Community Organizers

Handbook for Artists Working in Community

A 116-page resource guide serves as a way for artists who would like to start or enhance their work within communities. The resource is broken into five sections: Artist Groundwork, Community Groundwork, Project Formation, Project Implementation, and Group Participation Tools.

Overlooked Anchors: Advancing a New Standard of Practice

This report serves as a call to action to the arts sector to propagate equitable local economic growth through the “anchor framework” and describes how the arts sector through creative placemaking can foster community development and local economic growth. Through case studies of arts and culture organizations, it discusses the challenges and potential solutions for engagement with and within anchor institutions.

Rethinking Neighborhood Change and Tracking Progress

This report offers an examination of how to assess creative placemaking initiatives and, in general, community development strategies that target urban inequality. It offers key takeaways on how creative placemaking affects these kinds of communities.

When Artists Break Ground

This handbook guide created by Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC) provides commentary about the unique position arts, creative placemaking, and community development have in rust belt cities. CPAC shares in this handbook 15 themes and practices they developed when working with artists in community development..

Continuum of Impact Guide

Animating Democracy’s Continuum of Impact guide defines six families of social and civic outcomes that arts practitioners and their partners commonly aspire to and achieve through creative work. These outcome families articulate ways the arts contribute to making change happen.

Metathemes: Designing for Equitable Social Change

Developed by Design Impact, this report looks at the work of over 30 social service organizations to develop a framework for how organizations can confront inequities from a human-centered design perspective. The work looks at the core question – how do we put equity in to practice.

Planning & Designing Arts-Based Civic Engagement Projects

This toolkit provides a framework for thinking through a plan for arts-based civic engagement and dialogue projects. It guides artists and community organizers through a series of questions and is most helpful for early in the project development phase when going from an idea or a need to a real project.

Mapping the Landscape of Socially Engaged Artistic Practice

This report gives an overview and some examples of the role of a socially-engaged and community-based artist, differentiating them from a studio artist, for example. A social practice artist uses art, activism, and community engagement to work towards community and/or local government goals.