Creative Solutions: A Roundtable on Arts, Culture and the Path to Community Recovery & Wellbeing
In a roundtable interview, two LISC experts and two members of LISC’s Emerging Leaders Council offer reflections and critical best practices for harnessing arts and culture as part of our national recovery—from the economic devastation of COVID, and from the country’s long-standing racial health, wealth and opportunity gap.
COVID-related shut-downs have affected community-based organizations across the country. Organizations have had to shutter their regular programs and services, and fundraising activities have been significantly disrupted in the absence of in-person gatherings. As many government resources have been re-directed to provide immediate service supports to residents and individuals, the question has arisen: what will happen to arts and culture groups, which are so crucial to community building and social cohesion, and which will be critical to healing and rebuilding in a post-COVID environment.
LISC’s Emerging Leaders Council members Laura Fox and Emily Rasmussen, whose work has spanned the arts and culture, social enterprise and the private sectors, joined Lynne McCormack and Elizabeth Demetriou from LISC’s economic development team to discuss the role that arts and culture groups play in neighborhoods, and what needs to be done to support this sector moving forward. Anna Alekseyeva of LISC’s Strategy and Innovation team moderated the discussion.
Participants:
- Lynne McCormack, LISC Senior Creative Placemaking Officer
- Elizabeth Demetriou, LISC Program Director, Economic Development
- Laura Fox, General Manager, Citi Bikes, Lyft Bikes and Scooters; Adjunct Professor, NYU Stern School of Business
- Emily Rasmussen, Co-Founder and CEO of Grapevine.org, a platform for Giving Circles
- Moderator: Anna Alekseyeva, VP, LISC Strategy and Innovation
Lynne, I want to start by asking you how arts and culture organizations across the country and across LISC’s network are faring during these extraordinarily challenging times.
Lynne: Many arts and culture community-based organizations (CBOs) are really in crisis. Arts and culture organizations exist largely to bring people together around projects or events. Obviously, that kind of work is really hard to do at the moment. We are seeing innovation and creativity – theater companies putting on exclusively outdoor seasons, shifts to delivering services online and the like – but we are also seeing many organizations having to lay off staff.
However, we’re also seeing organizations adapt to the needs on the ground. Many groups in our network have shifted to providing direct relief services in their communities, including delivering food donations and providing financial wellness services to residents. Arts CBOs tend to form strong trust bonds within their communities and have a good awareness of local needs.
One of the premises of LISC’s Creative Placemaking program is that artistic and cultural activities strengthen communities. Can you speak to how you see arts and culture contributing to community wellbeing and re-building in the aftermath of COVID?
Lynne: As a general principle, approaching community development through arts and culture strategies promotes new modes of solving difficult challenges. We often approach community development from a deficit-based perspective. We're looking at unemployment, a dearth of civic infrastructure, shortages in affordable housing, transportation challenges and more.
All of these indicators speak to a lack of something. But with a culture-based approach, we're looking at assets rather than deficits. We’re asking: what was here in the past and what is here now? What kinds of talent exists in this community? What kinds of cultural connections exist here? What food represents us? What kinds of art do we make and music do we play? Where do people gather? What is the story of our neighborhood? What issues have shaped us?
Figuring out how to tap into the positive aspects of our communities is more important now than ever. Not only does it lead to creative solutions, it allows people to have a more hopeful vision for the future. The reflection that goes on in an arts-based engagement process enables us to tackle difficult historic issues and neighborhood trauma. This kind of reflection will be critical as communities rebuild and recover from the impacts of COVID and the ongoing racial injustice and trauma in our country.
Laura: This intangible aspect to art and creative placemaking that Lynne is talking about has transformative potential. Art creates deep connections to place by allowing people to create new conceptions of themselves and their communities.
What has drawn me to the arts and culture space, though, are its more tangible effects. Local arts organizations help create neighborhood vibrancy and dynamism that is difficult to artificially manufacture. This has economic and market-driven follow-on effects: increased spending and interest in local restaurants, retail, real estate, etc. The arts will be essential to place-based recovery in the aftermath of COVID.
Elizabeth: Arts also foster inclusion by lowering the barriers to entry for various places and activities. Before COVID, my local library had free art classes for kids, for example, which attracted a lot of people who may not have otherwise gone to the local library. Art can help bring underutilized public spaces to life.
Emily: Another angle is how arts can be used as a vehicle or frame for accomplishing other goals, particularly around social impact. For example, we're seeing the arts play an interesting role in health with music and memory or music and language recovery. There's this big 'arts and' bucket that we're just starting to scratch the surface of. As my LISC colleagues have pointed out, there is some interesting overlap here with the work to create new systems of community wealth based on an interdisciplinary model. I think arts and culture can be a critical facilitator in these efforts given its natural ability to cut across and weave together different domains.
Over time, our field has shifted from a siloed and domain-dependent paradigm of community development to an interdisciplinary model. What role do arts and culture play in this comprehensive paradigm of community development?
Laura: When we talk about place and what creates great quality of life, we talk about a lot of different elements. Some of those things, like affordable housing and transit, have long been core tenets of place-making frameworks and planning. To me, arts and culture are just as integral to delivering on quality of life, and should be part of any place-based approach.
Lynne: Under normal circumstances, events are a good example of how arts and culture can work in service of other community development goals – specifically to help make a place feel safe. People don't want to be in deserted spaces, but if you can activate a space with a positive activity, it changes the dynamic of how people think about that space. We've seen this happen in the Twin Cities with the Little Mekong Night Market. This space was underutilized in the evenings, but the introduction of a summer night market changed the way people think, interact with and explore the neighborhood during the rest of the year.
The potential of arts organizations to provide other necessary services to local residents – whether that’s financial literacy training or skills training – is substantial. We find that artists relate to people differently than service providers do; they tend to develop deep trust bonds with their program participants, and that can translate into other types of meaningful interactions outside of the arts and culture realm.
In many localities, we’re seeing neighborhoods changing in a way that creates displacement pressures on existing residents, and it’s very plausible that the after-effects of the COVID crisis will lead to speculative real estate purchases that will exacerbate these trends. Talk about how arts and culture can help promote ownership over a place.
Lynne: Historically, arts and culture bring people together and strengthen community by allowing people to hold ground and express ownership over a place. At LISC, we encourage artists and culture bearers who live in the communities we partner with to be invested in holding the ground they occupy by celebrating the existing culture of a neighborhood and by providing resources that support this work.
Emily: Part of claiming ownership is telling your own story, and arts and culture is powerful because it allows for an expression of the self and of one’s community. It also creates connections and mutual respect across places by fostering understanding across communities.
Elizabeth: When your neighborhood hasn’t had the opportunity to highlight local history and culture, then there’s a likelihood that someone else is going to come in and tell the story they want to tell. Celebrating its own story through arts and culture enables a neighborhood to elevate itself and make itself seen in the way that it wants to be seen.
This can lead to a neighborhood renaissance, but the question is: who is going to be part of that renaissance, and who is that renaissance for? We want to make sure that local residents and artists are included. That’s why LISC works with community-based organizations and local artists.
We know that many of the arts CBOs in our field were facing significant capacity challenges even in the pre-COVID environment. What capacity needs do you foresee for arts and culture CBOs today and into the future?
Lynne: When I think back to the impact that the 2008 recession had on arts CBOs, I get very concerned about the future. In the aftermath of the recession, philanthropic and public funding shifted towards social service providers. This was, of course, important and necessary, but it meant that many arts and culture organizations had to close their doors. In the arts and culture space, we didn’t start to see the full impact of the recession until 2011. Today, there is clearly a greater awareness of racial equity issues in the philanthropy space, and I think there is a better understanding of the power that arts and culture CBOs play in promoting and advancing equity, but I don’t know if that will be enough to address the full impact of COVID.
As we consider how organizations recover from the current environment and become sustainable, we also need to think about what capacity building means. Historically, when we’ve talked about capacity building, we’ve approached it formulaically by focusing on certain standard components: board development, budget planning, fundraising, etc. Much of the conversation for arts and culture CBOs has been around raising money, but most of the organizations we work with have boards composed of people from their neighborhoods.
They don't have access to the same kinds of patrons and donors that large arts institutions do, but we still expect these small organizations to operate and fundraise in the same ways as large arts institutions. These expectations are unreasonable. We need to blow this mindset open and start thinking about other ways neighborhood-based arts and culture organizations can access capital.
Laura: From a business perspective, I think about how arts organizations can operate as dynamic service providers and how these organizations can develop more flexible, market-biased business model capacity -- which is especially important now given the disrupting effects of COVID. For example, arts organizations can identify upcoming trends and adapt programming accordingly, innovate in their distribution models due to new technologies and applications, package their “products” (whether a type of artwork or a digital or remote physical experience) with audience relevance in mind, rethink the use and function of their core assets (from real estate to institutional knowledge and products), etc. There’s a need here, however, to build organizational capacity around identifying these areas of opportunity.
We know that public funding – at the local level – is going to be strained, but there is a lot of private impact capital looking for investment opportunities. How can arts and culture groups attract some of this capital?
Laura: We need to start thinking of business models as being important to the arts and culture space, in the same way as they are important in other sectors. How do we reward organizations that have viable business models and support their growth?
LISC’s Inclusive Creative Economy Fund is an example of this, but we are still missing a robust marketplace for arts and culture impact investments (and therefore the “nudges” and incentives for arts organizations to structure their business models more robustly). We see individual donors giving to large institutions, but what we need is an impact capital approach within the arts world to drive long-term sustainability.
Emily: What we often see when cities invest in arts and culture is flashy buildings. This type of investment, by its very nature, does not support community and neighborhood art, nor does it support actual programming. This raises the question of how we can unlock funds from different sources and in new ways.
At Grapevine.org, we focus on community-based collaborative giving through the giving circle model. This type of giving can be useful for CBOs that are doing local work and that have strong community support. Of course, there is the question of how much capital exists at the community level to be unlocked, which is an ongoing challenge, but this model can be powerful for CBOs that don’t have relationships with foundations and other large donors. Even community foundations have not been able to fill this gap for all communities.
Laura: I think the idea of the neighborhood itself as a source of capital is an exciting one. The Reinvestment Fund's Creative Neighborhood Fund concept is one example: it proposes taking increases generated by sales and tax revenues from neighborhood tourism and investing a percentage of these revenues into neighborhood-based groups.
This makes sense from a business lens: why not reinvest in the types of groups that are driving growth and tourism to a city’s neighborhoods? This will be especially relevant as cities reopen after COVID, and compete for both new residents and tourists. For example, when Chicago drives tourism to its ‘Uptown Music District’ and sees commercial revenues and taxes increasing, it could invest some of those tax gains back into the local music and arts organizations that develop that performance talent.
Lynne: One thing we’re thinking about at LISC is how to connect arts organizations in our neighborhoods to other resources that can potentially become revenue streams for them. So, we are asking ourselves: what services are arts organizations already providing that could allow them to tap into other funding streams?
We know, for example, that arts organizations across the country are creating new pathways to workforce development and exploring how they can support job creation. There are significant resources in the workforce development funding system nationally and at the state level, but this system can be challenging to access and navigate for small, entrepreneurial arts organizations. We want to help these organizations tap into these resources.