Connecting Californians
Finding the Art of Community Change
An Inquiry into the role of story in strengthening communities

The Field Dialogue

Practitioners working in grassroots arts and humanities such as Kate Magruder, Holly Alonso and Martin Hernandez were among the more than 100 people interviewed during the course of the research. Also included were representatives from larger arts institutions, humanities professionals, program staff from philanthropy, community organizers and popular educators. Those interviewed are located in Appendix D.

The discussions uncovered an overwhelming belief in the value of the arts and humanities to community-strengthening efforts. The themes identified here do not do justice to the nuance and complexity, the richness and intensity of response elicited by the interviews. They have been selected as examples of the concerns now being expressed in community dialogue, worthy, therefore, of further consideration as the work is pursued.

Some people in the world of the arts institutions believed that crossing old lines etched by habit and custom was the key to diversifying and deepening participation in their organizations, a process they regarded as a key to future institutional success. Others felt that community engagement in the creative process dilutes artistic excellence. For these people there seemed to be a clear dividing line between the product of art that has been established as first rate and a process of creation that engages the community. They drew a related line between professional and amateur. At one extreme, this view was expressed as "art should not be put to social purpose," accompanied by a fear of "political correctness." There seemed to be a relationship between these sentiments and some of the political rhetoric that has accompanied recent debates about culture issues in the country.

The line between process and product was of less importance to members of the humanities field, perhaps because story is so central to their worldview, perhaps because education is a driving interest, perhaps because interpretation of established artistic product (a territory they claim for themselves) is more sympathetic to community participation.

Among professionals in philanthropy, there was genuine interest in the cross-disciplinary aspects of this kind of community work. The interest seemed associated with a general desire to explore approaches to grantmaking that cross program fields.

Leaders in community organizing acknowledged readily that, in the form of story, they regularly put the arts to use in their work, both by encouraging participants to develop personal narratives and through training with classical stories from the Bible and Ancient Greece. Several acknowledged that organizing and art had been more closely connected in the past than at present, during, for instance, the civil-rights and farmworkers movements. Organizers were thus authentically interested in learning more about the arts and humanities, but, ever the pragmatic strategists, they also seemed ready to dismiss any approach that might take them off a straight line to definable success.

Those who saw themselves more in the tradition of popular education were clearly already resonant with and accomplished in the use of the arts to create the line, not necessarily perceived by them to be straight, to success in communities.

Current practitioners in grassroots arts and humanities seemed genuinely thrilled that anyone was interested in interviewing them. They said they feel isolated and marginalized from institutional worlds of art, humanities and funding sources. No feelings of marginalization, though, accompanied their descriptions of their work in communities. They reported a groundswell of community interest, a "hunger to connect" through the use of the arts and humanities.

Conversations Between Artists and Organizers

Seeking to deepen the dialogue of the interviews, the research project conducted two focus groups, one hosted by Dell’Arte Company in rural northern California, one by Cornerstone Theater in Los Angeles. Artists, organizers, educators and funders were invited to discuss their work in communities, reaching out from the techniques and training of their individual disciplines to find connections with one another. They told stories.

An artist turned organizer told of a seven-year-old Bay Area boy with leukemia, who, because his doctors didn’t know Spanish and his parents didn’t know English, had served as translator between them during the years of his successive treatments. When the last treatment had finally failed, it was he, at age 14, who translated to his parents that he was going to die. The story had become the focal point of a community campaign that forced the hospital to provide medical interpreters.

An artist told of a collaboration on a cross-ethnic, black-white performance of Romeo and Juliet between an ensemble company and residents of a small town in the deep South of the United States. The work had been challenging for everyone involved, and when the project was finished and interracial theater was not continued in the town, the company worried that their collaboration had caused more damage than positive change. Yet three years later the community won a major award for a racially integrated economic-development project. Many in the town felt that this success had only been possible because of the relationships they had developed by working together on Romeo and Juliet.

An organizer argued that sharing the stories of individuals without collective action is little more than "community masturbation," but he told of a campaign in California to raise the minimum wage and of the undocumented immigrant who decided to participate in the action, even though he risked exposure to the INS and deportation back to a country where he would likely lose his life. The campaign was won, raising the minimum wage from $3.45 to $4.25 an hour and creating enormous collective good. The immigrant was never seen again.

The interplay between artists and organizers in the two conversations was lively, provocative, and informative. The transcripts of both focus groups are available in their entirety in PDF format.

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