This research report evaluates the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Community Partners in Arts Access (CPAA) initiative to expand cultural participation among residents of North Philadelphia and Camden, NJ. The initiative had two phases. From September 2003 to December 2004, Knight invited 35 cultural organizations to participate in a planning process with a focus on organizational capacity, audience development, and action plans to broaden, deepen, and diversify participation. In December 2004, Knight awarded grants to 19 organizations to carry out their action plans over the next three years. The final evaluation report concluded that CPAA met its goals. Both regional and benchmark participation rates had increased from the beginning to the end of the initiative. By 2008 the gap between levels of cultural participation in North Philadelphia and Camden and the rest of the metropolitan area had been reduced significantly. This conclusion, however, belies the complexity that attended the initiative as it unfolded. Knight began CPAA in 2003 with an orthodox theory of organizational capacity building but by 2006 had shifted its focus to community transformation, and grantees had to rethink their projects. SIAP maintained its evaluation design: waves of grantee and regional participant data-gathering; a survey of artists living or working in North Philadelphia and Camden; and ongoing interviews and participant-observation with CPAA grantees. The qualitative record allowed SIAP not only to document what actually happened but also to make sense of changing theories of action during the course of the initiative.
SIAP's interim report on the Knight CPAA evaluation included an analysis of the relationship of cultural participation and serious crime in North Philadelphia; an update on cultural participation in North Philadelphia and Camden; and a summary of interviews with grantees and others involved in CPAA. Regarding the impact of crime, using data on reported crime between 1999 and 2004, SIAP found no evidence that serious crime suppressed cultural participation in North Philadelphia. Rather, crime and cultural participation were positively correlated, the result of their mutual relationship with social diversity. Grantees generally had a positive view of the initiative, though North Philadelphia groups expressed concern about the cost of partnerships with organizations located outside of the community. By contrast, one-to-one outreach strategies—often using artists and humanities scholars—elicited great enthusiasm among grantees. The report closed with two suggestions for the Foundation: (1) expand technical assistance from a focus on organizational capacity and formal partnerships to support groups working on community outreach strategies; and (2) explore opportunities to link cultural participation to other strategies for neighborhood revitalization.
This presentation is a summary of SIAP’s interim report on the Knight CPAA evaluation. The report has three parts: an assessment of the relationship of cultural participation and serious crime in North Philadelphia; an update on levels of cultural participation in North Philadelphia and Camden; and the findings of a set of interviews with grantees and others involved in CPAA.