive urban and public-space design and community development have good reason to coalesce into a force. Unfortunately, they're largely unaware of each other. They represent fringes of the arts, community development and design fields, struggling to build their case among colleagues in their respective fields. The reality is that they often have more in common with their counterparts in other fields than with those in their "home" fields. They're barely on the radar screens of only a hand full of public policy and philanthropic entities.

If it weren't for the marvelous but shoestring on-line Community Arts Network created and maintained by Linda Burnham and Steven Durland (and their earlier High Performance magazine), and some of the writing done over the past 20 years by Arlene Goldbard and Don Adams, the community-arts field would hardly be aware of itself or have any kind of compass. Attempts to connect and build a field among community artists and other community building activists over the past two decades have been relatively short-lived. A wonderful residual and informal network still exists from the efforts of the Alliance for Cultural Democracy (and its predecessor, the Neighborhood Arts Programs National Organizing Committee - NAPNOC). Other organizations focused within certain art disciplines connect artists and organizations who orient themselves to community-based work, such as Alternate ROOTS (Regional Organization of Theaters/Artists South).

A coalition bridging those steeped in community or asset-based cultural work and those in the community development sector who, like Robert Putnam, see the arts as the greatest untapped resource for building community, if linked together would constitute a meaningful movement. It shouldn't require a fundamental change in thinking or act of congress to bring this emerging community cultural-development field into closer communication and alignment with others who have similar community building goals and principles. But, such a connection is still elusive. Together they could build the kinds of programs and organizations — and influence incremental changes in established organizations — to bring about a more meaningful and widely acknowledged role for the arts in community building and for new kinds of partnerships.

Those in the social-justice organizing and more progressive community-development sectors bring to the table an asset-based way of thinking and a commitment to more equitable distribution of economic and cultural wealth. The cultural sector should appreciate this more and value the depth of experience here. As I've come to learn, it's not just about building communities, it's about building just communities.

My ancestors who arrived on the shores near Boston in the early 1600s decided, as did the spray-can wielding philosopher in New Haven almost 400 years later, that the society they were born into didn't have to be their reality. They left their homeland to shape their own social order. Some of my other forebears crouched in the thicket on the same shores wondering about these oddly dressed trespassers. Foremost on the immigrants' minds were how they would create shelter and warmth, find and grow adequate food, stave off disease and carry on their chosen cultural practices.

These earliest of English arrivals found that their survival was dependent upon charity, cultural exchange and learning from the indigenous population. Their small band surely would have perished if they hadn't developed communication and friendship with those they called "Indians." Larger waves of colonists backed by and representing more aggressive economic and political interests came later … and we're witness to what transpired during the next three centuries from whatever train we're riding.

"The practitioners and thinkers (in community cultural development) do not suggest that making theater or murals can substitute for the other social and political acts that create a humane and equitable society. But these community cultural development activities are demonstrably the best available tools to teach the skills and values of true citizenship: critical thinking, interrogating one's own assumptions, exercising social imagination and creative problem solving, simultaneously holding in mind one's immediate interests and the larger interests of the community as a whole."

— "Community, Culture and Globalization"
Don Adams & Arlene Goldbard
Rockefeller Foundation, 2002

Tom Borrup is a community activist, nonprofit arts administrator, and consultant based in Minneapolis, where he has been executive director of Intermedia Arts since 1980. He is a trustee of the Jerome Foundation, a former NAMAC board co-chair and has served on the boards of numerous community and arts organizations.

Referenced Books and Periodicals

"Better Together: Report of the Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement in America" (Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2000). To be published as "Better Together: Restoring the American Community," Robert D. Putnam and Lewis Feldstein (Simon & Schuster, September 2003).

"Bowling Alone: Collapse and Revival of American Community," Robert D. Putnam, (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

"Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing Community Assets," John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight (ACTA Publications, 1997).

"Can Do Citizens," Matthew Pike (Scarman Trust, 2003). Scarman is a national charity committed to helping citizens bring about change in their community, in the way that they want.

"Cities Revive, But What About the People," Brad Lander, book review in Shelterforce magazine, November-December, 2000.

"Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival," Paul Grogan and Tony Proscio (Westview Press, 2000).

"Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development," Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard (Rockefeller Foundation, 2001), and "Community, Culture and Globalization," edited by Adams and Goldbard (Rockefeller Foundation, 2002).

"Culture Counts in Communities: A Framework for Measurement," Maria-Rosario Jackson and Joaquin Herranz Jr., The Creativity, Culture and Communities Program, Urban Institute, 2002, Washington, D.C.

"The Cultures of Cities," Sharon Zukin, (Blackwell, 1995), an outstanding book on the dynamics of urban development and an understanding of power and the symbolic economy.

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities," Jane Jacobs (Random House 1961; Vintage Books, 1992), a bible for those interested in the design and functioning of urban environments.

"The Essential William H. Whyte," edited by Albert LaFarge (Fordham University Press, 2000), a collection of William (Holly) Whyte's writing about the behavior of people in urban environments.

"Indian New England Before the Mayflower," Howard S. Russell, (University Press of New England, 1980).

"Mastering Civic Engagement: A Challenge to Museums" (American Association of Museums, Museums and Community Initiative, 2002).

"The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life," Richard Florida (Basic Books, 2002).

"Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals," Saul Alinsky (Vintage Books, 1989), a text book for community organizers.

"Saga of the Pilgrims From Europe to the New World," John Harris (Globe Pequot Press, 1983).

"Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream," Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck (North Point Press, 2000), a basic book on New Urbanism

"Understanding Boston: Funding for Cultural Organizations in Boston and Nine Other Metropolitan Areas" (The Boston Foundation, 2003).

Recommended Organizations & Web Resources

AMTRAK, America's passenger rail service, best way to see the U.S.A.

Americans for the Arts

Art Crimes: Best Graffiti Sites

Centre for Creative Communities

Community Arts Network

Congress for New Urbanism

Fifth Avenue Committee

Grantmakers in the Arts

Intermedia Arts

Local Initiatives Support Corporation

Knight Program in Community Building, University of Miami School of Architecture

Partners for Livable Communities

Prince's Foundation

Project for Public Spaces

The Seaside Institute

Original CAN/API publication: April 2003