A Cultural Policy World Café: Learning from Cross-Sector Collaborations
David Mura
Panel Description: Explore what cultural policy can learn from cross-sector collaborations in health, climate, workforce and disability justice. This World Café will feature real-world case studies from leaders working across fields, offering insights on building effective partnerships with funders, policy makers and practitioners outside the arts.
Participants will move through tabletop discussions in each focus area, with space to dig into strategies, values and lessons learned. We’ll close by mapping shared approaches, identifying opportunities, and naming the skills and mindsets needed to navigate complex cross-sector work. Come ready to connect, reflect, and imagine what’s possible when cultural grantmaking moves beyond the site.
Attendees from the on-site workshop taking notes on the presentation.
Jaime Dempsey—emcee
Asks panelists & audience to introduce themselves:
What is your name? What is your role? Where is home?
Jaime asked panelists to talk about three categories -- Roses (success), thorns (challenges), buds (potential).
Panel: Randy Engstrom, Roberto Bedoya, Joel Snyder, Shey Rivera Rios, Johana Taylor, Mallor Nezam, Amanda Lovelee
Joel Snyder
Joel’s rose is seeing people as they are, seeing people as possessing abilities and not seeing them as disability. He said that viewing eye disease and low vision as a disability is more the result of how society treats people as opposed to a particular condition. If there is a ramp to a building, the person in a wheel chair does not have a disability. If all the lights go out or there’s a blackout, a blind person is better off than a sighted person. We have to change our thinking and vocabulary around disability.
Joel works with audio description, a verbal version of the visual; in this process, the visual is made verbal and aural and oral. You are looking for and using words that are succinct, vivid, imaginative and objective; audio description conveys the visual image that is not fully accessible particularly for people who are blind or have low vision. This is 8 percent of public.
Audio description is useful for people with sight who cannot see. Those who are congenitally blind have never seen color, but most vision loss is age related, people who once saw. Most of the audience he works with knew sight, but even if you’re congenitally blind you know what colors are and often mean.
Shey Rivera Rios, Studio Lobo, artist and organization
Shey Rivera Rios connects with municipalities, in the sector of public art. She works with place keeping neighborhood, public awareness of issues, advocacy, tourism, the creative economy, resilient nonprofits, the future of arts teaching and learning, art and well-being, fostering a creative work force.
She works with her art to change public policy, such as organizing artists to be facilitators and intermediaries. She worked with One Square World on the BERDO Ordinance (Boston Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance), which deals with indoor pollution. The city funded an initiative to create this ordinance and worked with four grass roots organizations to create links between work for climate change and housing.
We’re focused on neighborhoods affected by climate injustice, she said. We brought in artists and held various different community meetings, and we worked with organizations rooted in the community with member basis, and they brought all these folks to our sessions. The artists served as facilitators, and created narratives about how it is “to live in your building”. They even created a whole story of a resident--a mother who has a child with asthma. Through these meetings and discussions, they worked on buildings that could be designed to meet the standards, on building equity fund for buildings who could not afford to make changes. They would iterate the results of the discussions and then bring proposals back to the residents and hold further discussions. They also worked with animators and illustrators, and created community organizing toolkits for bringing people to the sessions.
“There are a lot of artists who want to impact public policy decisions and actions.”
Mallory Rukhsana Nezam
Mallory Nezam works with artists and governments, and she wants to see a paradigm shift from a commission or project based funding to artists as leaders and core partners in government and public policy and departments.
Minnesota Parks Artists in Residents.
In this project artists were given $50,000 to be embedded into parks over 9 months, twenty hours a week. There was a lot of process involved, bringing the community in along the way—a Sound Garden, poetry readings, artists making objects, temporary and permanent in the park; a backpack with art supplies, made in collaboration with local high school art club.
One goal was to increase public belonging, and the project demonstrated how artists can play a vital and crucial role in this. We should be doing more of, said Mallory, using artists as leaders and partners, imagining the future of the park. Artists created an augmented reality imagining a park with a lot more indigenous knowledge.
Mallory talked about how art was used in flyers for an event and how art can bring more people to a place like a park. And yet, there was the issue of how public can we make our efforts if, say, we are inviting the Latino community. She stressed the need for training to keep people safe.
Marllory’s “Bud” is seeing the culture change inside of the staff; community members who felt they didn’t belong are actually coming to the park. The project was not just art as a magical fairy dust but art as part of the process, creating ideas, bringing people together. The staff is thinking differently, moving from viewing artists/art as a one off program, and instead positioning artists as facilitators and leaders.
Johanna K. Taylor
Johanna Taylor collaborated with Transportion for America to connect artist leaders working in the area of transportation. “They felt they were working alone and we wanted to bring them together in person and create this book of expert leaders who would continue to grow the field. Out of that we successfully created Transportation Artist in Residence Network, MN Dept of Transportation.
Climate – Amanda Lovelee
Amanda Lovelee created Homecoming: Pep Rally for the Planet. If we can cheer for a football team, can we cheer for a tree, can we use art to bring people together to cheer something? She wants to get people to see value of hiring artists as full time staff. Amanda stressed connecting different entities and organization, such as convening a parade for the park with art stands to make banners, a high school marching band, and cheerleaders from the University of Minnesota. She asked people to write words of encouragement for the plants and planet and to create little flags or signs to carry in the parade.
Roberto Bedoya
Rose: Gathering artists whose medium is governance; to enroll artists in making arguments/conveying information/facilitations to change and innovate government.
Thorn: How I convince government people to see the value of a creative in their shop
How do you operatize belonging? You need a belonging strategy. In the Dept. of Transportation, what would happen if you hired an artist to think about public spaces such as sidewalks? How do you use the imagination of artists to figure out how to use governance of sidewalks and other public spaces? We had an artists in residence in a homeless encampment, but the funds ran out.
