When M/A partnerships produce positive results, municipalities and artists often want more opportunity. Part of creating such a partnership is thinking about how it can continue into the future.
Sustaining partnership work might take the form of:
Ongoing and regular opportunities for artists and municipalities to partner
An established program that supports the partnerships
A relationship between a particular municipal agency and a particular artist
A city agency’s way of delivering services, engaging community, and working equitably
Extending the impact of a particular project
Of course not all partnerships need to be forever— some partnerships are structured as one-time projects or time-limited initiatives. Partners need to consider whether and how sustainability is relevant to them, and plan for it at the very beginning of the relationship.
“Sometimes when a program ends, it leaves that hole behind. …you hate to bring in a resource and then not be able to have an opportunity for it to continue.”
Ann Siegel, Roslindale Community Center, Boston AIR program
Here are five strategies that can help with planning and establishing a foundation for sustainability.
Municipal government is cyclical, as major leadership and staff changes can happen after municipal elections. It’s important to have more than one champion within municipal government who can advocate for ongoing or new opportunities to integrate artists, secure resources, and build internal capacity. Joshua Silver of the Washington, DC Office of Planning recommends that you “seed and bleed this into [municipal] systems.” Strategies to build a municipal support system include:
Build relationships with agency leadership and staff, unions, management, and community task force/boards that work with local government. Cultivating career staff can help build a foundation of support given that political appointees and elected officials have limited terms.
Introduce other agencies to civically-engaged art and artists. Make it a point to invite staff across the municipality to public events, trainings, or internal meetings so they can experience the process and the artwork first-hand, and get a tangible sense of its possibilities and impacts.
Involve officials. Make sure that elected officials get regular updates about progress and outcomes. Invite them to experience or observe activities, and publicly and ceremonially recognize the impacts of artists and government working together, including announcements of major funding received. Watch this press conference to see how the Mayor, Chief of Police, and artists in Portland, ME publicly celebrated an important grant award.
Build demand. Listen for opportunities to connect partners and foster more allies.
Integrate partnership work into existing municipal programs, priorities, and mandates. Because Nashville’s Restorative Arts program was connected with the Juvenile Court, it was able to weather the end of the term of the mayor who initially funded the program.
Nashville, TN
Restorative Arts
Metro Arts, Juvenile Court, Oasis Center & local artists
The Restorative Arts program is a partnership between Nashville’s Office of Arts and Culture (Metro Arts), the Juvenile Court, and the Oasis Center to create an arts-based intervention system for court-involved youth. Research shows that youth engagement with the arts results in more investment in education, greater community engagement, and better self esteem and social skills. The program provides arts workshops, performances, and other arts experiences for youth in juvenile detention, and for families and youth who are otherwise court-involved.
Metro Arts and the Oasis Center trains teaching artists and partner organization staff in restorative practices, understanding systemic racism, trauma-informed care, positive youth development, non-violent communication and storytelling. This equips artists to be effective front-line service providers for youth. Teaching artists introduce participants to art forms including spoken word, storytelling, theater, creative writing, beat making, music production, dance, visual art, yoga, and drumming.
Restorative Arts is intentional in its commitment to equity because social, structural, and systemic inequities are at the core of trauma experienced by many young people who end up in the juvenile justice system. Before creating the program, Metro Arts staff worked to understand the oppressive structures that exist in its own agency work, in the systems in which it interacts, and in its partnership with Juvenile Justice Center. Only by analyzing inequity, could it devise the program that could help break down barriers.
Dedicate, cultivate, and support “vision keepers” who communicate and translate the partnerships’ value and develop strategies for sustaining interest, ownership, and visibility both within municipal government and in the public eye.
Invest in successful, replicable elements. These can reinforce the compelling public good that is created through a partnership. A musical and photographic tribute to victims of gun violence created by
Boston AIR artist Shaw Pong Liu has become an annual part of the City’s Mother’s Day March.
Boston, MA
Boston Artist in Residence Program (AIR)
Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, various city agencies & local artists
Artist Karen Young and artwork for her project Older and Bolder at the Boston AIR showcase, 2018. Photo: Ryan McMahon.
The Oral History Phone Booth, part of Daniel Johnson's project We Are Boston: Stories of Hope, Struggle, and Resilience, at the Boston AIR showcase, 2018.
Photo: Ryan McMahon
AIR Nakia Hill leading a writing workshop. Photo: City of Boston
Karen Young performing with Older and Bolder at National Night Out in Dorchester. Photo: City of Boston.
Steve Locke's Love Letter to a Library, at Central Branch of Boston Public Library. Photo: City of Boston
Nakia Hill leading a writing workshop with senior women, whose stories were featured in her intergenerational anthology I Still Did It: Stories of Resilience.Photo: City of Boston
The Boston Artists-in-Residence Program (Boston AIR) began in 2015, and was developed alongside the the City’s ten-year cultural strategic plan, Boston Creates. The AIR program positions social practice as an important part of government work and community engagement. Artists can help the city approach challenges in new ways, and lift up voices that are less often heard. The program aims to provide communities with more pathways to become active in shaping and understanding the policies that influence them.
Artists work with specific departments, neighborhoods, and/or within city programs such as after-school programs. As of 2019, 20 artists have participated. The AIR program uses a cohort model, in which multiple artists are working in the same year, and also convene for workshops, lectures, and to learn from each other. Cohorts may work with themes—for example the seven 2018 AIR projects were framed through a lens of Resilience and Racial Equity. For the first four months, the artists researched related City policies and practices such as climate change and aging. They then spent a year collaborating with community members and City officials on art projects that reframed public conversations around the issues. You can see some examples of the AIR cohort’s work in this video.
Find opportunities to continue M/A relationships after the project is over. Allison Orr and Krisse Marty of make a point to attend employee appreciation events; they show a documentary of an M/A project at city events; they invite city employees to participate on panels; and they have even created an alumni group of city participants and convene them once a year.
Involve community members in becoming stewards of the work. The late artist Jackie Brookner said about her stormwater retention project, “We don’t talk about maintaining a baby. We care for a baby. Changing diapers and feeding is care. Stormwater ponds are about caring for, not maintaining.”
Boston, MA
Boston Artist in Residence Program (AIR)
Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, various city agencies & local artists
Artist Karen Young and artwork for her project Older and Bolder at the Boston AIR showcase, 2018. Photo: Ryan McMahon.
The Oral History Phone Booth, part of Daniel Johnson's project We Are Boston: Stories of Hope, Struggle, and Resilience, at the Boston AIR showcase, 2018.
Photo: Ryan McMahon
AIR Nakia Hill leading a writing workshop. Photo: City of Boston
Karen Young performing with Older and Bolder at National Night Out in Dorchester. Photo: City of Boston.
Steve Locke's Love Letter to a Library, at Central Branch of Boston Public Library. Photo: City of Boston
Nakia Hill leading a writing workshop with senior women, whose stories were featured in her intergenerational anthology I Still Did It: Stories of Resilience.Photo: City of Boston
The Boston Artists-in-Residence Program (Boston AIR) began in 2015, and was developed alongside the the City’s ten-year cultural strategic plan, Boston Creates. The AIR program positions social practice as an important part of government work and community engagement. Artists can help the city approach challenges in new ways, and lift up voices that are less often heard. The program aims to provide communities with more pathways to become active in shaping and understanding the policies that influence them.
Artists work with specific departments, neighborhoods, and/or within city programs such as after-school programs. As of 2019, 20 artists have participated. The AIR program uses a cohort model, in which multiple artists are working in the same year, and also convene for workshops, lectures, and to learn from each other. Cohorts may work with themes—for example the seven 2018 AIR projects were framed through a lens of Resilience and Racial Equity. For the first four months, the artists researched related City policies and practices such as climate change and aging. They then spent a year collaborating with community members and City officials on art projects that reframed public conversations around the issues. You can see some examples of the AIR cohort’s work in this video.
Austin-based Forklift Danceworks activates communities through a collaborative creative process. Forklift’s performances are typically large-scale, site-specific civic spectacles that create deeper understandings of the jobs essential to urban life, more informed civic dialogue, and greater connection between citizens and across communities. My Park, My Pool, My City is a three-year artistic residency in partnership with the Austin’s Parks and Recreation Aquatics Division which began in 2017, activating and amplifying civic engagement around the future of Austin’s city pools. It was conceived of after a successful collaboration between Forklift and Austin’s Urban Forestry Program.
From 2015-17, Forklift Co-Directors Alison Orr and Krissie Marty participated in conversations and planning meetings with the Director and staff of the Parks & Recreation Department and neighborhood leaders. They came to more fully understand the importance of pools as public gathering spaces and the challenges Austin’s pools face. Austin’s 45 aquatics facilities are on average 50 years old, and many need more repairs than the city can afford. Conditions are particularly acute in the historically marginalized neighborhoods of East Austin.
As these neighborhoods expand and their demographics shift, My Park, My Pool, My City is, in part, an opportunity to celebrate and maintain the vibrant histories of these communities, and to bring Austinites together at the pool. For each of the three years, My Park, My Pool, My City centered on a different East Austin pool, creating summer performances in collaboration with aquatics maintenance staff, lifeguards, and neighborhood residents. Forklift also hosted and participated in community meetings and pool parties leading up to and following each show. The Aquatics Division provided access to city facilities, paid performing employees for their time, and informed the issues the project addresses. Through a process of deep listening and collaborative creation, Forklift artists invited staff and pool users to share their stories, and invited audiences to bear witness to the people whose labor supports life in Austin.
When artists or third-party partners play a significant managerial role in a partnership, reliance on them may keep municipalities from taking initiative to coordinate, resource, and lead ongoing partnerships. There can still be an ongoing and important role for local arts agencies or nonprofit partners who can manage and expedite budgets, funding and contracts.
Plan for leadership transition from intermediaries or artists to municipal entities.
Set up systems to operationalize partnership policies and practices including:
Identifying and vetting municipal opportunities and readiness
Solidifying the role and responsibilities of the municipal liaison
Finding, securing, and working with artists
Documenting values, procedures, and key contacts
Institutionalizing accountability measures
Documenting what’s been learned from working with artists, including through regular reflection, and incorporating it into internal and external evaluation
Create a funding plan that lays the foundation for continued work.
“[City] departments...have systems that we’ve built with and for them where they can hire their own artists. The true role of an intermediary is to work yourself out of a job.”
Amelia Brown, Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, Minneapolis
Build Artists’ Capacity and a Pipeline
Municipalities can only benefit from more artists becoming interested and skilled in civic work, especially if they represent the diversity of local communities and artistic disciplines. Supporting artists’ capacity to do work civically, and developing a pipeline to working with the municipality is key. Working in tandem with a Local Arts Agency or artist service organization can help municipalities achieve these goals.
Contract experienced artists to mentor other artists in the skills and sensibilities needed to work in an M/A partnerships. Experienced artists can be encouraged to include other artists into their budget to assist and learn by doing.
Offer training and workshops by experienced artists. These can be standalone workshops developed internally or with third-party partners, or they could be offered through existing artist professional development programs, or through local colleges and universities. These could be offered regularly and/or in advance of an upcoming opportunity.
Build Evidence of Positive Impacts
M/A partnerships have myriad positive impacts on municipalities and communities. Evaluating, documenting and disseminating these are an essential way to make the case to municipal leaders and funders for sustaining partnership work. Evaluation is a key part of this equation—you can learn more about how and why to evaluate partnerships here.These pointers will also help you in this work:
Identify the decision-makers within city government. Collect evidence that makes the case for M/A partnerships and present it to those leaders.
Remember that change happens over time. Many municipal goals require long-term work and commitment to create change. An M/A partnership can create pre-conditions for change. Document incremental changes during partnerships and, when possible, ripple effects and longer-term changes that result.
Publicize the projects widely.Communicate the value of M/A partnerships beyond immediate project stakeholders and in both cultural and civic circles.
Example
evaluators, Rainbow Research, recommended that the City create this infrastructure to sustain the program:
Define what long-term commitment looks like for the City, including connecting the program across multiple departments, and adapting departmental practices and policies to facilitate the program.
Define what resources, support, and commitment from City leadership are needed to support this level of change and build an internal City structure for sustainability.
Encourage interested City departments to demonstrate readiness or willingness for change including a demonstration of ‘pre-work’ on race/racial biases, commitment of time and resources, and commitment from department leadership.
The Equity Pulpit, part of a project by D.A. Bullock and Ariah Fine, in collaboration with the Neighborhood and Community Relations Department.
Photo: Alizarin Meninnga, Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy, City of Minneapolis
Part of a creative asset mapping of the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood by artists E.G. Bailey and Shá Cage.
Photo: Justin Sengly, Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy, City of Minneapolis
Part of a creative asset mapping of the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood by artists E.G. Bailey and Shá Cage.
Photo: Justin Sengly, Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy, City of Minneapolis
Tenants participating in a “Hearing Tenant Voices” workshop with artists Mankwe Ndosi and Reggie Prim, in collaboration with the Regulatory Services Department.
Photo: Rebecca Crisanta de Ybarra, Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy, City of Minneapolis
Housing inspectors participating in a “Hearing Tenant Voices” workshop with artists Mankwe Ndosi and Reggie Prim, in collaboration with the Regulatory Services Department.
Photo: Rebecca Crisanta de Ybarra, Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy, City of Minneapolis
Minneapolis’ Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy (ACCE) leads the Creative CityMaking (CCM) program since 2013. CCM advances the City’s goal of improving economic and racial disparities through systems change, and by creating better engagement and services for communities. CCM places experienced community artists into collaboration with staff in City departments which have included Community Planning and Economic Development, Regulatory Services, Information Technology, Neighborhood and Community Relations, City Clerk’s Office, Public Works, and the Office of Sustainability. Projects have focused both on internal concerns, such as transforming agency culture, and on agency work within communities.
CCM is grounded in ideas of equity. Teams have participated in dialogue that included deep personal reflection and often emotional conversations about the City’s and departments’ historical and current patterns of inequity. They have worked to understand the specific contexts of the department and the community that they engage. Artists have been particularly adept at identifying disconnects between the departments’ intentions for community engagement, and the reality of their practices. These conversations, though difficult at times, created a space for both team and project growth.
Three structural aspects of CCM were key to its continued success:
A strong third-party partner was critical to establishing CCM. Nonprofit Intermedia Arts (now defunct) partnered with ACCE to initiate the program, which was funded by an Art Place grant. Intermedia Arts (IA) was the grant recipient in order to have outside control of resources and safeguard against any potential political interference with the program. IA and ACCE collaboratively designed and launched the program with the intention that ACCE would assume administration of the project. IA served as intermediary between artists and City departments.
ACCE engaged an outside evaluator, Rainbow Research, to produce a Developmental Evaluation of CCM. The evaluators were “embedded” early on and provided ongoing feedback and reflection to teams so that projects could adjust in real time to get the best results. For more on this, see the Evaluation in Action profile.
ACCE developed a plan to sustain the program. While the Art Place grant stretched over the three year pilot phase, ACCE contributed departmental matching funds for the second and third years. They then secured an NEA grant to match those funds. ACCE also hired a program manager to support the partnerships and ensure future capacity for CCM.
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