Partnership Basics

Building lasting partnerships across sectors.

Arts and culture-based community development projects typically involve relationships between local organizations, artists or arts agencies, and local government partners. Although the specific arrangements of these stakeholders are as varied as the projects themselves, it’s always helpful to consider these partnership basics:

• When initially working through ideas for projects, conceive of partnerships with their long- term potential in mind. Projects will end, but relationships can be sustained for many years.
• Think extensively about the types of partners you invite to the table, especially cross- sector individuals and organizations that can offer new perspectives on the project.
• Make space for creating shared goals, values, and visions before writing grants or starting the main project. Reflect together at the outset about what your partnership can achieve.
• Set up regular times to check in, evaluate partnership tasks and roles, and find ways to clarify and improve communications. Partnerships are always about collective learning experiences, so put aside time and space for that learning to happen.
• If the partners come from very different professional sectors, designate an “intermediary” who can help to translate across differences of professional language and methods.

Though partnerships we can:

✔ Better understand, and be relevant to, a community
✔ Bring complementary skills and resources
✔ Tackle larger tasks
✔ Collectively take on risk
✔ Achieve greater impact
✔ Create more sustainable, longer-term responses.

Early partnership questions to think about:

• What’s your current understanding of your partner’s job and responsibilities? What more would be helpful to understand?
• How would you describe the limitations/strengths of your own discipline?
• As the project progresses, what will be the easiest ways to communicate across difference? What challenges do you anticipate?
• How can partners all help to build trust within the team?
• How will partners approach evolving project needs? Changes in scope? Desired outcomes?
• How do partners want to be a part of the larger story that’s told about the project?

In addition to asking these questions at the onset of a project, the Charting Stakeholders worksheet will help identify how to organize partners and manage relationships as a project moves forward.

CHARTING STAKEHOLDERS
→ Download the worksheet

Building professional relationships with artists
and arts organizations

One of the most essential partnerships in creative placemaking projects is with the artists or arts organizations that help to define a project. When starting these relationships, it’s important not to assume that the artist will only offer something visual or performative to the team.

Artists have many skills. They may influence the community engagement process, re-frame the problem at hand, or design a process to address it. Artists may find a creative way to discover what matters to a community, or they may help residents generate creative ideas to address a community challenge.

Put aside any assumptions you may have about the proposed question, and let the community reveal their ideas for solutions through deep communication, interaction, and engagement. Though artists may enter the partnership with their own ideas for the project, this connection with the community should be the main foundation for the project’s design and implementation. All partners should remain open to changes in plans or in the project itself. Remember that the process is just as important as the final project.

"Artists and creatives do not always get the same as information as other small businesses —so we’re in the business of helping people find each other."
—Margarita Villegas, Baltimore Creatives Acceleration Network

Balancing artistic freedom and community voice

It’s never easy to balance many different voices within a single project. One of the more nuanced aspects of working with arts-based responses to community issues is balancing artistic freedom with community voices. Who should have the first word on what type of art is called for? Or the last word on what should be produced?

There is no simple answer to that question. In general, it’s best to cultivate a shared sense of creativity and control among all participants. Open, frequent communication is essential for maintaining this balance.

Building relationships with local government agencies

Just as artists and arts organizations bring different perspectives to community issues, local government staff and agencies also understand, and work with, community issues in ways that can be specific to the professional roles they play (such as with planners vs. elected officials). Understanding what these roles and perspectives are, and what they can contribute to any particular arts-based community project, is essential for being able to harness the full capacity of a project’s partnerships.

Some things to keep in mind:

• When local government staff or elected officials are first approached about working on a project, they may not be familiar with what creative placemaking is or how it works.
• Begin conversations by explaining what creative placemaking is and what it can do for the community.
• Connect your project to the agency’s primary mission.
• Suggest specific ideas for how staff and departments can embed arts and cultural
• approaches into comprehensive community work.
• Frame conversations in terms of what is efficient and effective.

Building relationships within the community

Just as local government staff and elected officials may be unfamiliar with the full dimensions of creative placemaking, community members may also need assistance learning how the larger community can benefit from investing in such approaches.

An important first step may be to step back and figure out a common definition of what art-based community development approaches could look like in the neighborhood. Then, once potential community partners are oriented to a shared vision for the project, team members can collectively seek opportunities to include additional community voices in conversations about scoping and decision-making processes. It’s essential to welcome all partners to the table when defining the project’s goals, values, and vision.

In addition, if partnering with community members as an arts organization, or a local government agency, there is an opportunity to educate all stakeholders about the local system of government.

"When we hit crisis, we realized the value of our document of cooperation. Crisis is an opportunity to grow together."
—Scott Oshima, Our Town Technical Assistance Resource Team Member

Partnership life-cycles

1. Getting to the point of sharing in the benefits of partnership will require patience, letting relationships evolve and move through their own necessary growing pains. Traditionally, healthy partnerships are thought to evolve through five main phases:
2. Forming: In the early stages of a project, people are on their best behavior. This is a good time to set goals and expectations.
3. Storming: There will naturally come a time when partners begin to push against each other’s boundaries, and this is when those boundaries become most visible. At this stage, it’s helpful to refer back to earlier discussions on goals, objectives, and roles.
4. Norming: Now that the partners have moved through the difficulties of really learning about each other, this is a time to move the project forward with an appreciation of each participant’s different strengths.
5. Performing: This is the time when the partnerships’ investment in each other pays off, and goals begin to be reached more fluidly and easily.
6. Adjourning: If there is a clear endpoint to the project, it’s important to acknowledge what was achieved through the partnership and how everyone benefited.

WHO IS YOUR STARTER TEAM?
→ Download the Worksheet

APPRECIATING YOUR PARTNERS
→ Download the Worksheet

WHO CAN HELP?
→ Download the Worksheet

WHO'S ON YOUR TEAM?
→ Download the Worksheet

Additional Resources

Curated for you by the LISC team, the resources below provide models of best practice, insights from our Resource Team, and other extras we hope will be useful to you as you navigate your creative placemaking projects. 

ENGAGE: 

Municipal Artist Partnership Toolkit, A Blade of Grass Fund and Americans for the Arts 
Informed by the deep municipal partnership work of A Blade of Grass in cities like New York, Portland ME, and Boston, the Municipal Artist Partnership Toolkit supports practitioners by providing “relationship guide to forging strong and sustainable creative partnerships between local governments and artists.” This interactive toolkit incorporates essential introduction to partnership strategy, case studies, videos, and tools to guide work at every stage of creative placemaking projects.

This material emerged from a past Our Town Knowledge Building project. Through the Our Town Knowledge Building program, the NEA has invested in community development and arts membership organizations to build out knowledge on how to do creative placemaking.  

WATCH:

Creative Placemaking Toolkit for Counties, National Association of County Officials in partnership with Americans for the Arts
Themed around “Building Arts-Driven Community and Economic Development Solutions for Your County,” this prerecorded webinar shows how counties are improving their economies and building thriving communities by leveraging arts, and culture. Community spokespeople discuss their creative solutions to local challenges, providing county elected officials and staff members with strong case studies in county-wide placemaking.

The 5 Stages of a Loving Partnership
Want to know the secret of lasting partnership (in creative placemaking)? Join Scott Oshima in this session from the March 2021 Learning Lab for Our Town Grantees as they share the story of Sustainable Little Tokyo’s partnership and the world’s most unlikely (cross-sector nonprofit) throuple: an artist, a developer, and a community organizer! See it all! Awkward beginnings, laughter, confusion, documents of cooperation, scandals, new leadership, and joy! But will they survive a worldwide pandemic crisis? Find out in the recording below.