Leveraging the roles that arts and culture can play in a community development context can both help those organizations achieve their goals and also fundamentally shift how people relate to each other. In working with arts and culture, community development organizations can better adapt to become more connected, relevant, and responsive to their constituencies.

Organizations can more effectively connect with residents and other stakeholders on a deeper level, share history, build a sense of community identity, and reframe challenges so that they can be addressed more effectively. In the process, residents are activated to exercise their power to shape their future.

Our new brief, Strengthening and Connecting to the Social Fabric of Communities,” describes how this has worked in the CDI places and puts forward a theory of change for the process by which organizations and communities can move toward more equitable outcomes.