In August 2021, after more than two decades working with artists and in nonprofit arts and culture organizations of all sizes, I joined the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs to resuscitate a handful of programs that had been on hold due to COVID-19. I’d never worked for a civic arts agency before. I was curious to learn what it was like to work inside the system, eager to get a “birds-eye” perspective on the arts in Los Angeles that had been eluding me, and more than a little nervous. While I believe fervently in government’s role in supporting the arts and its ability to create meaningful and far-ranging impact, (read my article about the NEA in The Atlantic), I also knew, anecdotally, how challenging it can be to get work done in a civic context.
When I started at DCA and began assessing my portfolio of projects, it was as if I had walked into a hastily abandoned storeroom piled high with partially-assembled Ikea furniture, with no instructions, no helpers, and a single Allen wrench. Luckily, that’s just the kind of thing I like to do.
The project that I was most excited about was a community-based cultural asset mapping initiative called Promise Zone Arts: South L.A. Promise Zones are an Obama-era initiative that take a “collective impact” approach to “create jobs; increase economic activity; improve educational outcomes; increase access to affordable housing; reduce serious and violent crime; among other locally-defined priorities.”
Promise Zone Arts is a DCA initiative to integrate arts and culture into the mix of the “collective impact” approach. Promise Zone Arts: South L.A. was actually the second Promise Zone Arts initiative that DCA had undertaken. The City of Los Angeles has two Promise Zones. The first one, in Central Los Angeles, was one of the first five Promise Zones that the Obama administration announced and was the site of DCA’s first Promise Zone Arts project. The South LA Promise Zone was recognized in 2016 as part of the final cohort of Promise Zones.
The Promise Zone Arts South LA website launched in June 2023 with a database, interactive map and video story bank. It was an amazing journey to get there, it was a huge accomplishment, and there’s still so far to go! (For a great write-up of the project, read this article in Hyperallergic by Matt Stromberg.)
Over the past few years I’ve learned that, for people who aren’t in the weeds on this type of work, “community-based cultural asset mapping” sounds like a bunch of jargon. But it is actually merely accurate. Basically, it means taking a lot of time to partner with a community and ask people what they treasure: what are the places, people, events, artists, culture bearers, elders, businesses, practices, etc. (past and present) that make their community feel like home.
In case you were wondering, this is very difficult, time-consuming work, especially to do inclusively, responsively and respectfully. There are no shortcuts.
I’m writing this personal essay from the perspective of someone working for a large agency, for the benefit of others who may be working in large agencies or arts organizations. This is not meant as an official “best practices” document, but a personal reflection. That being said, I think we did a lot of things the right way, that weren’t necessarily easy to do, and I want to share them.
If you are really interested in the deep dive, download the project’s final report here. But for those of you who want the quick takeaway TL;DR version, here are some “lessons learned” bullet points:
- Work in Partnership
Work with good, trusted partners. DCA applied for an NEA Our Town Grant with project partners South Los Angeles Transit Empowerment Zone (SLATE-Z), Community Coalition, LA Commons and USC’s Neighborhood Data for Social Change initiative, all of whom have deep roots in South Los Angeles, standing in the community, serious expertise and aligned values. This project could not have been implemented, much less succeeded, without this kind of deep, respectful, collaborative partnership.
- Stay Grounded in Values
It is tempting to rush. It is hard to resist the sense of urgency around deadlines and milestones, it is easy to get frustrated with the pace of moving at human speed, of listening and talking and listening again to consider all perspectives. It is tempting to just shift into “efficient” and “productive” mode to get it done – whatever “it” is – at any given moment. But if you know your values, and your values are about community and inclusion and process and being circumspect, thoughtful, deliberate and, above all else, listening, then you need to always be coming back to your values and moving from there. If you feel lost, overwhelmed, panicked or angry, take a breath and come back to your values.
- Practice Collaboration
We held weekly all-partner meetings and honestly things take a lot longer that way; those were some long meetings. But it was important that everyone’s voice and perspective was included. We spent a lot of time in process and dialogue, trying to ensure that any decisions were collectively approved, that the right people were in the conversation and had been consulted and given an opportunity to weigh in before moving ahead. This process has intrinsic value, yields meaningful, sometimes surprising, insights and frequently surfaces crucial knowledge that might otherwise go overlooked or unheard.
- Be Flexible
When the partners convened in December 2021 to restart the project after a pandemic-enforced hiatus, we were all still living and operating under pandemic conditions. The logic model and project plans had all been developed before the pandemic and all of our organizations had underdone stress and change. We had already been granted one extension on the NEA grant so we had less time to do the project than originally planned and were significantly constrained by the pandemic conditions. It took a lot of creativity and faith, a willingness to take a flexible approach to achieving our program goals. Things are unpredictable and subject to change, you have to be able to adapt.
- Be Responsive
In addition to working with partners who have deep roots, trust and credibility in the community, we convened a Cultural Treasures Coalition of elders, culture bearers, artists and organizers who served to guide the project and connect people. Involving the community, listening to the community and trying to see what’s really there, changed what we did and how we talked about the project.
One of the key insights early on was that the community doesn’t self-identify as residents of the Promise Zone – and why would they? – so we changed the public-facing name of the project to Cultural Treasures of South LA to emphasize this was about the Cultural Treasures and the community, not about an externally imposed designation. It is about driving narrative change from scarcity to abundance, about making legible the treasures that are already in place in the community.
We intentionally left the definition of “cultural treasure” wide open, and as we conducted focus groups and as surveys started to come in it became clear why that was so important. Nominations came in for things that might not at first seem to fit the bill of a cultural treasure – like a health resource center. But health resource centers can also serve as cultural centers – maybe not arts-centric but very much a part of the cultural fabric of meaningful places and safe spaces. So, when we start to actually listen to what we’re hearing, it changes the way we see what’s in front of us.
- Be Process-Oriented, Iterative and Emergent
The uncertainty and unpredictability of starting this work under pandemic conditions meant we had to be prepared to shift as needed, take advantage of opportunities when they presented themselves, and adapt, adapt, adapt. At the same time, as we began holding focus groups and listening to the community, we realized The Process is the Product and that Data Projects are Storytelling Projects.
The original program design was for this to be a kind of “Business to Business” tool for getting cultural data to talk to other data sets, with data people being the primary user group. There was some unspecific language about how, because the data was open source and free, it could be used by the community as a tool for advocacy, but practically speaking that was not going to be the case. The digital divide technology gap is real, raising the question of what tools does the community really need to attract resources and develop cultural infrastructure from the ground up?
As tempting as it is to focus on getting our data set to talk to other data sets – and it is still part of the project remit – the real value of these projects is getting people to talk to other people, especially other people they wouldn’t normally encounter or be in conversation with.
With that in mind, we had to re-think our imagined end users and try to think how each of three different user groups (Community, Data/Policy people, General Public) might engage with, and use, the data and tools we were building.
At the same time, the first Promise Zone Arts project in the Central Los Angeles Promise Zone, once built, was no longer tended to. There had been no plan in place for how it became a dynamic, living platform. We realized early on with this project that we wanted to make a platform that would be dynamic and living, and we did our best to infuse our process with that idea. All along we were asking ourselves – and others – once this is built, then what?
- Be Transparent
Process-wise, we used social media from the very beginning to be public and transparent about the project and our process – process as product – sharing out about meetings and conversations, inviting engagement from the community and feedback in real time. This helped build visibility and awareness, and also provided space for people to get involved and even inform our process and the direction of the work.
Another key takeaway, especially for people working in large organizations or agencies, is that part of transparency is honesty and humility. If you don’t know something, admit it. If you mess up, admit it. If you don’t know the answer, admit it. If you are representing a big agency, cultural organization or entity, you have to show up as a human being. Try to be cognizant of your positionality.
- De-Center the Big Institution
The project is about and for the community, so we made a conscious effort to keep the community, and our community-based partners, at the center of the project, leveraging our scale and reach when possible and appropriate, but keeping the focus on the partners and community.
LESSONS LEARNED/WHAT’S NEXT?
One of the most fantastic parts of this project was all the collaborative, collective learning we were able to do, most notably that data projects are storytelling projects and it is not only about getting data to talk to data, it’s about getting people to talk to people.
That being said, there are still a bunch of questions we are trying to answer, and find the resources to address. The main, overarching question is, now that we’ve built the database, interactive map and story bank, now what? How does this become a dynamic, living platform? What does that look like, how does it work, and what does it consist of?
The partners convened a community visioning session in October and there were a lot of ideas about what this could be, what directions it might go, how we might be able to build it, some of which were very high concept, others were more tangible, practical and immediate.
For instance, one of the things we heard repeatedly was the need for event listings. This is not a big fancy tool, it is actually pretty simple, but clearly a need.
With the contraction of mainstream media and the disappearance of cultural journalism, this is a sector-wide problem. But this problem is exacerbated in communities that are already marginalized, under-resourced and under-represented. How do community members find out about what’s around them?
What other resources – like comprehensive, easily accessible listings – do artists and the cultural community writ large need to help build awareness of their work? What resources does the community at large need to facilitate access to the cultural resources already in place around them?
In a sense when we’re talking about the future of this project – and projects like it elsewhere – we’re talking about an emergent field of Digital Creative Placemaking – or really Placekeeping – that is about creating “third places” that bridge the digital and in-person worlds, providing a platform and resources to communities to develop cultural infrastructure that connects to other outcomes in economic development, health, climate, transit, development, etc.
At the same time, as mentioned above, the digital divide is real. What does this kind of platform look like when building digital tools for a phone-first community? Where most everyone has a smart phone of one kind or another but may not be using a desktop or a laptop or a tablet and may not have reliable access to high speed Internet?
Maybe it is a “community garden” model where the data is a collectively tended commons, where conversations are had, connections are made and creativity is cultivated? Maybe it is something else. These are just a few of the questions that this project – and the partners – are trying to answer as we look to the future. (And seek funding!)
We hope that the story being told through Cultural Treasures of South LA initiative will continue to deepen and grow over time, that the digital platform will expand to provide more resources to the community, that there will be more cultural programming, and support for artists and art projects that intersect with other issues like economic opportunity, healthy communities, transit, education and climate resiliency.
What it will look like, only time will tell.