The Long, Hot Summer of Service: Community Artists on The Job

And the word for this summer is … service! New national service initiatives are making headlines, generating new hopes for community arts jobs. Read on to learn what’s happening right now and to explore what could happen in the lead-up to 2010, the 75th anniversary of “Federal One,” the constellation of federal arts programs that employed an estimated 40,000 writers, performers, visual artists and others from 1935-39. It was part of the WPA, the Works Progress Administration that was integral to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. As I discussed in two essays CAN published last winter (see the first two links at the end of this article, where you will find all referenced URLs), resource-starved community artists have been salivating since President Obama’s election in anticipation of new funding for their work, especially through federal support for jobs. Indeed, some of us are planning to use the 75th anniversary to shine a light on the value of artists’ public service, past and present, in hopes of helping to create the conditions that will eventually bring some sort of new WPA into being.

But no one thinks those conditions exist right now: Neither the Obama administration nor members of Congress seem eager to risk newfound political capital on a cause so tainted by right-wing opposition. Kiff Gallagher, founder and CEO of the Music National Service (MNS), creator of the MusicanCorps program described later in this article, points out:

MusicianCorps’ Kiff Gallagher was pivotal in finding elected officials to ensure that language was put into the Serve America Act that lists arts work among the permitted activities, described as: “providing skilled musicians and artists to promote greater community unity through the use of music and arts education and engagement through work in low-income communities, and education, health care, and therapeutic settings, and other work in the public domain with citizens of all ages.”

Whether we could right now, if there’s a second stimulus, put a stake in the ground and say we think this money ought to go for a new WPA — if there was ever a president who would be sympathetic to that, I think it’s this one. Whether or not the Congress would go for that, I don’t know. I do get disconcerted when I see a $780 billion stimulus package with a mere $50 million going to the NEA, and having it be one of the top three talking points for adversaries of that bill. That doesn’t exactly make me confident that we could step up with a massive federal jobs program for artists right now, but that’s definitely a worthwhile long-term goal.

Yet, in President Obama’s high-visibility commitment to service as a core theme of his administration, almost everyone sees reasons to hope. Through the volunteer campaigns of the White House’s “United We Serve” Web site or through artists corps programs like those described in this article, many perceive this moment as providing timely and potent opportunities to spotlight the artists’ work they see as critical to national recovery and healthy communities. Jane Golden, founder and executive director of the City of Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program, the nation’s largest public art program (some of whose projects are described below), expresses the prevalent mood among practitioners:

We’ve been doing this a long time, trying to keep the WPA alive in our own small way. Now I really feel that there is this excitement in the air. You start to sense all that’s possible when you put artists to work. Now more than ever, people are embracing innovation, thinking about the incredible link between art and social change and thinking about the creative economy in a different way. What does it mean for our society to put artists to work? What does it mean to really think about how we get the environment to reflect our intrinsic humanity and social values? Having worked in the field of community public art for a long time, I believe it is imperative to seize this important moment where there exists a renewed sense of energy, inspiration as well as many artists who want to dedicate themselves to art with a social purpose. Now is the time to really push forward with a contemporary WPA.

To accomplish this goal will require patience and energy, a sustained and concerted push. In the meantime, opportunities exist in niches and nooks across the funding landscape. Mostly, they fall short of sustainable fulltime salaries for artists working in public service, but are widely perceived as steps on the road toward that goal. This article discusses current developments with respect to volunteer programs, service corps programs and other job training and employment initiatives now being piloted around the country. A few examples are highlighted in each section. It would be great to have an exhaustive list of projects, but as explained by Kara McDonagh, who until recently ran the Americorps program at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), the task of assembling a definitive list sounds as daunting as stuffing the feathers back into a pillow:

There’s lots and lots of arts programs that get funded under different things, and that’s great. It’s wonderful that people have been smart and creative to find ways to keep themselves alive. But at the same time, because we’re all kind of hidden out in these places, we’re not necessarily visible enough to say, “Look at the huge effect that we’re having across the country in these different programs. There’s a real mass of them.” I don’t even know that if you wanted to go in and really look at different programs like this, that you would even find them in one place. So it’s interesting, because some of what we have to do to survive right now may be interfering with what we need to do to organize ourselves to survive in the long term.

The final section explores how these developments might help to advance longer-term prospects for public service jobs for artists, suggesting steps readers can take right now.

Volunteering

Volunteering is a core aspect of the Obama administration’s United We Serve campaign, launched with a stirring June 16 video in which the President directly addressed Americans:

This summer, I'm calling on all of you to make volunteerism and community service part of your daily life and the life of this nation. And when I say “all,” I mean everyone—young and old, from every background, all across this country. We need individuals, community organizations, corporations, foundations, and our government to be part of this effort.

We’ll be focusing on core areas of our recovery agenda—health care, energy independence, education and community and economic renewal.

What was originally billed as the Summer of Service is set to culminate on September 11 with a “National Day of Service and Remembrance” (then to slide seamlessly into a fall, winter and spring of service in the form of a year-round volunteerism and service campaign). The United We Serve Web site, operated by the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), concentrates on a few functions. Visitors can create their own projects; register their projects and recruit volunteers; locate volunteer opportunities; and share and read stories of service. The “Stories of Service Blog” is organized around priority topics for the administration: Community Renewal, Education, Energy and the Environment, Health and Safety and Security.

The online feature for volunteering and posting volunteer opportunities operates by keyword and location, so there’s no way to tell how many arts-related projects are listed overall. When I input the word “arts” and my Berkeley zip code, pages of opportunities came up, most of them to answer phones, help with special events for fundraising and do other office work. The same thing happened when I input “dance” and “San Francisco.” I tried with other keywords and locales, but only a few listings, fewer than ten percent, bore the “myproject.serve.gov” URL that identifies a posting created expressly for United We Serve. Most listings were linked to other volunteer sites, such as United Way, volunteermatch.org or idealist.org, suggesting that as yet, not many arts groups are posting direct announcements, and also that United We Serve is relying on aggregating volunteer postings from other sources.

Some community arts advocates are encouraging community-based artists and organizations to post their projects as a way to increase visibility and appreciation for their work. As seen by Yosi Sergant, formerly of the White House Office of Public Engagement and now National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) communications director, “There are so, so many great stories to tell of people who are already doing this every single day, and all they need to do is use Serve.gov to tell that story.”

Tucson-based muralist Michael Schwartz is doing just that. He registered the Bronx Wash Mural Project, a participatory community mural project in the North West Neighborhood, at the United We Serve Web site. He told me:

Volunteers worki on the Tucson Arts Brigade’s Bronx Wash Mural Project, a participatory community mural project in Tucson’s North West Neighborhood. Project Director Michael B. Schwartz registered a request for a volunteer mural assistant on the U.S. government’s United We Serve Web site

The things I’ve put up there so far are like “request for a mural assistant.” I requested a volunteer for the neighborhood organizing position, which is the person that goes door-to-door and documents people’s stories. I haven’t gotten any responses, but I linked to the blog for the mural project. A lot of people don’t know about Serve.gov. They think about it as, “Oh, I don’t have time to volunteer,” as opposed to thinking of it as a tool. There’s all sorts of things that volunteers could do. All community artists are going above and beyond, because the process part of our work isn’t funded very often, it’s difficult to quantify it. This is a way to get more volunteers on the process part of it, to fulfill that need and advertise what we’re doing.

Michael also says that for him, volunteering has been a reliable path to paying work:

What if the American Red Cross, say, decides they really want to use the arts. They look on Serve.gov to see what artists are in their region who might want to collaborate with them on doing a play about AIDS. Maybe the first time around, they wouldn’t be able to fund it, but if it’s successful and they want more, maybe they’ll hire that artist and a program will emerge. You go in as a volunteer, you show people what you can do, and then you say, “If you want more, I’m for hire. Is there a way we can work together?” My whole career has been that way.

Volunteers play important roles in the work of the Venice, California-based SPARC (the Social and Public Art Resource Center), sometimes through its César Chávez Digital Mural Lab, a collaboration with the University of California at Los Angeles. For example, as a class project, students at the Lab recently completed work on a mural entitled “Danza de la Tierra” for University Elementary School's 6th grade class, portraying the evolution of Hip Hop dance, inspired by the students’ own study of dance. Check out SPARC’s Web site for information on its volunteer interns.

Just about every community arts projects makes good use of volunteers, with paid and volunteer participants supporting each other’s work. Jane Golden described how this works at Mural Arts:

In all our mural projects, of which there are over a hundred a year, there are community days. Given the opportunity, people rise and say that they want to contribute. That’s very exciting. At the same time, it’s also important for artists and young people to have a place where they can make a more significant contribution and job opportunities will allow that to happen. So I’m a big believer that you work on both at the same time.

Service Corps

In April, President Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act of 2009, reauthorizing and expanding national service programs administered by the CNCS, which was created by federal legislation in 1993.

The Serve America Act contains two provisions that have been exciting to advocates of artists service corps: A “Social Innovation Fund” pilot program provides seed funding for “innovative and evidence-based programs that leverage private and foundation capital to meet major social challenges,” which could include community-arts-based programs; and a subsection [Section 122 (B) (xii)] of the Education Corps provision that lists arts work, described thusly, among the permitted activities:

providing skilled musicians and artists to promote greater community unity through the use of music and arts education and engagement through work in low-income communities, and education, health care, and therapeutic settings, and other work in the public domain with citizens of all ages.

There is a long and complicated story of personal relationship, determined advocacy and negotiation behind that paragraph. MusicianCorps’ Kiff Gallagher was pivotal in finding elected officials to ensure this language was in the Act, and tips his hat to “Representative Joe Crowley and Chairman George Miller in the House and Senators Jean Shaheen and Judd Gregg for taking the artist corps idea and making it law,” because without their sponsorship, that paragraph wouldn’t exist.

Arts and service insiders consider it significant progress that this provision was part of the Act; that it was included as a subset of education, and not as an artists corps in its own right, suggests the degree of progress. The Act takes effect on October 1, 2009. Right now, key questions about how it will be funded and implemented are unresolved. Funds have not yet been appropriated for CNCS as a whole, and no one thinks it likely that there will be a separate allocation for artists’ work. (At this writing, Congress is considering cutting $90 million of the total $1.149 billion the President requested; follow the appropriation debate at Voices for National Service’s Web site, linked below.) Best guesses are that nonprofits will apply for Education Corps posts for arts-related projects, so the ultimate level of arts investment will be measured by the aggregate of funded applications, which will entail many separate decisions made by different people in different places over time. Advocates I spoke with in July noted that despite President Obama’s declarations as to the centrality of service, the agency still lacks a CEO, so that while the character of its new leadership will shape its future, all there is to go on at the moment is speculation, futile until an appointment has been made.

There are many indications that community arts work does not yet have a secure foothold in the culture of national service as it has evolved since 1993. This past June in San Francisco, CNCS and the Points of Light Institute convened a massive 2009 National Conference on Volunteering and Service, with a keynote by Michelle Obama inaugurating the United We Serve campaign. The conference Web site linked below contains information on programs and activities, but a search for arts-related offerings turns up almost nothing.

Kiff Gallagher has been involved in the development of national service since he took part in crafting CNCS’ 1993 enabling legislation. He offered a presentation about MNS’ programs from the conference’s “Energy Stage,” described at the conference site as “a mouthpiece for organizations to further their message through giveaways, motivational speakers and audience interaction.” In the list of Energy Stage presenters, I found one other community arts-related speaker. Gallagher thinks integrating arts work into the national service mindset is an uphill task, but he senses new receptivity and new power emanating from the Serve America Act:

We had a 30-minute presentation. What was exciting was the crowd that started to gather. Rather than continue with the PowerPoint, I just left the Crowley Amendment from the Service Act on the screen, so people could see it for themselves; it really hadn’t been promoted. A lot of folks were surprised and excited when they heard about it. At the grassroots level, I think we’re there. We just need strategies and support to reach them. People lined up afterwards to ask, “How come I haven’t heard about this? How can I be a part of this?”

The arts community can come together, recognize that this language is in there, and organize. The statute and regulation will inform national service policy and ultimately program selection. Arts and service are similar in their evolution at the policy level in that there has been somewhat of a collective insecurity about being “soft.” Service dealt with that in part by sharpening up, hardening up: it’s about “getting things done,” about direct, demonstrable results—we can count it, put it in a spreadsheet—it’s about critical outcomes that we deliver in schools and communities. We also aligned ourselves with military service, again, making us a little less soft.

Prior to now, CNCS grantmakers have had less incentive to fund arts programs. This Crowley language opens a new door. Even though no money is specifically appropriated for arts activity, for the first time, the words “musician and artist corps” are in federal law. It’s now our job to present ourselves. Identifying and communicating effective music and arts-driven service programs is a really important piece of the puzzle. We can learn from the service movement by demonstrating that arts have not only intrinsic value; they are, in fact, a necessity for healthy communities. Music and the arts get things done too.

Each state has a State Service Commission appointed by its governor to regrant federal service corps funds. Some are public agencies, some nonprofits, most focus on promoting both volunteerism and service corps. They may also set priorities for service programs; provide training and technical assistance; conduct evaluations and/or promote and oversee local, state and private-sector resources to match federal investment. But as with nearly everything else about national service, it varies greatly by locale. All the state commissions are linked off the American Association of State Service Commissions Web site. The current national chair, Bill Basl, executive director of the Washington State Commission, has a reputation for openness to new ideas. Will he embrace the work of artists? A scan of the Washington Web site doesn’t turn up any arts-related projects, but if Washington artists get on the case, perhaps that will change.

Right now, several types of artists corps programs are in operation, each different in shape, scope and funding.

“Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds” (City Lights, 2009) a collection of poetry, prose and memoir San Francisco’s WritersCorps teachers. WritersCorps is the longest-lived of the U.S. service corps programs, morphing through several different sponsorships since its creation in 1994 with support from the NEA and AmeriCorps.

WritersCorps is the longest-lived of the service corps programs, morphing through several different sponsorships since its creation in 1994 with support from the NEA and AmeriCorps. Janet Heller, San Francisco WritersCorps’ founding director, was an arts administration fellow in the NEA’s Literature Program when discussions began about the need for a writers corps. She wrote the proposal which secured $400,000 from the Corporation for National Service. Three sites were initially selected—in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and the Bronx—with the hope that the program would later expand. But a few years later, they became independent allies rather than subsets of a single national program. Today, WritersCorps in San Francisco is a project of the San Francisco Arts Commission, a city agency with a $500,000 budget.

WritersCorps hires writers of poetry and prose to serve as teaching artists, receiving intensive, ongoing training, creating their own lessons and curricula, working in school (primarily) and other community and institutional settings, and helping to create WritersCorps events and publications. WritersCorps has published an impressive series of anthologies and how-to books, all available from an online store at its Web site, including “Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: The Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose,” a collection celebrating the program’s 15th anniversary. There is a WritersCorps Apprentice Program that gives 18- to 23-year-old writers the opportunity to support each other’s development as writers and teaching artists; teaching artists employed by WritersCorps bring apprentices into the classroom as guest artists or assistants.

WritersCorps teaching artists aren’t novices: eligibility requirements include two years prior literary teaching experience with young people, a year of relevant community work, evidence of literary accomplishment and a B.A. or equivalent experience. They are compensated on an hourly basis: $25-30 per hour and a healthcare allowance, up to 100 hours per month for nine months, up to three years in all, and a writing stipend for the summer. For the 2009-10 school year, the program supports seven teaching artists and one artist-in-residence.

In its early days, WritersCorps operated under federal auspices, overseen by an office at the NEA that received AmeriCorps funds. WritersCorps teachers, under the AmeriCorps model, earned minimum wage (then $5.25 per hour). When Congress made federal agencies ineligible for national service funding, the local programs could try for state funding, but in California, the application was rejected. The city of San Francisco took over, and now WritersCorps funds come from municipal coffers and public and private grants. When I asked Heller whether she considered reapplying for national-service funds, she said AmeriCorps was a possible source of support for apprentices, but questioned its applicability otherwise:

We don’t really see AmeriCorps dollars as a best match for WritersCorps teaching artists who need to live and work in the Bay Area. I think the best way to fund teaching artists is to find them a very strong wage as well as to give them critical professional development so they stay in the field. I think of programs like the Teach for America model as being investments in individuals who rarely remain in the teaching profession. What I found in my first three years running the WritersCorps AmeriCorps model is that there was too much emphasis on the emerging teacher, and that’s why we changed our model.

Kids will respond to adults if they’re green or mid-career or at the top of their game. But if resources are limited, we want to hire the best qualified teaching artist who will have the most impact on youth and the overall site. We made the decision not to be a teaching apprentice program, and that’s been critical for our success.

Community Arts Corps poster for “Connecting the Dots: Life in the Community Art Corps,” an exhibition of work made by community artists in collaboration with community members and youth, at Maryland Institute College Art (MICA), July16-August 1, 2009. Community Art Corps is an AmeriCorps-funded project working in conjunction with the M.A. in Community Art program at MICA.

The Community Art Corps (CAC) is an AmeriCorps-funded project working in conjunction with the M.A. in Community Art (MACA) program at the Maryland Institute College of Art. (Two stories featuring detailed descriptions by Kara McDonagh have been published on CAN and are linked below.) At this point, the program comprises 19 members, nine of whom are in the graduate program (the others found the placement searching for AmeriCorps opportunities or through local or MICA-related networks). Indeed, all MACA students who are eligible by virtue of being U.S. citizens (or who haven’t already completed the two years of service AmeriCorps allows) are part of the program. Each person partners 32 hours a week with a community organization, sharing their vision for the potential of the arts in Baltimore's communities. The artist, organization and community members collaborate in intensive 11-month residencies that also enable and underwrite students’ experiential learning. Community partners have included after-school programs, arts organizations, other community organizations, schools and libraries.

MICA’s Americorps program began during the 2003-4 school year, before MACA was launched. There are differences in timeframe and intensity for MACA students and other members (students start earlier and carry both academic and residency responsibilities), but the two cohorts interact and have sometimes collaborated, as on a final exhibition. For their first 11 months, members receive the AmeriCorps minimum salary of $11,000 plus health insurance and a $5,000 education award upon completion.

For MICA, the AmeriCorps program has been a success despite the program’s constraints as McDonagh describes them:

Some of my early learning running other AmeriCorps programs had to do with preparation. They do allow 20 percent of people’s time to be on training, so I don’t think it’s a limitation of the program itself, because that’s one day a week. It’s more a question of whether you can set up a really well-developed training program. The major amount of AmeriCorps funding goes directly to stipends for members, with not a whole lot left over that goes towards infrastructure. In the programs I saw prior to coming to MACA, that was really problematic because we were devoting so much of our time and energy to this federal grant, and all the processes that go along with it, and we were small and didn't have a lot of infrastructure to manage those things. You could get maybe 60 percent of one person’s small salary out of that grant and then that person was responsible for training programs and partnership building, supporting the new AmeriCorps members, and documenting and evaluation. It was just crazy. What some successful programs did is ramp up, get these really big corps of people and then you could request more funds for staffing. But if you want to have a small corps doing specialized work, it was more difficult. It works well at MICA, because there's already a lot of support and infrastructure there. I didn't have to do a lot of the managing of the grants, and was able to concentrate on developing the program.

Members can apply for a second AmeriCorps year at double the stipend, and many of them, having become deeply involved in their work, take advantage of this option, according to McDonagh:

That first year, you’re choosing to do a year of service at a very minimal wage, partly because you’re getting experience. Often, the people who come through our program will stay a second year. We help them negotiate additional funding that comes directly from the organization to supplement the AmeriCorps stipend. Usually by the second year, the organization and the community are pretty sold on what is possible by continuing their work with the artist. If someone is willing to stick around another year, and if the community wants them around another year, usually it’s because really good things are happening. Often, the artist is able to be part of the creative process of figuring out how to raise some additional money, whether it’s a new project that they started or the expansion of something that was already happening. So we make that part of our operating procedures. It still doesn’t come up to the kind of jobs we hope to generate for people who are much more experienced and have been in the field for a longer time, but it’s a step towards that.

From MICA’s perspective, the Community Arts Corps has been a success, and the hope is that the AmeriCorps program will expand into other community-related areas at MICA, such as design programs.

Samuel Russell, San Francisco urban/hip-hop/gospel keyboardist and drummer, who is one of the six MusicianCorps Fellows in the Bay Area for 20009-2010. They’re preparing to develop music and instruction programs in schools, recruit volunteers, work with terminally ill children and produce events in hospitals and shelters.

MusicianCorps is the newest of these three. This August, Music National Service (MNS) is simultaneously launching two efforts.

Four pilot MusicianCorps experiments have been created in collaboration with organizational and educational partners in Seattle, Chicago, New Orleans and San Francisco/Oakland, placing half a dozen Fellows in each community. Each Fellow receives a month of training, two weeks collectively in a National Training Camp (author and teaching artist advocate Eric Booth has helped to design and lead the training) and two weeks of site-based work back at home. Each fulfills a 10-month term of service in school and community settings. Each will receive a stipend calibrated on local living costs, plus healthcare. In the Bay Area, the stipend amounts to $2,300 per month, exceeding the $1,900 per month ceiling for AmeriCorps Fellows but, in a place where the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is over $2,000, still not what most would consider a viable full-time salary.

The six Bay Area Fellows are mainly in their twenties (although one is 64). It's a diverse group in terms of heritage (Filipino, African American, Latino and more) musical orientation (hip-hop, gospel, jazz, symphonic music, West African drumming, folk music including traditional Mexican music), preparation (prior experience as a teaching artist and curriculum designer in schools and prisons, music therapy, choir director and more). They are preparing to develop music and instruction programs in schools, recruit volunteers, work with terminally ill children, and produce events in hospitals and shelters.

In its first year, MNS is also launching MusicianMentors, a music volunteer network for those willing to serve a few hours each week with a young musician or a community program.

Funding for the pilot year has come not from AmeriCorps, but from a primary grant of $550,000 from the Hewlett Foundation and smaller grants from other funders; MNS is still seeking support to carry the program through the year. A multi-year AmeriCorps VISTA national grant will offer administrative capacity for program launch and expansion, starting with eight VISTA volunteers to help with documentation, evaluation and other tasks to support the hands-on Fellows and Mentors.

Kiff Gallagher reports that there were almost 100 applicants for the six Bay Area slots for MusicanCorps Fellows. “We had this outpouring of interest. We probably could have had 25 to 30 that were the same kind of quality as the ones we selected.”

Stimulus Projects

Early in July, a total of 630 organizations received NEA grants of $25,000 or $50,000 each, funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)—stimulus funds—totaling nearly $30 million. But all of those were given to organizations that had received NEA funding during the past four years “to support the preservation of jobs that are threatened by declines in philanthropic and other support during the current economic downturn.” In other words, while they were derived from stimulus funding, they served as supplemental grants for organizations already supported by the Endowment.

The big question for many community artists has been whether ARRA funds will be forthcoming for new initiatives by nonarts agencies, initiatives embodying the value of artists’ work in advancing national goals for recovery. Positive responses are beginning to trickle in, as the following examples demonstrate.

Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program, for instance, is receiving two types of ARRA support. The largest pool supports a three-year initiative with a stimulus grant from the Edward Byrne Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program at the Department of Justice for a collaboration with the Youth Violence Reduction Partnership (YVRP) to create a model job and skills-training program for young adults at risk of killing and being killed. The program will pay up to 40 young people minimum wage ($7.25 per hour) for 20-hour weeks over a period of nine months (four of those hours in skill-building workshops and field trips, and the balance as part of mural restoration crews). The budget also covers funding for materials, coordination and the professional time of experienced artists and instructors, for a total of $1.35 million over the project’s three years, so there’s a small job-creation element for artists as well as young people. Activities include major projects in mural restoration, landscape work, instruction in relevant technologies and art-making skills, as well as leadership and career training and information on college opportunities.

MAP’s other stimulus funding came in the form of a $122,000 grant from WorkReady Philadelphia, the City’s system to prepare 14- to 21-year-olds to enter the workforce. This provides the bulk of underwriting for MAP to hire 100 young people for several different summer projects:

• “Art and Soul: Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” has kids designing sneakers and banners and organizing a major walk for the arts around City Hall in the fall involving hundreds of young people. Part of the civic-engagement curriculum they’re studying entails the history of public protest, which will inform their own plans.
• A Restored Spaces Initiative along a commercial corridor in the Kensington neighborhood relates to the passage of water through the neighborhood and its proximity to the Delaware River. Young participants are studying the neighborhood’s Master Plan, working with city planners, reflecting on both historic identity and the current spirit of a diverse and interesting community that has changed as its historic base of mills and industry has eroded.
• The third element is a five-story civic-engagement mural in a part of the generally affluent Center City that’s in disrepair. The mural features both local and global leaders who’ve organized and advocated to make a difference in their communities. Young people led community meetings, Jane Golden told me, “working with residents in this neighborhood, some of them historically resistant to murals, our students had to be both artists and activists. They had to be as clear about advocacy as they were about design and composition. And in the end, they had to articulate clearly and passionately about why murals are important and how they connect to a bigger picture of art and social change. They led the community process and today I am proud to say, there is a five-story mural in process, with brilliant color and imagery.”

City Without Walls is a public art program in Newark, N.J., whose director, Ben Goldman, has been an active and vocal advocate of investing stimulus funds in arts work. (Click on the link to CWOW’s Web site, below, to download Goldman’s proposal that one percent of ARRA be spent this way.) In mid-July, Goldman announced “City Murals,” a joint project with Rutgers University that will create two murals on urban environmental themes. CWOW artists will train 24 young people in Newark through a summer employment program, paid for with ARRA funds administered by NewarkWorks, the City agency responsible for local federal Workforce Investment Act programs. It’s a partnership with Rutgers’ YE2S Center (Youth Education and Employment Success Center), itself a collaboration involving several public and private agencies. The program is brand-new, so there’s not much to say yet, but check CWOW’s site for updates.

Proving It

There’s a critical hope at the heart of current exhortations to highlight artists’ involvement in the Summer of Service and other national efforts to promote volunteerism and service. At the start of the campaign, Americans for the Arts linked its Web site to United We Serve, urging arts organizations to get involved to “to show what a vital role the arts play in community involvement and development.” With respect to the community cultural development field, I keep hearing people say that community artists’ past efforts, however worthy and however valued by those who had direct contact with them, did not rise to the level of visibility necessary to attract policy-makers’ attention, to convince them that artists’ public service is worthy of adequate funding. Many advocates hope that the administration’s focus on service will provide the opportunity to correct this. The NEA’s Yosi Sergant sees it this way:

“There are people who believe they’ve proven the story, who say that artists are serving the community all the time and that we shouldn’t ask them to do more than what they already do. I remind them that, ‘so are teachers, so are social workers, so are nurses, so are plumbers—but the President is asking them to volunteer too.’” –Yosi Sergant, National Endowment for the Arts

I believe that the arts community can continue its hard work to make effective changes in our neighborhoods, but set against the backdrop of United We Serve. It is my hope that with the additional attention and focus from people who might not have been paying attention before, and even by some who weren’t even willing to look, that we can shine a spotlight on the power of this community to make our cities more livable, our citizens healthier and our communities stronger. We’re being offered a framework for our community to tell our stories, to share its hard work and to show our ongoing commitment to our serving their neighborhoods.

In response to hearing it said that community artists are always being asked to prove their value, as if past proof had no validity, Sergant shared this perception:

While most communities and their leadership are quick to acknowledge the reality that arts programs have make significant impact and “move the needle” in their neighborhoods, the national conversation has truly not yet been had. At the end of summer, when our President and First Lady get up on stage to celebrate the successes of United We Serve, they will either use the word “art,” or they will not use the word “art.” The arts community can make that an easy decision for them.

Documenting the past won’t do it, Sergant believes.

While the tireless efforts of the arts community to make life in their communities better each and every day is undeniable, United We Serve is a new initiative and a new opportunity that requires new energy and focus. There are people who believe they’ve proven the story, who say that artists are serving the community all the time and that we shouldn’t ask them to do more than what they already do. I remind them that, “so are teachers, so are social workers, so are nurses, so are plumbers—but the President is asking them to volunteer too.” This is a call to action independent of and beyond the work that this community is already doing and its ongoing struggle to be recognized as a significant contributing workforce. I simply suggest that when our community heeds the President’s call to volunteer, that we can do so as artists, arts administrators, arts organizers and lovers of art. We decide what skills we bring to the table that we will use while being of service to our community.

Some groups are acting on this potential. Americans for the Arts is creating a Web site to launch in August for artists and arts groups to upload stories, photos, and videos of their arts-based service projects. They plan to showcase featured stories, sharing them with CNCS, the media and social networking sites. Another project is in the planning stages from Caron Atlas, who directs the Arts & Democracy Project of State Voices and the Arts & Community Change initiative of the Pratt Center for Community Development, Judilee Reed, Executive Director of Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC), and Holly Sidford, President of Helicon Collaborative. They have been exploring funding possibilities for an organizing, coalition-building and communications project that could have six related impacts: elevating the visibility of artists and organizations working for community change; attracting resources to the work; highlighting “best practices”; improving coordination within the field; laying a foundation for ongoing involvement in the Obama administration’s multi-year commitment to community service; and connecting this work to CNCS and other agencies, promoting artists as a policy resource.

“We need to be pushing multiple different strategies simultaneously,” Sidford told me:

Part of our thought was that a few dollars from a foundation would help us create a Web presence, and also hire some sophisticated PR folks and get some placements on TV, radio and print, elevating the visibility of exemplary projects. To do it in the context of United We Serve would be to connect all that work to a larger national effort, instead of being just one-offs by wacky, idiosyncratic artists, to really show the connections among and between seemingly disparate efforts.

Whether or not their project launches as soon as this summer, Caron Atlas stresses the need to document and promote artists’ community service on its own terms:

We could highlight Judy Baca’s work with volunteers at SPARC to help preserve murals, which could be a poster child for United We Serve. You don’t want to just look at the volunteers, you want to look at what the importance of these murals has been all the way through and how it’s also been a job program, the whole dimension of it. If we had a little more control over the frame, we could tell that whole story, as opposed to just put it on a Web site and say, “Do you want to volunteer for this?” The Urban Bush Women Institute in New Orleans is another good example. It’s a number of things, including volunteer efforts, in the framework of how do you even enter a community and work respectfully within it? How do you convey that knowledge? The hope is we could shape the frame a little more.

Artists volunteer in many ways in addition to sharing their professional skills. It’s not only art-specific. Artists are part of a lot of things: they work on committees and community boards, take part in political campaigns, are good neighbors. For artists to be recognized, they have to be seen as contributing to their communities in many ways. We could profile Appalshop, for instance, where there are so many examples of artists volunteering in the community and other community members volunteering too—parents who support their kids in youth media programs, for instance. There are some exciting programs where artists work with advocates, like the work SEIU (the Service Employees International Union) has done with comedy writers, creating a parody Web site—Healthy Americans Against Healthcare Reform—and video clips creatively debunking the right’s opposition to healthcare reform. Publicizing work like this could help to reframe service to include community organizing and policy change, working toward systemic transformation. If we can use the language of community organizing more, we’ll be able to elevate successful organizing strategies that have been advanced by artists.

Muralist Michael Schwartz believes that taking part in the Summer of Service can also have influence on the dominant concept of service, building respect for artists’ ways of serving:

I want to be of service. I want to have that sense of pride that I’m part of a community, and a large community. This is a way of redefining what it means to be a patriot, to be a citizen of this country and world, and what it means to serve. You don’t have to just serve in the military. You can serve by being a community artist, and that contributes to the betterment of the world. It fulfills that wanting to be part of a larger community, building and defending that community. That’s the most important thing about Serve.gov: It’s an example of the paradigm shift that we’re undergoing, that President Obama is attempting to lead us through. And when people see the impact of our work as community artists, they’re going to see the necessity to fund this work also. That’s the hope.

Schwartz has been been talking with staff members of United We Serve about how to spread the word within the service field, integrating awareness and appreciation for arts work by highlighting community arts projects:

We’re in a dialogue about the best way to encourage community artists to take advantage of Serve.gov, and the best way that Serve.gov can utilize artists too. So it goes both ways. The conversation is about how we match up community artists with partner agencies. There are several ways to foster this relationship. One is to familiarize these institutions with what artists can do, and how artists can help them accomplish their goals and mission. And on the other hand is how to teach artists how to integrate what they’re doing with these institutions without losing their poetic voice, without losing the intrinsic value of what they’re doing.

One of Schwartz’s ideas is to call for artists who want to create a mural, performance, workshop or other project around key administration themes, such as clean energy, healthcare access, community renewal or education, then create a way for Serve.gov to match them up with organizations working on related issues.

Partly as a result of introductions Schwartz made in the course of his conversations with United We Serve representatives, The Arts & Democracy Project of State Voices with cohosts Alternate ROOTS, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture and the National Performance Network convened a late-July conference-call briefing about the United We Serve program for community artists and organizations to learn more about the initiative and how to engage with it.

Some type of artists’ corps has been on the agenda of national arts advocates for at least a year. In November 2008, a group of mainstream arts advocates submitted arts policy proposals to the new administration, which called for a strengthening of the relationship between national service programs and the arts. (See Arts Policy in the New Administration link from the Performing Arts Alliance Web site below) According to Amy Fitterer, director of government affairs for Dance/USA and OPERA America:

Getting the paragraph on artists in the Serve America Act is a great breakthrough for the arts community, but we need to be patient. It’s going to be a while before we start to see how the agency’s going to develop its guidelines and implement them, and what sorts of programs arts organizations are going to come up with that are going to be selected by the Corporation for National and Community Service for support.

Some CNCS staffers are very enthusiastic when I mention community mural programs or community music in low-income areas. The bigger issue is simply that at the Corporation for National and Community Service it has not been on the forefront of their minds that the arts are a strong partner, and that the arts can meet all of these unmet community needs. Here at the national level, we’re trying to get the agency to think more about the arts, to include them.

She described the efforts of herself and her fellow D.C.-based advocates on national service and the arts:

National service is on our agenda. The government affairs staff from the national arts service organizations have been in contact with the Corporation for National and Community Service, have met with staffers from the National Service Caucus on the hill, have published comments on the CNCS Web site and have been in contact with the White House liaison for National and Community Service. In the 2009 Arts Advocacy Handbook we had a two-page issue brief on national service and the arts which hundreds of arts advocates used during hill visits in March.

“Having worked in the field of community public art for a long time, I believe it is imperative to seize this important moment where there exists a renewed sense of energy and inspiration as well as many artists who want to dedicate themselves to art with a social purpose.”  -- Jane Golden, City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program

Members of the Cultural Advocacy Group, an informal alliance comprising governmental affairs staffers from major arts service organizations, have been monitoring and weighing in on this issue. But community artists don’t have a national service organization with a governmental-affairs person stationed in Washington. Even though several of the organizations active in this group include some community artists in their memberships, the level of knowledge, vision and hope for a new WPA present in the community cultural development field are not currently a significant part of that conversation. Indeed, the D.C.-based people I consulted for this article were frank about not knowing much about the WPA, CETA (the 1970s Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) or other models of full-scale public-service employment, and the first question each asked when I brought up the topic was where in the federal agency landscape such an initiative would be situated.

This is certainly understandable. A long time ago I represented a national alliance of community artists in Washington, so I know firsthand how hard it is to resist shrinking the discourse to what’s currently doable inside the Beltway. Washington’s habit of mind is to argue over carpeting colors for your dream house before the architect has even made a sketch. Politicians focus on bottom lines and organization charts, because horse trading and deal making—“This will mean $X for your favorite agency, $X for your district”—are the ways most things get done. But that’s also the reason so many great ideas are reduced to minor tweaks by the time they are implemented. Administratively, there are many viable answers to where a new WPA could reside, from a pot of funds at the Department of Labor to a new federal agency to a constellation of programs at different agencies with an overall coordinating mechanism. What’s missing from Washington right now is the vision that can make this an exciting prospect, and a visible constituency large and enthusiastic enough to move that vision past significant opposition, including the right’s ongoing pact with the media, guaranteeing headlines for opposition to any arts-related funding, no matter how minuscule.

The other side of hope is skepticism about whether visibility will lead to support. We’ve been trumpeting our work’s importance for a long time, many community artists say, volunteering to the point of exhaustion. The idea that finally, visibility will bring increased funding is just an assumption. Maybe so, but unless people are ready to give up altogether, there’s no way to know if current hopes are grounded in reality except to test them.

As I was researching this article, an old joke kept circulating through my mind. I heard it as a Jewish joke, but when I Googled the punchline, I learned there are Christian versions, sports versions, even dumb-blonde versions. Here’s the way I heard it:

After a terrible run of bad luck, a man is disheartened: business failure, mounting debts, the fear of losing his home and harming his family. He goes to the synagogue every day to pray for divine help, first in rescuing his business, and when the business fails, in saving his home. Each time he beseeches: “I have done my best to be a good person and treat everyone fairly. Please God, have mercy, help me out.” Yet help is not forthcoming. On each successive visit, he dials down his entreaties until finally he fixes on a single request: “Please, please have mercy. At least let me win the lottery and pay off my debts.” After weeks of unanswered prayers, the man falls into despair. Weeping uncontrollably, he speaks one last time to God: “Have mercy, please! I haven’t got the strength even to ask anymore. What harm would it do? At least let me win the lottery!” A clap of thunder echoes and a booming Voice rings out: “I hear you, I hear you,” the Voice says. “Now, please, you have mercy on Me! Meet Me halfway: at least buy a ticket!”

In many ways and many voices, this is what is being said to artists. And in unprecedented numbers, they are responding.

What You Can Do

Publicize your projects. Registering volunteer opportunities and blogging successes with Serve.gov are seen by some advocates as easy ways to raise the profile of your work.

The National Campaign to Hire Artists to Work in Schools and Communities (NCHAWS) has commissioned video clips from artists’ public-service advocates (actors Bill Irwin and Peter Coyote, who had CETA public-service arts jobs during the ‘70s are featured there, and a clip of me is posted there too). If enough artists make enough clips, they will go viral, spreading the message of community cultural development’s power.

As always, this work is under-reported in the mass media. Any project connected to stimulus funding, any project that foreshadows a new WPA, any project that offers exciting footage and/or a neat news hook could and should be part of today’s headlines. Now is the time to contact media people in your orbit, calling in favors from allies with good media contacts. And as the Serve America Act moves toward appropriation and implementation in October, the time is ripe for op-eds. The Web is full of sensible guidelines for how to write one; below, I’ve linked one such page from Duke University.

Package projects to dovetail with current opportunities. As Mural Arts and CWOW’s successes show, it take ingenuity to frame community cultural development projects so they slide easily into the grooves created by stimulus funding, but it is indeed possible, requiring a type of creativity most community artists have been practicing their entire careers.

There are quite a few online resources listing ARRA-related funding opportunities other programs within federal agencies. There are links below to Recovery.gov and Grants.gov, the two portals for federal funding, as well as to the National Council of Nonprofits’ page of resources on new public initiatives, and to Americans for the Arts’ funding page.

Fund this work. If you are a funder, public or private, or have access to funders, make an effort to share information and excitement about this work. There’s a long history of under-funding in the community arts field, of projects given just enough money to continue fundraising, but not to stabilize or prosper. As my friend Dudley Cocke of Roadside Theater likes to say, “The field is littered with our successes.” Here’s how Kiff Gallagher put it in July:

We need funding right now. Congress and the President say they want a musician and artist corps. Grassroots organizations and community artists have organized with us in several cities. National leaders in arts and civic engagement continue to volunteer their resources. Eight months ago, Hewlett Foundation started us down the runway and we’re finally about to take off. But will we reach cruising altitude? The funding challenge remains brutal. So many have already given so much, but our MusicianCorps Fellows still need living stipends and basic healthcare to serve America’s most neglected children and communities. And we need start-up support. I think the cost-benefit of an investment right now in music and arts national service is huge.

With all the projects described in this article and many others like them, there are exciting opportunities to make a difference in a visible way, with credit attaching to the visionary funders who do step up. But I’d like to think there are some smart people out there who will invest not so much for credit but because the moment is ripe. As we have seen so many times in the past, individuals who seize the time can change the course of history. The history of public-service jobs for artists is full of serendipity. Google these names to see what I mean: if George Biddle hadn’t traveled in Mexico with Diego Rivera, if FDR hadn’t gone to the elite Groton School with George Biddle, and thus been disposed to read Biddle’s letters and take his ideas for a federal art project seriously; if Harry Hopkins hadn’t known Hallie Flanagan, if Elmer Rice hadn’t already formulated ideas for a federal theater and been the only theater person who responded to Flanagan’s plea to accompany her to Washington to meet with Harry Hopkins’ assistant Jacob Baker; if Baker hadn’t irritated Eleanor Roosevelt so much that Ellen Woodward’s and Hallie Flanagan’s ideas of a decentralized Federal Theater Project won out over his notion of a centralized national theater….

If all of these ifs, each one tied to individual circumstance and personality, had played out differently, we would probably be hearing a very different WPA history today. Who will have the courage to make history now?

If you support national service for artists, this is also a moment to push for full funding for the Serve America Act, so that it doesn’t go into effect on October 1 with an inadequate budget. If artists’ work is highlighted during the funding debate—if members of Congress actually put language into the record stating the importance of this aspect of the Act—that will also help arts projects win Education Corps slots when it’s time to apply.

Indeed, the same is true for other state and federal funding programs. Community artists see how their work could be of value in meeting transportation, community development, health and education goals (to name just a few). That potential can be actualized through relatively small steps. For instance, I’m aware of at least one activist working with an elected official to get definitional language into a bill that validates community artists and organizations as recipients of funding under its provisions. If you have legislative allies, work with them to ensure that community arts work is on the list when programs are defined and legislation submitted. Caron Atlas makes the point that “We need to be in conversation with the policy makers as early in their process as possible, even when their programs don't seem to initially include the arts, or fit as well as we'd like them to,” to be ready when opportunities do arise.

Use the WPA 75th anniversary in 2010 to bring attention to artists’ public service, past and present, and the need for future initiatives. I’m working right now with some organizations that want to take advantage of this anniversary to shine a light on future opportunity. Over the coming months, I will be reporting on this and offering ideas to those on my email list for Cultural Recovery, the concept that is animating my work these days: sustainable national recovery demands cultural recovery. Send your email address to arlene@arlenegoldbard.com and I’ll add you to the list.

Generate ideas and dialogue around what’s needed. Kiff Gallagher is working on a project tentatively titled ImagineArtists, to aggregate energy for a multidisciplinary national arts service corps. A group of artists and activists emerging from a May 12th White House Briefing on Art, Community, Social Justice and National Recovery are drafting a new cultural-policy framework that we hope will be endorsed by artists, activists and organizations nationwide and adopted by the Obama administration. One of its main points is public-service employment. The framework is still in development, but you will be hearing about it soon.

What are your ideas? Now’s the time to share all our visions of what’s needed and of the advocacy and organizing that can bring them about. Are you scheming, meeting, blogging about this? Let the field hear from you.

I’ve been thinking, writing and speaking about these issues for a long time. Lately, I’ve been considering how to focus my work over the next year or two. The big thing I want to promote is a paradigm shift in our national understanding of culture and arts work, from something nice but not necessary to culture as a core focus of policy because it is a crucible for resilience, shared meaning, mutual understanding and social imagination. I want to keep my focus on cultural policy, to be sure. But the clearest way to get people to understand the centrality of this work is to give them the direct experience of working with artists in community, because that’s when it becomes alive. For those who have never had that experience, no matter how much persuasive argument they consume, it tends to remain abstract. And to attain a critical mass of opportunity, such that everyone has easy access to this experience, both public and private support are needed.

I don’t know if we’ll be able to bring about a new WPA during President Obama’s two terms—politics is a lottery, with random luck and happenstance as determinative as effort. But with more than seven years to go, it’s a worthy pursuit. Right now, there are so many ways to buy a lottery ticket that in unprecedented numbers, community artists are meeting this destiny halfway. “Have mercy,” I hear them hoping, “let us win!”

Arlene Goldbard is a writer, speaker and consultant on culture, politics and spirituality, based in Berkeley. She is a long-time veteran of the community cultural development field who began writing about cultural policy (including public service employment for artists) more than 30 years ago. She worked at the San Francisco Neighborhood Arts Program in 1973, when the first CETA arts jobs were created. Her most recent book is “New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development” (New Village Press, November 2006). Subscribe to her blog, read about Cultural Recovery and download her writings at her Web site: http://arlenegoldbard.com.

References

The New New Deal 2009: Public Service Jobs for Artists?
http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/ archivefiles/2008/12/the_newnew_deal.php

The New New Deal, Part 2 - A New WPA for Artists: How and Why
http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/ archivefiles/2009/01/the_new_new_dea.php

Music National Service, MusicanCorps and MusicMentors
http://musicnationalservice.org/

City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program
http://www.muralarts.org/

United We Serve
http://serve.gov/
http://serve.gov/remarks.asp

Bronx Wash Community Mural Project
http://bronxwashmuralproject.blogspot.com/
http://myproject.serve.gov/public/ OpportunityDetail.aspx?projectId=10662&&subProjectId=4832501

UCLA and SPARC César Chávez Digital Mural Lab
http://sparcmurals.org/ucla/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=381&Itemid=1

SPARC Summer Interns
http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=35&Itemid=67

Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act of 2009
http://www.nationalservice.gov/about/serveamerica/index.asp

Voices for National Service
http://www.voicesforservice.org/

2009 National Conference on Volunteering and Service
http://www.volunteeringandservice.org/

Corporation for National and Community Service (all the CNCS programs, including Senior Corps, AmeriCorps, AmeriCorps VISTA, AmeriCorps NCCC and Learn and Serve America are linked from this page)
http://www.nationalservice.gov/

WritersCorps
http://www.sfartscommission.org/WC/

Art Work, Social Work: An Interview with Kara McDonagh
http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/ archivefiles/2006/09/art_work_social.php

Fostering Commitment: The Community Arts Corps
http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/ archivefiles/2008/08/fostering_commi.php

MICA Master of Arts in Community Arts
http://www.mica.edu/Programs_of_Study/ MA_Degree_Programs/Master_of_Arts_in_Community_Arts.html

NEA Recovery Act grants
http://www.arts.gov/recovery/nea-recovery-act-grants.html

City Without Walls
http://www.cwow.org/

Arts & Democracy Project
www.artsanddemocracy.org

American Association of State Service Commissions
http://www.asc-online.org/

Service Employees International Union
http://www.seiu.org/2009/07/sarah-jones-a-right-to-care.php
http://haarm.org/

Americans for the Arts on United We Serve and the arts
www.serve.artsusa.org

Performing Arts Alliance policy link
http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/2226093_zz3s0/ArtsTransitionStatement.pdf

Op-Ed Articles: How to Write and Place Them
http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/duke_community/oped.html

National Campaign to Hire Artists to Work in Schools and Communities
http://mikeyno.com/nchaws/?page_id=6

Recovery.gov
http://www.recovery.gov/

Grants.gov
http://www.grants.gov/

National Council of Nonprofits
http://www.councilofnonprofits.org/?q=policy#ncba

Americans for the Arts Arts funding response and readiness kit
http://www.americansforthearts.org/information_services/toolkit/default.asp

Cultural Recovery and May 12th White House Briefing on Art, Community, Social Justice, National Recovery
http://arlenegoldbard.com/culturalrecovery/

Original CAN/API publication: July 2009