Culture Builds Community Evaluation—1997-2002

Between 1996 and 2002, SIAP worked with the William Penn Foundation on assessment of its community arts initiative in Greater Philadelphia called Culture Builds Community. SIAP’s evaluation assessed grantees’ ability to strengthen their organizations as well as their community-building capacity during a three-year grant-making cycle (June 1997-Feb 2001).

During Culture Builds Community, SIAP developed and refined a set of empirical methods for studying the relationship between cultural resources and urban communities with a focus on: (1) identification of under-the-radar actors in the community cultural sector—in particular, resident artists, informal cultural programs, for-profit cultural firms, and non-arts organizations; and (2) documentation of institutional and social networks within and between neighborhoods that support community-based arts. The research team drew two important implications from this work. First, for the community cultural sector, these networks of relationships are often more important than the organizational strength of individual cultural providers. This suggests that an ecological model of community culture may be a better guide to policymaking than an orthodox focus on organizations. Second, the unrealized links identified—the structural holes in the community cultural sector—are a potential domain of policy intervention that was largely outside of the Culture Builds Community framework. This ecological perspective dovetailed with the team’s exploration of the arts’ relationship to social movements. One paper outlines a multi-year ethnographic study of the role of the arts in AIDS/HIV activism in Philadelphia. Another proposes re-conceptualization of community-based arts that shifts from a classic nonprofit organization model to that of a social movement.

SIAP’s Culture Builds Community Evaluation—1997-2002 Collection includes the following research reports and working papers.

Summary Reports:

  • Culture Builds Community Research Brief (Feb 2002)
  • Culture Builds Community Evaluation: Summary Report (Jan 2002)

Working Papers:

  • Housing Markets and Social Capital: The Role of Participation, Institutions, and Diversity in Neighborhood Transformation (June 2001)
  • Urban Vitality, Diversity, and Culture: Population Growth and Ethnic Change in Philadelphia: 1990-2000 (March 2001)
  • Cultural Participation and Communities: The Role of Individual and Neighborhood Effects (Oct 2000)
  • The Geography of Cultural Production in Metropolitan Philadelphia (Feb 2000)
  • Cultural Organizations in the Network Society (Oct 1999)
  • Is All the World Philadelphia? A Multi-city Study of Arts and Cultural Organizations, Diversity, and Urban Revitalization (May 1999)
  • Representing the City: Arts, Culture, and Diversity in Philadelphia (April 1999)
  • Cultural Participation and Civic Engagement In Five Philadelphia Neighborhoods (Jan 1998)
  • Community Revitalization and the Arts in Philadelphia (Jan 1998)
  • Dimensions of Regional Arts and Cultural Participation: Individual and Neighborhood Effects on Participation in the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area (Sept 1997)
  • Social Citizenship and Urban Poverty (Feb 1997)

Arts and Social Movements

  • "Irrational" Organizations: Why Community-based Organizations are Really Social Movements (June 2000)
  • Art and Social Change: AIDS Activism in Philadelphia (Feb 1997)

 

Social Impact of the Arts Project

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  • Publication
    Re-presenting the City: Arts, Culture, and Diversity in Philadelphia
    (1999-04-01) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan C
    Diversity is an essential feature of urbanism, as articulated by Louis Wirth in his classic 1938 essay, “Urbanism as a Way of Life.” This paper presents 1990s findings on the connection between social diversity and cultural engagement in Philadelphia neighborhoods to question the reality of “city trenches” (Ira Katznelson 1981) and dominant views about the limits of urban revitalization. The paper examines the links between civic engagement and ethnic and economic diversity in Philadelphia by analyzing the relationship of the geography of civic and community organizations to their socio-economic context. The authors argue that arts and cultural organizations and engagement do not parallel divisions of race and social class; rather, they tend to concentrate in neighborhoods that are ethnically and economically diverse. Thus, cultural organizations provide an opportunity to support community institutions without reinforcement of social segregation.
  • Publication
    Is All the World Philadelphia?: A Multi-city Study of Arts and Cultural Organizations, Diversity, and Urban Revitalization
    (1999-05-01) Stern, Mark J
    This paper takes on the question—to what extent to are the relationships between diversity, social capital, and revitalization that SIAP has documented in Philadelphia present in other cities? This paper uses available data to give a first approximation of the relationship between these variables in other U.S. cities. For this first multi-city investigation, SIAP chose four cities—Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, and San Francisco—that share similarities but exhibit contrasts as well. They all have sizable ethnic minorities, although their ethnic composition varies greatly. They represent the four basic regions of the United States defined by the Census Bureau. Two represent established cities that have had to accommodate the restructuring of the world and national economies over the past several decades, while two represent the “Sunbelt.” Finally, two of the cities have a classic nineteenth-century core with concentric circles of later settlement, while the other two represent the urban form of the automobile age with multiple “centers” and a more dispersed pattern of development. As a “first-cut” on a multi-city study, the results of the analysis are striking. Each of the three major patterns found in Philadelphia are also present in the other cities. Each city had a substantial set of economically and ethnically diverse neighborhoods. In each city these neighborhoods were home to a large number of cultural organizations. Finally, in each city diverse neighborhoods with many cultural organizations were those most likely to experience revitalization during the 1980s. This paper therefore lays an important foundation in demonstrating that SIAP findings from Philadelphia are not idiosyncratic. In at least this respect, all the world really is like Philadelphia.
  • Publication
    Community Revitalization and the Arts in Philadelphia
    (1998) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan C
    This paper explores the contours of community revitalization and its relationship to arts activity. The authors found that in Philadelphia, neighborhoods in which the arts were a visible presence were more likely to have fared better—as measured by changes in poverty and population—than the rest of the city. The paper begins with an examination of trends in revitalization in the city of Philadelphia during the 1980s. The team found little relationship between declines in poverty and changes in the racial composition of the city’s neighborhoods—a classic indicator of gentrification--during this decade. When they examined the relationship of the arts to revitalization, they found that sections of the city that consistently emerged as “high participation” neighborhoods—whether looking at presence of cultural organizations or levels of local involvement--were precisely the places likely to have higher than average growth of income and population during the 1980s. The authors then turn to patterns of participation in community arts activities. What they found was extraordinarily high levels of participation from across the region in community cultural activities. And, consistent with previous SIAP studies, they found that the diverse neighborhoods of the city account for the lion’s share of this regional participation in community arts.
  • Publication
    Cultural Participation and Civic Engagement In Five Philadelphia Neighborhoods
    (1998) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan C
    One of SIAP's goals has been to examine the links that connect arts participation to other form of civic engagement. In previous papers, the team used a variety of perspectives--the location of organizations, levels of community participation, observation of behavior and physical traces, and levels of regional cultural participation--to examine this process. This paper uses a community participation survey conducted in five Philadelphia case study neighborhoods to examine links between community participation, community arts participation, and regional arts participation. This paper and other SIAP studies have found that the socio-economic status of a neighborhood is a consistent predictor of residents' level of participation. Yet, the paper also suggests that cultural participation is more complex than either the economic model or the cultural capital theory would predict. A neighborhood’s cultural infrastructure is a stronger predictor of participation than either income or education. Moreover, decisions about cultural participation are closely related to engagement in other types of community activities, such as schools, community groups, and social clubs. Thus neighborhood residents effectively function as connectors between arts and non-arts institutions. The paper documents a strong relationship between neighborhood cultural participation and other forms of community engagement. The fact that residents make connections that remain elusive for organizational leaders suggests an avenue for strengthening institutional networks.
  • Publication
    Social Citizenship and Urban Poverty
    (1997-02-01) Stern, Mark J
    The increased visibility of concentrated urban poverty has posed a variety of intellectual and policy challenges in the past decade. The spread of joblessness and economic disinvestment has left many urban neighborhoods in ruins. Fears about the culture and family life of the poor have motivated a variety of responses, including the recent “welfare reform” effort that ended the federal government’s guarantee of financial assistance to dependent children. The author has argued in previous papers that the underclass thesis--which draws a sharp distinction between the underclass and the mainstream--has served an ideological role with respect to social changes in two spheres: work and family. In this paper, Stern extends the argument to another sphere of social life: the public sphere. The underclass thesis is explicit in its predictions of what we should expect to find with respect to public participation. That is, underclass neighborhoods should be characterized by low levels of public participation, few social institutions, and profound neglect of public places. Moreover, we should find a discontinuity between levels in areas of concentrated poverty and the rest of the city. This paper examines public participation and the underclass from an empirical perspective. Stern uses three SIAP data sources to examine the role of arts and cultural institutions in the social life of Philadelphia. The first is a survey of public participation, conducted in five Philadelphia neighborhoods during the summer and fall of 1997, which examines the relationship of participation in neighborhood institutions, cultural participation, and evaluations of quality-of-life. The second is an assessment of physical traces of attention and neglect in these five neighborhoods and one additional community. The third is a compilation of social and community institutions for the entire Philadelphia region. These data sources provide three distinct perspectives on the concept of participation--the individual structure of participation, the physical residue of public engagement and disengagement, and the institutional structure of participation.
  • Publication
    “Irrational” Organizations: Why Community-Based Organizations Are Really Social Movements
    (2000-06-01) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan C
    This paper was prepared for the Planners Network Conference 2000 in Toronto. The focus of the paper is a re-conceptualization of community-based organizations from a model of a classic nonprofit institution to that of a social movement. Our observations are based on intensive evaluation of about 40 community-based arts organizations in Philadelphia involved in the Culture Builds Community initiative (1997-2001) of the William Penn Foundation. We argue that these small organizations have been colonized by business school consultants who want them to act and look like more established nonprofits. In our view, these organizations are better conceptualized as 'social movements' rather than—potentially—rational organizations. Changing the conceptual framework in this manner changes the definition of terms like 'capacity-building' and 'sustainability.' In addition, it shifts the 'unit of analysis' from individual organizations to the social networks in which they operate.
  • Publication
    Dimensions of Regional Arts and Cultural Participation: Individual and Neighborhood Effects on Participation in the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area
    (1997-09-01) Stern, Mark J
    One of SIAP's goals has been to explore the dimensions of cultural participation and, in particular, the social context of participation. In a 1994 working paper, Stern used the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) specially commissioned in 1992 for the Philadelphia metropolitan area to which he added information on the number of cultural organizations located in the zip code of each respondent. The results were startling. This rough measure of community cultural resources was significantly correlated with levels of regional participation--that is, the more cultural programs located in their neighborhood, the more likely respondents were to take part in cultural activities citywide. Moreover, the relationship was stronger than that for income, education, or race/ethnicity. Thus, there appeared to be a strong “neighborhood effect” on cultural participation, something that previous research had been unable to measure. Although these findings were instructive, the limits of the Philadelphia SPPA--lack of more precise geographical identification and relatively small sample size--made it difficult to use for more detailed analysis. During 1996 and 1997, SIAP undertook a two-pronged strategy to examine more fully the interaction between community and regional participation. First, the team collected and analyzed participant data from a cross-section of Philadelphia’s regional cultural institutions. Second, they conducted a a "community participation survey" in five Philadelphia neighborhoods. This paper reports the results of the analysis of regional cultural participation. A companion paper, Cultural Participation and Civic Engagement in Five Philadelphia Neighborhoods (January 1998), examines local participation patterns.
  • Publication
    Culture Builds Community Evaluation: Summary Report
    (2002-01-01) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan C
    In 1997 the William Penn Foundation undertook the Culture Builds Community (CBC) initiative as a way to link its commitments to urban communities and to the arts and culture in the Philadelphia region. The initiative eventually funded 29 programs involving 38 organizations to test a variety of strategies to expand cultural participation and strengthen community-based cultural organizations. Some organizations received core operating support while others were funded to undertake programs focused on expanding cultural opportunities, enhancing artistic quality, or fostering community-based collaborations with a focus on young people. The Foundation provided technical assistance as well as funding to CBC grantees, from June 1997 through February 2001, and awarded a grant to Penn’s Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP) to evaluate the initiative. SIAP's assessment had two objectives: (1) to provide a better understanding of the dynamics of the community cultural sector and (2) to determine whether CBC achieved its goals with respect to strengthening organizations, expanding cultural opportunities, and improving the role of cultural organizations in building community. This report presents the findings of that assessment. SIAP concludes that overall, at the end of the initiative, the region’s community cultural sector was much stronger than it had been three years earlier.
  • Publication
    Culture Builds Community Research Brief: The Power of Arts and Culture in Community Building
    (2002-02-01) Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP)
    This research brief was designed as a hand-out for broad circulation among community arts practitioners as well as advocates and funders of community-based cultural programs. SIAP research in Philadelphia demonstrates that community arts activity can be a driving force behind the revitalization of neighborhoods. Culture Builds Community, an initiative of the William Penn Foundation, supported community arts programs in Greater Philadelphia from 1997-2001. Evaluation of this initiative, led by the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania (SIAP), focused on the ability of these organizations to build their own capacity while strengthening their community.
  • Publication
    Housing Markets and Social Capital: The Role of Participation, Institutions, and Diversity in Neighborhood Transformation
    (2001-06-01) Stern, Mark J
    This paper examines the housing markets described in the Philadelphia Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI), launched by Mayor John Street in April 2001, through the lens of social capital indicators. In SIAP’s view, the lack of hard data on the city's social and human assets made it difficult for NTI or other urban revitalization efforts to evaluate urban assets with the same rigor as urban deficits. The paper uses SIAP data on three categories of assets to examine their potential implications for the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative: social institutions, individual participation, and economic and ethnic diversity. The paper argues that each of the three dimensions measures a different temporal aspect of social capital. Using economic parlance, institutions was proposed as a lagging indicator, participation as a concurrent indicator, and diversity as a leading indicator of social capital. Specifically, the paper sought to assess whether differences in social capital reinforce or cut across housing markets, and whether a social capital perspective could help identify neighborhoods with a better than average chance of succeeding in transforming themselves.