Cultural Engagement to Mitigate Social Isolation
My collaborator Dana Mitroff Silvers and I have received a grant from the Aspen Institute Tech Policy Hub, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Omidyar Network, to help museums, libraries, and performing arts organizations work more directly with their communities during this awful, challenging moment in America.
The Aspen Tech Policy Hub announcement and press release is here.
10 cultural organizations, together serving over 4 million people across the United States, have joined us.
Our partners are,
Arts & Minds, New York, New York (with Howes Studio), with Carolyn Halpin-Healy, Nellie Escalante, and Deborah Howes
Akron-Summit County Public Library System, Akron, OH, with Jennifer Stencel
Center for Art and Public Exchange, an initiative of the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS, with Monique Davis
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, with Liz Neely
Lux Art Institute, Encinitas, CA, with Andrew Utt and Claudia Cano
Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS, with McKenzie Drake
Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ, with Deborah Kasindorf and Silvia Flippini Fantoni
RED EYE Theater, Minneapolis, MN, with Emily Gastineau, Jeffrey Wells, and Rachel Jendrzejewski
Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN, with Katherine Covey and Susannah Schouweiler
The idea of this project is very humble and straightforward: Dana and I will bring the group together and provide workshops, facilitation, coaching, know-how, and outside perspectives; and the participants will bring their vast professional expertise, imagination, and intimate knowledge of their communities, missions, and values. We’ll meet weekly over the course of 10 weeks and together we’ll try to nudge new experiments and ideas into the light of day.
When we conceived this project back in April we were focused exclusively on addressing the harm being caused to communities and individuals by the social isolation of Covid-19, but April seems like it was 100 years ago. Now, with our hearts aching from the eruption of pain, fear, and anger of what we have all lived through and witnessed over the last few days here in the US, and with many of our collaborators dealing with the immediate consequences and long-term root causes of violence and injustice on their own doorsteps, we will inevitably be drawn together towards a larger and more consequential response.
I hope you will follow this project here, with the participants directly, on my Twitter and Dana’s Twitter — and I also hope that everyone, everywhere, will become more deeply committed to the social and cultural life, social justice, and wellbeing of their own communities.
P.S.
In addition to this Aspen project I’m also beginning to lead a series of sense-making workshops with Europeana Network members this week, with Jasper Visser, to help understand and support the digital transformation they are currently experiencing across the European cultural sector.
Also, we have launched a call for participation for What Matters Now, an online community event to be held on July 10, 2020 [was previously July 3]. Please check it out and join us!
