The Drum Beat 215 - Arts-Based Community Development
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In "Mapping the Field: Arts-Based Community Development", William Cleveland defines Arts-based Community Development (ABCD) as "Arts-centered activity that contributes to the sustained advancement of human dignity, health and/or productivity within a community." This activity is designed to educate and inform, inspire and mobilise, nurture and heal, and build and improve community capacity and/or infrastructure.
How does this process work? If art has traditionally been a means of affirming and celebrating culture, how can it be used as a strategy of communicating for social change? This issue of the Drum Beat presents some ABCD initiatives, thinking, and networks that explore art as a form of communication for community development worldwide.
This is by no means a complete list of arts-based initiatives or networks. More can be found on The CI site and we seek others on an ongoing basis. Please send your information to Deborah Heimann dheimann@comminit.com
EXPERIENCES
1. Prevention of Drug Use and Abuse through Art - Colombia
This project uses art to counteract drug use risk factors at the individual, family, social, and cultural levels. Motivating the programme is the belief that art facilitates free expression, creativity, and identity. Young people, many of whom have traveled to Barranquilla to flee violence in rural areas, compose stories on the basis of their own experiences with drug use and prevention. These stories are then dramatised and performed in a public forum. Participants are encouraged to organise themselves into groups that will develop action plans after the project ends. Impact data indicates that comprehension and internalisation of solidarity, as a value, increased from 60% to 90%, respect from 62% to 93%, and a sense of belonging from 42% to 90%. There was a reported decrease in drug use from 25% to 7%.
Contact Mario Zapata mariozapata@celcaribe.net.co OR Fabio Serrano fserrrano@gobatl.gov.co
2. EARTH Project - Global
Judith Marcuse Projects is launching a 3-year, multi-nation arts initiative that explores issues of global sustainability and social justice from the perspective of young people. A network of arts organisations worldwide will collaborate in a 6-stage process that will bring together youth, artists, and environmental and social justice organisations. EARTH activities are designed to bring youth from disparate communities together to create a context for cultural exchange through art and to help them gain a sense of their collective power to create more humane, viable societies.
Contact info@jmprojects.ca
3. The Esperanza Peace & Justice Center - Texas & Mexico
Established in 1987, this centre works to help individuals and grassroots organisations acquire knowledge and skills supportive of life in a just society. Esperanza provokes interaction among diverse groups of people to challenge oppression across racial, class, sexual orientation, gender, age, health, physical, and cultural boundaries. One purpose is to keep alive and reclaim the Mexicana/Chicana/Indígena/Mestiza communities of San Antonio, Texas and México. Strategies include networking and alliance building, pláticas (public forums), and advocacy projects. For instance, MujerARTES is a cooperative in which women make art together while developing oral histories expressive of "nuestra cultura".
Contact graciela@esperanzacenter.org or esperanza@esperanzacenter.org
4. Feral Arts - Australia
This community cultural development group establishes and maintains links with arts and cultural practitioners across Australia in an effort to develop and promote models of locally-driven arts practice. The goal is to support growth in the arts and cultural sectors and the broader community by offering capacity-building, communication venues, and technology to marginalised communities. A broader aim is to encourage cultural pluralism - acknowledging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as Australia's original cultures - and social inclusion.
Contact ferals@feralarts.com.au
5. People's Popular Theatre (PPT) - East Africa
Working mostly in Kenya, this community-based group uses theatre to raise awareness about discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, or disability. The group conducts research on traditional cultural art forms and practices, exploring how they affect gender relations and then working to correct gender imbalances in society through performance art. Other projects - some of which have involved advocacy work - have focussed on poverty, sexual harrassment, violence against women, AIDS awareness among university students, civic education, street children, and women and the constitution review. PPT also organises cultural events and promotes the use of popular theatre as a teaching and awareness tool.
Contact Kimingichi Wabende kimingichi@yahoo.co.uk
6. The Sang Fan Wan Mai Group - Chiang Rai, Thailand
Formally launched in 1996, this group of young rural volunteers uses media and arts to educate and inform their peers about HIV/AIDS. Through peer education activities such as traveling puppet shows and radio broadcasts, the group promotes AIDS prevention measures and tries to effect changes in young people's thinking and behaviour, passing on clear information about safer sex. Community participation is key to the efforts of this small organisation, as is the idea that young people deserve opportunities to make well-informed reproductive decisions.
Contact Ms. Jansuay Janpeng Tel.: 66 53 664 334
See also:
- K@2 Centre - Karosta, Liepaja, Latvia
- The Village of Arts and Humanities - Philadelphia, USA
- Abhivyakti Media for Development - India
- Art and Upheaval - Global
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THINKING
7. Overlaps, Intersections and Conflicts: An Introduction to Arts and Culture - by Arlene Goldbard
"[M]erely by participating - by exchanging words, observing customs, involving oneself in communal celebration and grief and the milestones of community life - everyone participates in creating and disseminating culture." Community artists and arts organisations can play roles in cultural development, too. For example, artists worldwide are working with community members to respond to globalisation, which risks "overwhelming heritage cultures with mass-produced commercial cultural products."
8. Cultural Policy: in the board rooms and on the streets - by Caron Atlas
Decisions made every day - from the choice of a family to educate their child in the language, traditions, and history of a particular ethnic group to a city council's decision to cut arts in the schools - constitute cultural policy. Policymaking in this area is often implicit and invisible; this prevents citizens from being able to have a conversation about the meaning and value of art and culture for them. "[A]re we reaching out to our colleagues in other fields only to strengthen the arts, or are we committed to a broader conversation about the needs of our communities and the strength of our democracy?"
9. The Dialectic of Community Arts Practice and Globalization, or Is This Parade Going the Wrong Way? - by Tom Borrup
"When you work to create and provide tools for cultural self-determination to your fellow community members, do you know if you're truly contributing to human liberation and empowerment? Or might you be unwittingly advancing a grander colonization scheme or an economic exploitation strategy?" With these questions in mind, Borrup provides 3 "stories of contradictions": case studies of community-based cultural work worldwide that have been used - wittingly or unwittingly - as tools for a larger, corporate-driven aim.
See also:
- Common Characteristics of Effective [Arts-based Community Development] Programmes
- Mapping the Field: Arts-Based Community Development
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...African choices...critical voices....crossing borders...African stories...
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NETWORKS
10. Art for Charity - Arts for Global Development Network - Global
Brings arts advocates and stakeholders together to promote the use of art as a way to improve communities worldwide, especially in the poorer regions in Eastern Europe, Eastern Mediterranean/Northern Africa, Near/Middle East, and Central Asia. The Art4Charity site is used to construct and sustain a database that includes artists, artisans, independent consultants, NGOs, research and analysis experts, developmental economists, social-educational specialists, national and multilateral development agencies, and businesses. Art for Charity uses this network to foster specific community-based socio-economic and educational development projects.
Contact info@art4charity.net
11. Peace & the Arts: The Roles of Art in Peacebuilding Distance Learning
A virtual course designed to explore the linkages between art and peace and to enable participants to contribute to peace using their creativity and imagination.
Contact tapcourse@yahoo.com
12. Creative Exchange
Educates people about arts and culture through an international network, an information centre, professional resources, and activities that support the use of arts and culture to achieve social change and to promote awareness and respect for cultural rights.
See also:
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Pulse Poll
Is the field of natural resource management communication faced with major theoretical debates and differences over the methods and principles to use in developing and conducting natural resource management initiatives?
If yes, what are the major issues as you see them?
[For context, see The Drum Beat 213.]
VOTE & COMMENT
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This issue written and edited by Kier Olsen DeVries.
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The Drum Beat seeks to cover the full range of communication for development activities. Inclusion of an item does not imply endorsement or support by The Partners.
Please send material for The Drum Beat to the Editor - Deborah Heimann dheimann@comminit.com
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