ICCD - Institute for Community Cultural Development

For synopsis, click on ICCD Summary

Minneapolis, MN
Sponsored by Intermedia Arts and Twin Cities Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC)
2002-2004

The Project
The Institute for Community Cultural Development (ICCD) is a professional development initiative for people who work at the crossroads between art and community development. Intermedia Arts and the Twin Cities Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) founded ICCD to build a network of individuals and organizations with a shared commitment to using the arts to build strong, sustainable communities. For more about Intermedia and LISC, click on

For more about the Center for the Study of Art and Community, click on www.artandcommunity.com.

Initially, I was asked onto the core faculty team because:
1) I am a working community-engaged artist with a strong background in adult learning and pedagogy;
2) I have partnered with Intermedia on many projects since the 1980s, most recently on the artist team for People Places Connections (click on Urban Web); and
3) Prior to ICCD, Bill and I had worked closely together for several years on the Perpich Center’s Artist/Educator Institute, so we had a solid collaborative history to apply to ICCD.

In addition to the core faculty, national and regional leaders in the field of community cultural development are brought in to provide additional resources to the fellows.

About ICCD Fellows
The ICCD fellows are a select group of seven community-engaged artists and seven community development professionals with significant experience working in areas such as community organizing, community development, and urban planning. Fellows are nominated by colleagues in their fields (although they may also self-nominate), followed by a competitive application and interview process.

About ICCD Curriculum
The curriculum outline below is a framework for the journey of ICCD, which parallels the journey of the work itself, from preparation through evaluation. We developed the curriculum through intensive work periods led by Bill with Erik, Sandy Agustin (Interim Executive Director at Intermedia Arts), Barb Jeanetta (Senior Program Officer, Twin Cities LISC), Theresa Sweetland (Education and Community Programs Manager at Intermedia Arts), and myself. For those of us involved in creating the curriculum, the process also served significantly as a partnership development process, where we learned about one another’s values, assumptions, skills and knowledge. Bill, Erik and I still revisit the curriculum after each session to consider any revisions we want to make to the curricular plan, so that it best addresses the evolving needs of the group.

Session # 1	Community & Cultural Development: Getting to Know the Field and Ourselves What are the various definitions, myths, and perceptions that impact arts and community development fields? What is Art? What is Community? What is Community Development? What is the History and Ecology of Arts-Based Community Development? Where am I? Where do I fit?
Session # 2	Setting the Table Where do I want to be? What do I want to do? What do I know? Where does my organization what to be? What do artists, arts organizations, and community partners need to know before entering into collaborations? What questions do I need to ask? Where do I find the answers? What is my own capacity for this work? What is my organization’s capacity for this work?
Session # 3	Environment: Recognizing Rank and Privilege How do I recognize my own rank and power? Is the accumulation of power intrinsically negative? How can power be positive? How can it be negative? How can I use rank and privilege as tools for community change?
Session # 4	Diversity of Learning Styles, Conflict Resolution & Motivating Others How do I learn and interact most effectively? How do we generate a climate of respect for different ways of learning and communicating with each other, with partners and with community?
Session # 5	Authentic and Appropriate Partnerships: Organizing and Advocacy What skills do partners need to enter into successful collaborations? How do partners find common ground and mutual self-interest? What is organizing and how does it relate to the arts and community development?
Session # 6	Authentic and Appropriate Partnerships: Partnership Strategies How can partners work together to avoid and solve disagreements? How do partners share power, define success, and build trust? What does it take to create a successful long-term partnership?
Session #7	Sustainability: Clarity and Purpose- Articulating Our Message How do artists and community developers access funds and resources differently? How can we work together to find creative ways to sustain our work?
Session #8	Evaluation and Public Relations How do we know if we have succeeded in doing what we set out to accomplish? What data and information is useful and relevant to your various partners (community partners, funders, media, government, etc.)?
Session #9	Open Space Technology: Taking Stock of the Journey Where am I? How am I going to take the Institute home? (Note: Open Space Technology is a convening process in which participants self-organize around the questions, insights and issues that are of critical importance to them. For more about OST, click on www.openspaceworld.org/wiki/wiki/wiki.cgi?AboutOpenSpace.
Session # 10	Open Space Technology and Graduation

The Inquiry
How do arts and community development contribute to capable and caring communities?

Challenges
Although the actual practice of bringing communities together with art is ancient, the field of Community Cultural Development is still emerging. As with any emerging profession there are fewer national organizations, journals or convening events than in more established fields. An ongoing challenge of ICCD is to define (and re-define) exactly what we are talking about when we combine the words community and culture and development. Stories have been an essential instrument to ground our conversation in real life practice.

Another challenge has been designing a program that addresses the broad spectrum of learning styles, knowledge, skills, and needs among ICCD fellows. We frequently shift modalities (writing, talking, moving, making…) to accommodate the reality that one participant’s preferred mode of information exchange is the edge of another participant’s comfort zone.

What I learned

• Despite the differences in our vocabularies and tools, non-profit community developers and artists who engage communities share more in common than we often realize. As an artist, I know a lot about how ideas manifest in the form of art. Hanging out with community developers has taught me how ideas manifest in the form of housing, economic development initiatives, or social services. Social and economic needs inform policy, and policy manifests as the structures of our collective life (from buildings to laws). In other words, through ICCD, I have gained a deeper understanding of how systems produce things that impact a whole lot of people’s lives. This understanding informs the way I now design my artistic work, so that my efforts have a greater likelihood of genuinely affecting social transformation.
  
  
• ICCD is rooted in a belief that the future health of our communities demands new creative cross-sector leadership at every level. By encouraging local leadership in the emerging field of community cultural development, we hope ICCD will contribute to the future vitality of communities in and around Minneapolis and Saint Paul. ICCD is important because it invests in leadership development.
  
  
• I have always been drawn more to direct experience than to stories. For example, the sensation and movement of a hand on a cheek is inherently more interesting to me than the interpretation, meaning or context for the hand on the cheek, that is, the story of the hand on a cheek. (This is probably why I became a dancer and a meditator, two activities that invoke immediate experience rather than stories). Nevertheless, through ICCD, I have come to appreciate the vital role stories play in both community development and community-engaged artmaking. Stories have the power to generate a shared understanding that connects people to one another.
  
  
• Because the ICCD fellows are such a diverse group, an observation that is obvious to one person may be revelatory to another. One of our working practices is to "state the obvious", that is, to name our assumptions out loud. By remembering to "state the obvious" I create a greater likelihood that my message will be understood in the way I mean it. (For more about communication in community-engaged art practice, click on Interpersonal Communication Skills in Community Art: An Introduction to the Awareness Wheel.) "Stating the obvious" is a simple, but helpful, stepping-stone to more inclusive communication.
  
  
• Each ICCD session meets in a different location. Past sessions have been held in settings such as: Hope Community (a thriving multi-cultural campus of affordable housing); East Village (a small urban village on the edge of downtown); and Homewood Studios (an artists’ workspace and small community meeting space in North Minneapolis). At each location we hear the "creation story" of the place. I have come to think of place-making as an art form.
  
  
• I assess the significance of what I learn by how I integrate the findings into my work and life. Unlike the other projects on this website which have some history to them, ICCD is a current project. With the other projects, I have a clarity that comes from years of reflection. I am too close to ICCD to honestly know yet what I am learning and how I will be influenced by ICCD over time.
  

Resolution
To continue the work. For more information about the future of the Institute for Community Cultural Development, click on www.intermediaarts.org or click on Changes.