Inside the Strategies of Community-Based Arts Organizations

Building Trust, Sustaining Art

New report shows how community-based arts organizations navigate trust, provide artistic value, and ensure organizational well-being amidst shifting cultural and funding landscapes

Many arts organizations, especially those rooted in communities of color, serve as anchors in their communities. They provide much needed resources for community members of all ages, from training and residency space for artists to producing extraordinary work with significant cultural and civic value. What’s more, they often face structural disadvantages such as a lack of funding from governments and philanthropies.

A new report, "Building Trust, Sustaining Art,” analyzes cross-cutting themes from studies of more than a dozen arts organizations rooted in communities of color participating in The Wallace Foundation’s multi-strand Advancing Well-Being in the Arts initiative. After nearly four years of close collaboration, this report marks the first major release of key insights from the Thriving Communities cohort. It presents an overview of the organizations’ contributions to cultural innovation and identifies a set of adaptive strategies that shape how arts organizations rooted in communities of color sustain their work—and, in turn, contribute to cultural vitality and community connection.

Other arts practitioners facing similar challenges, such as sustaining labor-intensive practices with limited resources and balancing local, national, and international ambition might find the adaptive strategies used by the Thriving Communities cohort of particular interest. Some of these include:

Trust-building strategies and practices that keep organizations rooted in and responsive to the communities they serve;
Archiving and documentation to preserve cultural memory, strengthen organizational capacity, and demonstrate organizations' importance to their communities;
Placemaking and capital investment practices that help communities feel stable, connected, and supported in the long-term.

Located throughout the continental U.S. and Puerto Rico, the Thriving Communities cohort spans artistic disciplines and organizational models, including place-based community hubs; culturally specific performing arts organizations with national and international reach; organizations centered on community history, archives, and cultural memory; and media-making and storytelling organizations.