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Over the past decade, community-based arts and culture strategies have blossomed as an essential element of equitable development. They have become a key to the advancement of health equity, and now those creative powers are being directed toward improving public health education and treatment during the pandemic. Arts and culture have been at the center of every facet of the movement for racial justice, projecting new voices, expressing critical values, building bridges, sounding alarms, and celebrating leaders.
At PolicyLink, we have been honored to partner with and document the experiences of community leaders in arts and culture over this decade, and we have many of you receiving this message to thank for your insights, involvement, and support as we went about this work. We released a lot of new material in December 2020 and in April 2021, and now we have the latest contributions from our staff and partners to share with you.
These new videos, publications, articles, and links have been added to www.communitydevelopment.art
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, the PolicyLink arts and culture microsite which began in 2018 to document the ArtPlace America Community Development Investments initiative (CDI), but which has evolved to include other projects as well.
The recently added items include:
New brief on the organizational competencies needed for equitable creative placemaking
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. The sixth and final brief in our series about the ArtPlace CDI initiative is authored by Lyz Crane, who was the director of the initiative. Lyz describes how she and a host of advisors and trainers worked with community development organization leaders to build eight key capacities for integrating arts and culture into their work, from collaborating with artists to raising capital and many others in between. The brief includes links to many of the materials used in the capacity-building activities.
Video perspectives from nearly 40 CDI leaders
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. Photographer and videographer Chris Johnson completed more than 100 interviews during two visits with people active in the six CDI communities, and these were used extensively in the seven fully produced videos (one about each community plus an overview) released on the microsite in December 2020. But the newly added interview clips in their original form offer a wider range of unfiltered perspectives from neighborhood leaders, CDI agency staff, and collaborating artists about what this work meant to them, what they learned, and how they grew and changed.
Two essays from PolicyLink complement and extend the report, WE-Making: How Arts and Culture Unite People to Work toward Community Well-Being
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, by Metris Arts, which was released in April 2021. One essay
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describes promising practices for advancing social cohesion in community development, health, and the arts. The other essay
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outlines strategies and resources for useful research to meet the current momentum for organizing and policy change for racial equity.
Other follow-up activities to advance the WE-Making framework
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. The Center for Arts in Medicine (CAM) of the University of Florida has been soliciting community stories by leaders of communities of color about building social cohesion through the arts. CAM hosted a webinar
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on October 5 about the WE-Making theory of change in practice, focusing on local leaders of innovative efforts in Oakland along with presenters from PolicyLink and Metris Arts. The webinar archive
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and a link to the CAM We-Making Resources repository are now on the microsite.
News articles, book chapters, and other media about CDI and other arts and culture activities. A great deal of new writing was released in 2021, not only from PolicyLink but in diverse magazines, books, and news websites, and links to these pieces can be found on the continually updated Press & Media page
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of the microsite.
Many Fires This Time
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, a poetic docudrama. This feature film, created for the PolicyLink “We, the 100 Million”
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initiative, documents the journey of A Scribe Called Quess? as he connects with fellow activist poets and the communities they represent. From Oakland to Chicago to Kentucky to New Orleans, we glimpse the worlds of everyday people fighting for equity and justice in community safety; housing and gentrification; water and environment; job security and health; migration and globalization; education; and LGBTQIA rights.
We welcome you to make good use of these new resources as well as the ones previously posted to www.communitydevelopment.art
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, and to let us know what you think
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.
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