PHILADELPHIA—The Miami-based John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has awarded $4.9 million in grants to 19 local arts groups in a broad attempt to increase cultural participation in North Philadelphia and Camden, two of the most underserved and vulnerable neighborhoods in the metropolitan area. Even though Philadelphia ranks among the richest cities in the nation in terms of cultural resources, some communities do not see the benefits of the vast resources. In fact, participation is lowest for minority adults and those with lower incomes.

All of the grantees’ projects under Knight’s “Community Partners in Arts in Access” program involve extensive community participation, from the very young to the very old, from students to the homeless, from those in recovery programs to those in the welfare system. The projects also involve each other – one of the goals of the grants is for the organizations to collaborate with other community groups, in some cases with the other Knight grantees, to best serve the largely African-American and Latino residents of the two neighborhoods.

“Right now, these low-income neighborhoods have limited arts events available to them that speak to their own identities and cultures. They deserve better access and deeper cultural experiences and we hope the Partners in Arts Access will help them achieve that,” said Julie Tarr, Knight’s community liaison program officer for Philadelphia-Camden.

The groups, which will be funded over a two-to-four year period, were challenged in their grant proposals to think in terms of neighborhood-specific projects. The geographic focus of the program brings them into partnership with other organizations with which they wouldn’t normally work. The 19 groups are involved in a range of arts and cultural activities, including mural and puppet making, dance, jazz music, ceramics, playwriting and painting, to name a few.

“The Knight grant is challenging us to do more,” said Jane Golden, one of the grantees and director of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. “We’ve worked in North Philadelphia before but these collaborations are an opportunity to work in a deeper way and bring people together in a way we’ve never done.”

Research Guides Knight’s “Community Partners in Arts Access”

The Knight Foundation developed the new “Partners in Arts Access” initiative after evaluating the research that was produced through a partnership with the Wallace Funds and RAND Corporation and considering how it could be applied in the Philadelphia-Camden market. The report, called “The New Framework for Building Participation in the Arts,” helped to frame the Philadelphia-Camden program. Results of the study can be found at: (http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1323/. This study, as well as research conducted by Mark Stern’s Social Impact of the Arts Project (at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Work and also a Knight Foundation grantee) http://www.ssw.upenn.edu/SIAP, provided valuable insight into how and why individuals choose to participate in arts and culture and the barriers that might prevent them from doing so.

“Our investments in Philadelphia provide us with a real-life setting in which we can test the ideas we helped develop and assemble examples of effective approaches,” said Julie Tarr. Tarr said that RAND created a model that illustrates the factors that influence cultural participation decisions. In order for arts organizations to design effective strategies to engage new audiences, they must understand how and why people choose to participate. Just as important, they must align their participation-building strategies with their mission.

The Wallace Fund/Rand research also showed that partnerships and collaborations are the backbone of the cultural participation model. The Knight grants were given to organizations that are committed to building community arts programming through collaborations, or to those organizations that have a good base of existing partnerships in their neighborhoods.

Given that Knight’s resources are too limited to serve the entire region, the current program will focus on two distressed areas: North Philadelphia and Camden City. The residents in the targeted neighborhoods are multi-ethnic and culturally diverse. The organizations met as a group to participate in a workshop that focused on how to build partnerships and collaborative programs.

“This is the kind of investment that says to a community like North Philadelphia that art can really make a difference in your lives, that art matters,” said Patricia Scott Hobbs, director of training for New Freedom Theatre, one of Philadelphia-based nonprofits to receive funding from the Knight Foundation.”

Collaborative Efforts, Partnerships

All of the 19 organizations funded by the Knight Foundation have developed individual programs and will be developing and initiating them in communities over the next three years. Some examples of the collaborations:

• The Clay Studio, a ceramics program; Strings for Schools, a music program; and Philadelphia Young Playwrights are establishing their programs in six middle and high schools. Different populations of students will participate in each activity, but ultimately share their results with one another and, at the end of the academic year, with the larger community. Nearly 550 students will be served by the three groups’ workshops in a school year.
  
  Playwriting will help the students develop their identity, according to Glen Knapp, executive director of Young Playwrights. “Playwriting is an educational tool that places the kids’ work at the center of the learning process. They own it and have a sense of pride,” he said.
  
  In Knapp’s experience, inner-city students use the playwriting opportunity to write about things meaningful to them. “They really use it as an outlet to tell us what’s going on in their lives,” he said.
  
  The six schools are split between African-American and Latino neighborhoods.
  
  “It’s been as if there’s a wall between these two communities. Running our programs concurrently is a way to create cultural activities to break down these barriers,” said Welthie Fitzgerald, executive director of Strings for Schools.
• Philadelphia Mural Arts will partner with over 20 north Philadelphia community organizations—churches, libraries, recreation center and neighborhood groups—to create a series of murals which will illustrate the voices, stories and lives of “My North Philly,” the name of project. A specialist in ethnography will document this project, which makes the program even more unique.
• Five organizations in Camden are banding together to form the Camden Arts Partners, a coalition that meets monthly to coordinate programs and promote their activities. The grantees are the Perkins Center for the Arts, Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts, Settlement Music School’s new Camden facility, South Jersey Performing Arts Center, the Walt Whitman Arts Center. The organizations have developed individual programs to serve the community, but many of the programs are integrated.

The Miami-based John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promotes excellence in journalism worldwide and invests in the vitality of 26 U.S. communities. With assets of $1.9 billion, Knight Foundation is a private independent foundation making $90 million in grants annually.