Crank It to Eleven

Music festivals' popularity has exploded, boosting revenues for host cities, artists, businesses, and a struggling recording industry. They also provide an environment very conducive for community development, for both locals and visitors alike. This research attempts to fill a literature gap by building on urban policy and arts policy theories to show how music festivals and music, in general, fit into the academic public administration discourse. These festivals have the potential to increase host cities' residents' quality of life and allow residents and visitors alike to experience new culture and showcase their own. However, a city that considers hosting a music festival cannot dive into the situation without careful considerations of significant challenges others have faced. Given these significant implications for cities for the better or worse, public administration scholars should examine this topic carefully and continue to monitor the new information about these festivals as it develops.

Art and Community Capacity-Building

Arts programs are increasingly becoming part of public engagement in the context of community health but have mostly been studied in urban and suburban locations. This chapter outlines a successful partnership between an arts in healthcare program and a community health coalition in rural Franklin County, Florida, an area struck by natural and human-made disasters. During a five-year period, the organizations worked in partnership to address the “fragmentation” of the community and its health services and to build community and organizational capacity for public health planning using the arts. The partnership sustained engagement with a variety of communities and institutions in Franklin County, Florida, conducted community assessments, developed public murals and mosaics, created community gardens, gathered stories, and employed Boalian theater strategies. The case study examines the partnership through the lens of a “Community Coalition Action Theory” framework, offering a narrative of a unique partnership (Butterfoss & Kegler, 2002).

The Role of Collaboration to Encourage Civic Engagement through the Arts

Historically governments have used art's universal language to achieve various goals, including political engagement through cultural enrichment. Employing nonprofit/public sector relationships for the arts presents myriad governance challenges, but always with the promise of intrinsic and extrinsic benefits. This chapter presents two cases to illustrate such collaborative relationships. Applying various nonprofit theories, stakeholder discussions and Sherry R. Arnstein's still relevant community engagement work to explore relationships between sectors in arts funding, the first involves the passage of a local tax to provide funding for arts education and arts organizations. The second illustrates an instrumental relationship between a local government and nonprofit to provide art programs to promote tolerance in an increasingly diverse community. Both cases present imperfect policies, but represent the continuation of an ancient practice wherein the arts are being used for more than arts' sake, but to serve a multitude of non-arts instrumental societal functions.

¡Adelante! El Mundo Mágico Creado, The Magical World Created

This chapter illustrates the unique cross-sector visual arts exchange program between Cuba and the U.S. This collaborative project is situated in the Cuban educational perspective of Pedagogía de la Ternura (Pedagogy of Tenderness) and La Cláse Magica (Magical Class), contextually driven bilingual model for diverse student population in the U.S. The role of art in Cuban context of national and cultural identity is also discussed. The CreArte in Cuba, a voluntary cultural community inspired organization, aims to improve the cultural life and the realities of all the local participants. In the U.S., CreArte project was implemented at a local high school to create a positive learning space for the most disenfranchised local high school students enrolled in a remedial reading program. The juxtaposition of two apparently disparate and contrasting realities formed an amazing collage of hope and trust beyond the visible cognitive, behavioral, and affective literacy outcomes for the students and adults in both countries traveling across 90 miles of troubled water between Cuba and USA.

The Arts, Civic Engagement, and Urban Youth

The Arts, Civic Engagement, and Urban Youth explores methods for using the arts as a vehicle to empower urban youth to become critically engaged in their communities and positively improve their quality of life. Barriers that prevent urban youth from critically engaging social injustices and inequalities are examined and arts-based responses offered. An arts-integrated methodology is woven into previously researched and proposed pathways to civic engagement in order to offer urban youth opportunities for hope and healing from chronic adversity. This arts-integrated methodology facilitates in the development of self-efficacy and knowledge for youth to successfully affect sustainable change in their communities.

Promoting Civic Engagement through University Curricula

In recent years, universities and colleges are including civic engagement in their mission statements. University administrators are increasingly encouraged faculty and students to participate in civic engagement both on and off campus. Various stakeholders should be part of this conversation in order to create a setting for learning that reflects the mission of the university or college. In this study, sixteen university freshmen participated in civic engagement through a freshman honors forum course. In addition to promoting civic engagement, the course supported the arts and museums in Memphis, Tennessee. Pre and exit surveys were conducted the participants to gain insight into their thoughts and experiences towards the course's curriculum. Their experiences provide a window into thinking about the role of civic engagement with university students.

A Foundation's 20-Year Experiment in Art and Civic Engagement

In 1994, four family foundations in San Francisco launched a grantmaking program to support Bay Area artists by providing them with project grants for the creation of new work through collaborations with nonprofit organizations. Creative Work Fund grantees may collaborate with any kind of nonprofit organization and many choose to work in community settings. This chapter explores five projects awarded grants between 2008 and 2013. Each focused on a distinctive goal: increasing cohesion among a community of recent immigrants from Africa, exploring a city's recovery from the economic downturn and foreclosure crisis, promoting literacy and reading in a inner city school district, incorporating public art into the development of an historic waterfront, and achieving better health and mental health outcomes for women infected with HIV. Project research is based on grant proposals, reports, media coverage, and interviews with artists and their principle nonprofit partners.

Orchestrating Community Change through Music and Heritage

This chapter will provide a case study reflection on the outcomes and lessons of a long-term community-university partnership that originated among a group of students exploring the relationship between creativity, culture, and community development in Memphis. A collaboratively-developed “Memphis Music Magnet” plan is being implemented in the Soulsville USA neighborhood to explore the regenerative potential of culture-led planning. The plan seeks to create neighborhood-level change by supporting musicians, celebrating the artistic heritage of the neighborhood, and creating new types of interaction and collaboration. This reflection will consider the missed opportunities and often-indirect relationship between positive impacts and preconceived intent.

Watching the Walls Crumble

This chapter offers an account of nine-months with the Young Lion's Global Artists, a youth arts program based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. This chapter serves as a practitioner's account, illustrating the program's creation, selected activities and group dynamics. Through these accounts the chapter further seeks to offer this program as an example of the potential for community-based art programs to cultivate conversation and social engagement. Over the course of a nine-month period this particular program was instrumental in creating bonds across ethnic divides that had initially caused social separation and tension when the program began, further highlighting the potential for arts program to inspire conversation and transformation (Greene, 1995; Eisner, 2002; Barrett, 2010).

Surviving the Partnership

This chapter breaks down the process and application of community engagement projects within a department of architecture, at an urban-serving research university. As a matter of policy, the department requires community engagement projects in all design studios, and as such, promotes a culture of engaged learning. The authors present an overview of engaged culture based on their experiences with community engagement projects, including strengths and areas for improvement. This is supported by the presentation of an arts-based project involving plastic reuse that brought together university students and primary school students. The authors conclude with recommendations for sustaining a culture of engagement, including aspects they seek to implement as they continue to foster engaged learning and further their own engaged scholarship.