Arts & Civic Engagement Impact Initiative Field Lab

The Field Lab is supporting cultural organizations in a collaborative inquiry with evaluation professionals to investigate how to gauge and describe social change impacts of their work. Each was selected because of its potential contributions toward advancing social change agendas in their communities.

Three organizations have received grants to facilitate project activities and support costs of participating in the Field Lab and Working Group.

Finding Voice, a program of the Tucson Pima Arts Council (TPAC), helps refugee and immigrant youth develop literacy and second language skills by researching, photographing, writing, and speaking out about critical social issues in their lives and communities. Through the creative process, young people develop a better understanding of their Tucson neighborhood and U.S. culture, while building a strong connection to their culture and family, as well as improved literacy skills, critical thinking, and self-confidence. Their work was exhibited in the Tucson Vice-Mayor’s office and in the U.S. Capitol building where six of the young artists discussed their work at a congressional briefing. Finding Voice recently engaged youth in arts-based projects exploring their personal experiences with health, war, and immigration. The students then hosted three interactive community forums where they shared their stories through art and together identified actions to address shared issues and concerns.

The focus of collaborative inquiry between TPAC and ethnographer and evaluator Maribel Alvarez is to define clear and feasible community-level outcomes for the Finding Voices project as well as practicable qualitative evaluation strategies to understand if and how such outcomes are achieved. In addition, in inquiry with Mark Stern and Susan Seifert, TPAC is looking at reasonable quantitative measures to help TPAC show evidence and make the case to city officials for applying arts to civic engagement goals based on priorities identified in the cultural plan.

The Hip Hop Mental Health Project (HHMHP) seeks to contribute to shifting the cultural paradigm of shame and alienation surrounding mental illness, and satisfy a need for a SAFE place to confront the issue and obtain vital information. Through the integration of performance and dialogue, the HHMHP works to impact public discourse and values among urban communities in a way that educates about the signs, symptoms, and spiraling course of mental illness, and to explore possible solutions to the contributing life stressors of societal stigma and the difficulties of an overtaxed mental health system. The Project is committed to engaging young urban and low-income communities of color as they are the most detrimentally affected by the disparities in mental health diagnosis, treatment, and care. The Hip Hop Mental Health Project is an initiative of 1+1+1=ONE, a Brooklyn based 501(c)3 organization that utilizes the methodology of Arts Based Civic Transformation to empower individuals and communities to affect positive social change.

The collaborative inquiry between Rha Goddess and evaluator Suzanne Callahan focuses on the impact of the theatrical performance piece, LOW, and post-performance dialogue on audiences’ attitudes, beliefs and perceptions about mental health and illness based on: a) a formal evaluation conducted by CUNY/NY researchers; and b) an alternative approach to audience evaluation developed in collaboration with Callahan and tested with one audience. The inquiry looks at the limitations of these efforts and at the potential for conducting a larger “project-level” evaluation in the future to capture outcomes of partnership activity and wider community level work associated with performances.

Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) is a Skid Row-based theater organization, founded and directed by artist John Malpede. LAPD has distinguished itself by its longstanding commitment to making change in L.A.’s Skid Row community, particularly the homeless, through theater-based civic engagement work. Many have recognized the apparent potent effects of LAPD’s work on individuals, on social relations, possibly also on influencing structures, systems, and even policy. 

LAPD and Urban Institute senior researcher, Maria Rosario Jackson, are developing a prototype for a tool to recurrently assess/evaluate the cultural ecosystem of Skid Row. The tool would enable cultural organizations and nonarts organizations that use arts and culture to register and document what the cultural infrastructure is in the neighborhood. As they see their work as part of a larger system, the tool can help: a)  foster evaluative thinking among collaborators; and b) create an asset-focused narrative for Skid Row different than the narrative created by city officials, developers, and others.

Two smaller awards have been made to projects to receive coaching from Chris Dwyer of RMC Research. These projects are applying and testing an existing framework for systematically defining and documenting indicators and outcomes that provide evidence of concern to targeted stakeholders and opinion leaders, as well as strategies for data collection and communication of results.  A common interest of these projects is building a case for the role of the arts in civic systems and processes. 

The Arts & Equity Initiative (AEI) is a three-year project of the City of Portland and nonprofit arts organization Terra Moto Inc., led by artist Marty Pottenger. It seeks to improve municipal government through strategic art projects between artists, city departments, unions, elected officials and the community. Launched in 2007 in Portland, ME, the initiative includes art-making workshops led by Pottenger and local artists (currently a printmaker, poets, and photographers) within the city’s Public Works, Health & Human Services, and Police Departments. AEI's working hypothesis is that it's useful for people to make art about their work and lives, and that doing so increases their chances to come up with better solutions to longstanding problems. One component, The Police Poetry Project, paired poets and photographers with members of the Portland Police Department (PPD) to write poetry and to address two key challenges—the relationship between police and the public and low department morale. 

Dwyer’s evaluation framework will be used to assess effects of the Police Poetry Project and be looked at for its use for other components of the initiative in the future.

The Orton Family Foundation: Art & Soul is a project in Starksboro, VT, applying arts-based methods of community engagement to generate and inform conversations around values and community. Art & Soul aims to engage residents through storytelling, art-making, community dialogues, events, and celebrations. It is expected that activities will reveal shared values and ideas for building a vision for one community’s future that are robust enough to influence concrete actions and decisions.