Book Review: The Creative Community Builder’s Handbook

"The Creative Community Builder’s Handbook: How To Transform Communities Using Local Assets, Arts, and Culture" by Tom Borrup with Partners for Livable Communities (St. Paul, Minn.: Fieldstone Alliance, April 2006, 280 pp.)

"The Creative Community Builder’s Handbook: How To Transform Communities Using Local Assets, Arts, and Culture" has been a long time coming, and boy, do we need it. The process Tom Borrup attempts to harness and explain in a logical and linear fashion is, as he acknowledges, often neither. Nevertheless, creative community building is a way of looking at our communities that the rest of the world knows well, uses and supports. In the U.S., it is mostly misunderstood.

What makes creative community building unique is that it is an organic process. One or more people, often artists, see challenges in a community and start talking to others about it. They ask for their ideas and solutions. They talk to residents, business owners, professionals in other fields, governmental representatives and civil servants – those who have an interest or stake in seeing change. These folks start meeting (Borrup offers a step-by-step structure) and projects that will bring about the hoped-for changes emerge, develop and perhaps are implemented.

Sometimes the whole thing blows up and sometimes it all comes together with sweetness and light. More often, it’s a combination of both, requiring patience, vision and persistence. It doesn’t stop there because change never stops. There will be intended outcomes and unintended ones. Once it's set in motion, once people from many walks of life have crossed the barriers between them, more things happen, more projects bear fruit, and people are empowered to be at the table when decisions about their lives are being made.

Borrup is well acquainted with creative community building with an intimate knowledge one can only acquire through the hands-on, day-to-day immersion in the challenges, joys and disappointments of 25 years in the trenches. He has seen it from both sides of the funding table, and created a vibrant, multidisciplinary, cross-cultural organization called Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis. He now consults, teaches and writes to make more communities aware of their potential.

In the interests of full disclosure, Borrup mentioned my name in the Acknowledgements section, so we do know each other. The U.S. world of creative community building is small, though growing. I have also spent over 25 years in community work, co-founding and running The Ink People Center for the Arts in Eureka, Calif. My experiences have been different than Borrup’s because creative community building is site- and context-specific, but the general process remains the same: artists + diverse people + challenge = creative community building.

Tom Borrup’s handbook thoughtfully describes this chaotic process. The book is divided into three sections. Part One focuses on the work of researchers, theorists and practitioners, dealing mostly with the social, civic and economic aspects of the role of culture, defining terms and leading the reader to the intersection of culture and community development. He states that even though studies have shown the efficacy and power of traditional community development efforts that incorporate arts and cultural components, that combination is rare. A study led by the Ford Foundation in 2002 and 2003 found striking results:

They observed that art and culture organizations support community involvement and participation, increase the potential for people to understand themselves and change how they see the world, and bolster community pride and identity. They also saw that the arts serve to improve derelict buildings, preserve cultural heritage, transmit values and history, bridge cultural, ethnic, and racial boundaries, and stimulate economic development.

Nevertheless, arts organizations and community-development corporations rarely work together.

Part Two gives examples of successful creative community-building efforts. Borrup outlines 20 culturally based projects, illustrating five economic strategies and five social strategies. Each strategy offers two examples. In all, the 20 example projects are chosen for their diversity, offering not cookie-cutter solutions but idea starters. They are based in urban, rural, rich, poor, homogenous and culturally diverse settings.

The projects described in the economic-strategies chapter worked to create jobs, stimulate trade through cultural tourism, attract investment by creating live/work zones for artists, diversify the local economy and improve property and enhance value. Strategies for building social connections through arts and culture include promoting interaction in public space, increasing civic participation through cultural celebrations, engaging youth, promoting stewardship of place and broadening participation in the civic agenda. Each chapter ends with a summary of best practices.

The book is well designed with lots of white space to breathe in, but all those words do wear on one after a while. Thankfully, black and white pictures are scattered throughout, and there is a lovely section of color photos at the end of the strategies section. They help bring to life the vibrancy of the work being done.

Part Three walks the future creative community builder through steps that will help structure the process and help the leader not omit any important parts. Borrup knows the process can only be guided, and tries to warn the reader not to be too rigid. Very thoughtfully, the Fieldstone Alliance provides downloadable copies of the worksheets that accompany the planning process.

Still, even after all my own experience, I found myself being lulled into a kind of security by Borrup's ordered, methodical steps. Maybe it was partly because I know how hard it can be. I want to believe in a true step-by-step process, but let the reader beware: creative community building is messy. Like most art forms, it needs vision, can get dirty in the making, and if you’re lucky, resolves itself into something magnificent.

As I read the book, I began to have a gnawing feeling the something was missing or just not coming across. It puzzled me for some time while I tried to put my finger on it. It came to me one day after I attended a meeting with Eureka’s City Manager, Director of Redevelopment, Main Street Program Director and a Heritage Preservation Specialist/Realtor. We were talking about the review process for murals and ultimately, all public art. The result was to agree to place the authority with the Art & Culture Commission, which I had been working to strengthen for three years. One of the reasons the discussion was happening at all was the increased interest and the number of projects being proposed as public art due to public education efforts about its benefits. I went back to my office feeling like I was walking on air.

Somehow, that sense of the joy that comes from even the small successes wasn’t conveyed in the book. Ultimately, that’s what makes it all worth it. When you see your community growing in positive ways through arts and culture projects that are generated by the people who live and work there, all the time, energy, struggle and dogged persistence are well worth it.

In the end, it’s all about the people. Creative community building is people-intensive. The people have forgotten their need to have art and culture infused in their lives, and the power creativity brings to one’s existence. Without that connection, they get stressed, lose hope, don’t know who they are. By reconnecting arts and culture to community, we are reconnecting people to themselves – offering them the chance to discover, create and be inspired, and to inspire others.

And then there’s the discussion going on in arts organizations of all types about how to make the argument to justify supporting the arts and culture. Somehow, we’ve lost the essential understanding of the inextricable place of arts and culture in the development of civilization, its socializing influences and, most of all, its place at the core of what it is to be human. That’s why creative community building is such an effective and powerful method. It reconnects us to our core values and gives us the courage and space to open ourselves to others who may seem too different from what we’re used to. That interaction is what has allowed us to create communities and societies in the first place.

We really need creative community building if we’re going to have any kind of civil society in the future, and this handbook should help introduce people from all walks of life to the concepts, values and principles inherent in the process. The whole time I was reading, I found myself making a mental list of people I wanted to share this book with, including the group I had met with, other arts-organization leaders, my board of directors and many more.

Borrup has put together a well thought-out argument, example and structure for aspiring creative community builders. The collaboration among the author, Partners for Livable Communities and Fieldstone Alliance lends respectability to a much misunderstood and underrated field and we are grateful for it. Creative community building may finally be entering its teen years in the U.S., if not coming of age quite yet.

Libby Maynard is an artist and executive director of The Ink People Center for the Arts in Eureka, Calif.

This book may be purchased online at Fieldstone Alliance: http://www.fieldstonealliance.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=63

Original CAN/API publication: November 2006