Page 11 - Toolkit

This diagram of Americans for the Arts’ New Community Visions Initiative touches upon the many facets impacting Community Health. Here, they put Arts and Culture at the center of the broadest definition of Community Health: The mainstreaming of Creative Placemaking as a field has shone the light of funding, conferences, research and other empowering resources. But the flow of those benefits is largely still top-down. Marginalized communities
still deeply struggle to gain access to resources, entry, a place of leadership and power over long-term funds or legislation that bring meaningful money, decision-making and infrastructure to the grass-roots level where sidelined people live.
As with all civil rights movements, the focus of mainstream media, politics and public-will are time-limited, cyclical and often subverted by performative measures that ultimately don’t end in permanent, systemic change for disadvantaged neighborhoods.
In equitable Creative Placemaking the process is shifted to include “bottom-up” leaders and efforts that already exist within neighborhoods, to recognize them, fund them, research them and support them.
Developers, politicians, academics, legislators and government officials already have the incentives, access, voice, place-at-the-table, and presumed right to be gatekeepers. They should be considered partners, not arbiters for neighborhoods.
This Tool Kit brings some resources, tools and perspectives to the hands of the very people who are at the front-line of systemic neighborhood change, more equitable cultural authenticity and community “health” in infrastructure and economic resources. These resources can contribute to neighborhood self-determination, property ownership for marginalized people, equitable access to capital, incentives and powerful leadership roles.
Inside all important studies about the art ecology, we have long-been asking and answering many questions, dialoguing, conferencing and documenting who does what, where, what is needed and what we can do to uplift an underfunded, undervalued aspect of our society. It is a continuous effort to balance between analyzing and action.
11