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outcomes Archives - ChangingMedia

Expecting Too Much of Creative Placemaking?

By | Art & Social Change, Art That Counts | One Comment

As is probably clear by now, I’m deeply curious and often delighted by creative placemaking. When it comes to evaluation of creative placemaking, however, I’m stumped or underwhelmed, and I’m not alone. Over a year ago, Ian David Moss wrote “Creative Placemaking Has An Outcomes Problem” and Ellen Berkovitch wrote a summary of arguments in “Can Creative Placemaking Be Proven?

Personally, I’m on the fence if the problem is in outcomes or expectations…

Outcomes: We’re not measuring (enough)

In some instances, funders and project organizers are content with anecdotal evidence or uncertain how to establish quantitative data for their projects. Metrics and analysis isn’t an important part of the project from conception, the effort to accomplish something is good enough.

Outcomes: We’re not measuring the right things

More recently, it’s been popular to tie artistic projects specifically to economic indicators — attempting to prove that an arts festival or mural project has increased home values or brought more jobs into a neighborhood. While these are valuable things if/when they can be proven, I don’t believe the value in an art project is in raising home values any more than I believe the purpose of a painting is to match my couch.

Expectations: Vibrancy Indicators & Causation

Creative placemaking grants from both ArtPlace America and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) are both assessed after the fact using community indicators. To simplify things, I’ll just talk about ArtPlace’s use of Vibrancy Indicators (the specifics of each program’s indicators are different; the general use and intent is similar enough).

ArtPlace Vibrancy Indicators

ArtPlace Vibrancy Indicators

Indicators aren’t meant to be the equivalent of a project’s goals … which is good, because if you were handed $280,000 (the average size of an ArtPlace grant) to increase the jobs or even the walkability of a neighborhood, it’s unlikely that creative placemaking would be the tool you turned to. However, indicators are taking the place of evaluation and, as a result, projects aren’t assessed based on their unique goals and audiences. Again, this seems to hinder our ability to assess which projects are successful and which are not and the thoughtful analysis of those results.

In looking at these broad areas, the funders are evaluating changes at a neighborhood or city level that may or may not be attributable to the actual funded creative placemaking activity. These sort of changes (e.g., increases in an area’s population, restaurants or artspaces) are the result of a variety of causes and are very worthwhile to track (see Vital Signs data) but can’t necessarily provide any clarity about whether one creative placemaking project was more successful than another — let alone why.

Finally, if the end goal for funders (and creative placemakers!) is to move the dial on some of these indicators, it would be far more encouraging to engage in long-term funding of specific projects and their evaluation and refinement. While a one-year project can positively impact a neighborhood’s walkscore, it can deteriorate into a detriment three years later if there’s no capacity to maintain it.

Scott Burkholder has written about funders questioning the impact of The Baltimore Love Project:

One of my “fondest” memories made during the project was sitting in a prolific Baltimore foundation’s offices. It was one of my first pitches to a significant investor. He had the means to pay for the entire project. Trial by fire was an understatement. Despite our passion, we were not prepared to articulate a change that was of interest to him. He pretty much asked us how many kids would graduate from high school and go to college as a result of our work. We not only didn’t know the answer, we had no response.

Seeing kids graduate from high school and enter college is an extremely worthwhile goal, but it’s not something that happens with only a year of effort (as of the publication of this article, my own kid will be a mere 275 days away from this achievement, so I can say this with some authority). There are twenty Baltimore Love Project murals total — and five of those are at area schools. Will an incoming freshman be inspired by the mural at her school? Will she go to college and get an art education degree? Will she return to Baltimore and teach, having her own hand in inspiring countless graduates?

It’s all possible, but a program evaluation that occurs as a brief requirement at a project’s end can never hope to track such a thing and expecting a project to deliver on those terms is unreasonable. (I should clarify here that the Baltimore Love Project is not specifically a creative placemaking endeavor, but their experience is not a unique one.)

I think creative placemaking projects have their impact, but we’re not doing the proper work yet to best highlight those impacts. The issue isn’t just with the outcomes, but also with our expectations for the projects and the data both.

Community art

Meaning & Merit in Community Arts

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So much of establishing metrics and evaluations for an organization or program is about asking the right questions and sometimes those questions take you unexpected places. For Rebecca Yenawine and Zoë Reznick Gewanter, their questions have led them on a multi-year research project encompassing not only the outcomes of community art projects, but also illuminating the meaning and merit of the field itself.

Yenawine and Reznick Gewanter are both involved in MICA’s Community Arts program (Yenawine is an adjunct faculty member and community art evaluation consultant and Reznick Gewanter is a graduate of the Masters of Art in Community Art and research assistant for studies through the Office of Community Engagement) and collaborators in the Reservoir Hill-based youth media nonprofit New Lens. In pursuit of useful evaluations for New Lens, the pair realized more contextual research was needed in the area of community art. They’ve designed and are in the process of completing the following three-phase research project:

  • Phase I (2010): Conducted 14 national interviews with community arts practitioners with ten or more years experience.
Chart describing the outcomes of community art

Outcomes of community art cited by current practitioners in the study. Source.

  • Phase II (2012): Interviewed more than 80 youth participants of Baltimore community arts programs.
  • Phase III (ongoing): Studied the impact of community arts programs in five Baltimore neighborhoods (four with active community arts programs, plus four control neighborhoods), collecting 1,000 surveys.

As a whole, this research looks to document the impacts of community art in order to help other practitioners, organizations, communities and funders. This sort of broad multidisciplinary research is rare and provides a benefit to the entire field. In its first two phases, the study provides a common language with which to discuss outcomes in community art, and the final phase includes the development of an assessment tool that can be adapted across organizations and communities. In addition to better describing the outcomes of community arts programs, the research of Yenawine and Reznick Gewanter also challenges practitioners and organizations to invest in evaluations that are specific to the impact and influence of the field and not simply generic metrics. On the Americans for the Arts web site, Yenawine writes:

If art is in fact offering a space for developing social understanding, for connecting and building relationships, and for developing greater cohesion, part of the story that needs to be told is about how and why this is a valuable counterbalance to a society whose bureaucracies emphasize productivity, economic success, and competition without fostering the larger social fabric of communities.

This is really the value of outcomes and metrics. Data is more than numbers in a spreadsheet, charts submitted with reports; at its best, it empowers our descriptions and understanding of our communities, our work and their merit.

IMAGE CREDIT. Photograph courtesy of New Lens.

Metrics for Joy and Life

By | Art & Social Change, Art That Counts | No Comments

Many art programs and projects exist because they seem like good ideas — some because they made good use of an existing space, others because they have good intentions to draw attention to or even solve a community problem. As an example, I present the missions of two now-defunct Baltimore projects:

  1. Operation: Storefront: To match landlords of vacant spaces with tenants to fill space and create life on the street.
  2. Black Male Identity Project (BMI): [To serve] as a catalyst for a national campaign to build, celebrate, and accentuate positive, authentic images and narratives of black cultural identity.

Both of these projects had laudable goals. But there can be substantial difficulty in evaluating the successes and failures in achieving such goals. What does it mean to be a catalyst on a national level or for there to be “life” on a street? Furthermore, how should these things be measured? What can they be compared to?

Evaluations such as this are often considered as an afterthought and usually as an angst-inducing or frustrating rite of passage to receive funding. Clayworks’ founder, Deborah Bedwell, once wrote:

…when I would see the words ‘measurable outcomes’ on a grant proposal, I would experience a wave of nausea and anxiety. I would be required, the grant stated, to prove to the prospective funder that our programs and activities had created a better life for those who touched clay and for the rest of the city — and maybe the rest of humanity.

So, just as an organization or project’s mission and goals can be far reaching and even dramatically overstated, the bar for measurement can also seem impossibly high. In an effort to create one-size-fits-all metrics, some have focused on the most obvious and simple things to identify and measure — such as attendance or economic impact. For some organizations and projects, even these metrics can be challenging. For example, how should the attendance to a mural or other public work of art be estimated? Some sites are using QR codes to track visits, but the necessity of smartphones is an obvious limitation to the resulting data. Some funders have developed their own gauges, such as ArtPlace’s vibrancy indicators, in an effort to create a level playing field among grantseekers and with a hope to create a more useful and larger pool of results data from their activities.

In the case of Clayworks, Bedwell was interested in capturing and communicating something beyond raw numbers about participation in their community arts program and saw the need to “figure out how to evaluate joy, how to measure creativity, and how to quantify that ‘I get it!’ moment that makes weeks of hard work worth the effort.” While many might give up before they started on such an effort, Clayworks received assistance from the Maryland Association of Nonprofits in tackling their evaluation dilemma; they adopted a model used by The Kellogg Foundation, which Bedwell described enthusiastically in an article for the NEA’s web site (Note: This article is no longer online, but is available as a PDF download. All Bedwell’s quotes are originally from this article.).

So, if one can measure the joy found in creating, then it is likely also possible to measure — with adequate thought and planning — the “life” or vibrancy of a street or neighborhood, the changes in attitudes inspired by a photograph or a lecture. It’s important for these challenging metrics to be tackled and shared, not just so funders can identify return on investment, but so artists and communities can benefit, be able to point to their successes, to know which efforts are worth continuing and repeating.

I plan on diving into this in even greater detail in future posts, as well as continuing to highlight existing art projects and their impact. If you want to share some insights about your organization or project, I invite you to join me in the comments or to reach out to me via Twitter or email.

Noteworthy:

If you are inspired by or involved in the intersection of arts, culture and community, these upcoming events may be worth your time to check out:


PHOTO CREDIT. Photo of entrance to the Franklin Building in Chicago by Flickr user Terence Faircloth/Atelier Teee.