From The Wallace Foundation: Building Trust, Sustaining Art
Cross-Case Findings from the Arts Research for Communities of Color Fellowship
New report shows how community-based arts organizations navigate trust, provide artistic value, and ensure organizational well-being amidst shifting cultural and funding landscapes
The report identifies seven core strategies that organizations have deployed to respond to such structural constraints. These strategies often help strengthen community accountability and expand artistic possibility within the field. They include:
- Trust-building strategies and practices that keep organizations rooted in and responsive to the communities they serve;
- Building legitimacy by reforming dominant narratives that devalue the arts of those communities;
- Archiving and documentation to preserve cultural memory, strengthen organizational capacity, and demonstrate organizations’ importance to their communities;
- Collective responsibility and intentional investment in labor, care, and sustainability practices;
- Dynamic management and governance approaches that maintain community-rooted values while developing systems that support scale and accountability;
- Collaboration, fluidity, and solidarity to strengthen relationships across people, organizations, and movements; and
- Placemaking and capital investment practices that help communities feel stable, connected, and supported in the long-term.
Photo courtesy of The Wallace Foundation.