Americans for the Arts today announced that the Southside Civic Lab of Fayetteville, Arkansas, has been awarded the Robert E. Gard Award. The award recognizes and celebrates exemplary work at the intersection of the arts and community life, and was presented this morning at Americans for the Arts’ 2019 Annual Convention in Minneapolis.

 

To increase awareness and dialogue about issues of neighborhood gentrification in Fayetteville, Artist’s Laboratory Theatre (ALT) developed the Southside Civic Lab project, a performance series and community effort to use theater and other art interventions as tools for building awareness around community issues relevant to southern Fayetteville. 

 

The project’s outputs were developed collaboratively and delivered over a period of 16 months through expansive research, interviews, and focus groups with local people who were experiencing food, transportation, and housing insecurity in Fayetteville’s Southside neighborhood. Activities included Listening Parties, which addressed topics affecting the community and offered radical hospitality including food and childcare; the curation of Neighborhood Ambassadors, who identified barriers and inequities for people who rely on public transit via research-driven, task-focused bus rides; and a three-day community visioning festival that offered workshops on citizen-led community development and civic engagement. All of these project events and experiences informed an original play titled Good Person of South Fayetteville, which was performed by ALT at site-specific venues including during public bus commutes. The project was supported by the Our Town grant through the National Endowment for the Arts. 

 

The Southside Civic Lab project generated impressive outcomes for the neighborhood, a historically low-income minority community, at a time of rapid gentrification. The project united longtime residents with new homeowners, City officials and community services providers to explore shared concerns, and inspired citizen engagement by underrepresented people. First-time attendance at public housing planning meetings by Southside neighbors resulted in a change of meeting structure to accommodate citizen input. In addition, the project empowered neighbors to make commitments to civic duties—one ran for City Council, while another joined the Housing Authority Board of Directors via appointment by the City’s mayor. This marked a comprehensive change in Board membership and operational staffing. 

 

“The Southside Civic Lab is strengthening the Fayetteville community as a whole,” said Robert L. Lynch, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts. “They have integrated the arts into their planning in a meaningful way, creating the necessary conditions to support a profoundly changing neighborhood. The community is transformed, and the lives of its residents have been positively impacted. I congratulate Southside Civic Lab for this well-deserved recognition.” 

 

Project partners include Laura Goodwin, Vice President, Learning, at Walton Arts Center; Devin Howland, Economic Vitality Director with the City of Fayetteville, Arkansas; Solomon Burchfield, Operations Manager at 7 Hills Homeless Center; Jennifer Brown, Marketing Director and Community Outreach at Salvation Army; Joel Gardner, Executive Director at Ozark Regional Transit; and Melissa Terry, Board Chair, with the Fayetteville Housing Authority. 

 

The Robert E. Gard Award is named in honor of one of the founding fathers of the local arts movement and a champion of the arts’ role in the creation and maintenance of healthy, vibrant, and equitable communities.  

 

Americans for the Arts is the leading nonprofit organization for advancing the arts and arts education in America. With offices in Washington, D.C. and New York City, it has a record of more than 55 years of service. Americans for the Arts is dedicated to representing and serving local communities and creating opportunities for every American to participate in and appreciate all forms of the arts. Additional information is available at www.AmericansForTheArts.org.