Museums, Libraries and 

Comprehensive Initiatives:

A First Look at Emerging Experience

Local Initiatives Support Corporation: Chris Walker & Lesley Lundgren

Institute of Museum and Library Services: Carlos Manjarrez & Sarah Fuller

November 1, 2015
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for 

the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 35,000 museums. Our mission is to inspire libraries 

and museums to advance innovation, lifelong learning, and cultural and civic engagement. Our grant making, policy development, and research help libraries and museums 

deliver valuable services that make it possible for communities and individuals to thrive.

The Local Initiatives Support Corporation equips struggling communities with the capital, 

program strategy and know-how to become places where people can thrive. Working with 

local leaders we invest in housing, health, education, public safety and employment—all 

basic needs that must be tackled at once so that progress in one is not undermined by 

neglect in another. Sharing our expertise of 30-plus years, we bring together key local 

players to take on pressing challenges and incubate new solutions. And with them, we 

help develop smarter public policy.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the many people who graciously contributed their time to talk to us, and those 

who attended a meeting in Washington DC to discuss this report and its possible implications. We 

would especially like to thank Susan Hildreth, former Director of the Institute of Museum and Library 

Services, for supporting this research and the work it aims to promote. And thanks for Carl Vogel and 

Matthew Scheer for editorial and design services, respectively. This project was made possible in part by 

a Cooperative Agreement between LISC and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Photo Credits

Chicago: page 37 photo by Alex Fledderjohn, page 38 photo courtesy of Garfield Park Conservatory 

Alliance; Colleton: pages 19 and 20 photos courtesy of The Colleton Museum and Farmer’s Market;

Detroit: pages 42 and 43 photos courtesy of Focus: HOPE; EdVenture: pages 46 and 47 photos courtesy 

of EdVenture; Hartford: pages 34 and 35 photos courtesy of Hartford Public Library; Indianapolis: pages 

15 and 16 photos courtesy of Children’s Museum Indianapolis; Pittsburgh: page 23 courtesy of (C)

Albert Vecerka/Esto × Koning Eizenberg Architecture × Perkins Eastman Architects, page 24 courtesy 

of Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh; Queens: page 31 photo by Neshi Galindo, page 32 photo by Scott 

Rudd; Sugar Hill: page 27 photo by Lauren Kelley, page 28 photo by Ed Reeve. 
Message from Institute of Museum and 

Library Services

One of the things that I find very satisfying about IMLS is watching the extremely substantive role that our nation’s libraries and museums are playing in community revitalization. By 

serving as “community anchors,” these institutions are helping to spark very real change. 

As you will see, this report highlights the many ways museums and libraries are collaborating across multiple public sectors (including housing, economic development, public 

health, education and arts). It also provides examples of institutions that are using their 

resources and reservoirs of community trust to address the needs of economically distressed communities.

IMLS and the Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC) will soon hold meetings in five 

cities to further discuss these findings. I truly hope that this report informs those discussions and inspires other museums and libraries to embrace more meaningful and 

impactful connections with the communities they serve.

Dr. Kathryn K. Matthew, Director

Institute of Museum and Library Services
Message from LISC

We at LISC know that the communities we support face deeply interconnected problems—

people who are poor and live in poor neighborhoods experience more crime, send their 

children to lower-performing schools, struggle to find steady employment, and face other 

challenges that people in higher-income communities do not.

This is why LISC, as a national intermediary dedicated to supporting community-based 

efforts to revitalize poor neighborhoods, has embraced comprehensiveness as the best 

way to set low-income neighborhoods on a path to renewal. We help community organizations form collaborations of diverse groups able to build affordable housing, dampen crime, 

improve school quality, and enhance many other areas of community quality simultaneously.

The groups we support cannot take on this hard work without important local partners, 

especially in fields not commonly tilled by traditional community developers. New efforts 

to reinforce the deep structure of communities—the cultural and educational opportunities that shape people’s understandings of themselves and their communities—can only 

gain traction when pursued in partnership with artists, arts and cultural institutions, and 

other conservators of local knowledge and culture, like libraries.

We view our joint work with IMLS as a good way to help organize this support. We are 

especially pleased that among other noteworthy local efforts, this report highlights the 

work of several of our own partners, including the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and 

Chicago’s Garfield Park Conservatory. We believe that efforts like these set a new standard of practice in advancing comprehensive approaches to change.

Michael Rubinger, President & CEO

Local Initiatives Support Corporations.
Table of Contents

1. Introduction and Summary 1

2. Converging Trends in Revitalization & Museum and Library Practice 5

The Broadening Public Purpose of Museums and Libraries 5

The Changing Practice of Community Revitalization 6

What Museums and Libraries Offer to Communities Pursuing Revitalization 8

What Communities Offer to Museums and Libraries 10

3. Physical Revitalization and Community Outcomes 12

Community Development 12

Economic Development 17

Creative Placemaking 21

4. Community-Building and Formation of Collective Efficacy 25

5. Collective Impact in Services Delivery 35

6. What It Takes: Terms of Engagement for Museums and Libraries 48

Institutional Commitment 49

Locus of Decisionmaking 51

Embeddedness Within Community Networks 53

Continuous Involvement 54

Level-of-Effort 55

7. Barriers to Museum and Library Engagement 57

Internal Changes 57

Navigating External Relationships 58

References 61

Appendix 1: Methodology 62

Appendix 2: List of Interviewees 63

Appendix 3: Abbreviated Case Descriptions 67
1

1. Introduction and Summary

This paper was motivated by our respective institutions’ joint interest in finding ways to 

connect museums and libraries into the broadening practice of comprehensive community revitalization of low-income neighborhoods. The world of museums and libraries 

has changed greatly over the past two decades. The thought and the practice of institutions’ contributions to community have superseded narrow concerns of patronage and 

audience development. The world of community revitalization has changed at the same 

time. Embrace of community-building and comprehensive approaches to change have 

advanced the field beyond the bricks-and-mortar focus of the past. The resulting confluence of values and interests creates opportunities for museums and libraries to magnify 

their public value by playing a supporting, and sometimes a leading, role in community-wide change efforts.

Our early discussions about how to support deeper ties between museums and libraries 

and comprehensive initiatives surfaced shared uncertainties about what, in fact, this 

connection would look like. And if we weren’t clear on what we expected to see happen, 

we couldn’t communicate clear expectations to our prospective institutional and community partners. 

We concluded that we needed to identify examples of current practices and see what we 

could learn from them. We identified about 50 examples of museum and library efforts 

that we considered at first glance to illustrate the kind of cooperative work we were 

looking for, and culled nine of these for a further look, including: the Hartford Public 

Library, the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, The Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance, 

the Queens Museum of Art, the Colleton Museum and Farmers’ Market in Walterboro, SC, 

The EdVenture Children’s Museum in Columbia, SC, the Detroit Public Library’s Parkman 

Branch, the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling in New York City, and the 

Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.
2

This is a diverse group of institutions in very different types of urban and largely rural 

settings, but they are all located in economically distressed communities and their leaders have very much taken to heart the notion that the fate of their institutions is bound up 

with the fortunes of their communities. Acting on this belief, they have engaged in three 

types of efforts within a more comprehensive framework:

• Physical revitalization and related initiatives, such as creative placemaking intended 

to incorporate arts and culture into efforts to revitalize urban neighborhoods; 

• Community-building efforts to encourage resident activism and deeper ties within 

and among communities; and

• Delivery of economic, educational, and social programs aimed to achieving specific outcomes for whole communities.

Many museums and libraries have taken on these kinds of efforts in the past. What distinguishes our examples is the context within which this work happens and the terms of 

institutional engagement with communities. 

The context is comprehensiveness, which we understood as collaborations among groups 

in multiple sectors to achieve a common outcome. These may aim for community-wide 

improvement across multiple domains of housing, economic development, public health, 

education, arts and culture and others. Or they may aim for improvement in specific social 

conditions, like educational outcomes for children, though collaborations among the many 

organizations that work in that domain.

The terms of institutional engagement, we believe, are qualitatively different from most of 

the episodic and limited partnerships that are typical of any institution’s work. We found it 

helpful to distinguish five attributes that characterize this difference:

• Institutional commitment: community engagement is seen as integral to the organization’s mission, which typically means that the work of multiple departments 

and program areas foster engagement, supported at the senior executive level 

and board.

• Locus of decisionmaking: program design and implementation decisions are 

shared with community leaders, including representatives of community-based 

organizations.

• Embeddedness within community networks: projects or programs (or series of 

projects or programs) are linked to the activities of multiple others who cooperate 

to achieve some type of collective impact.
3

• Level of effort: significant resources are devoted to the project or program relative 

to other organizational activities, understood in terms of staff time, budget, and 

attention by senior managers. 

• Continuation over time: projects or programs that do not end with one-shot 

efforts, but continue with the same organizations or types of organizations, often 

within some kind of framework for cooperation.

The report explores these in as much depth as telephone interviews permitted. We also 

took care to outline the sources of museum and library contribution to community, as 

seen by community partners, the returns from these contributions to the institutions, and 

some of the challenges they faced as they carried out the work.

Museums and libraries make very concrete contributions to community efforts through 

the programming and physical revitalization activities they undertake. They also contribute in less tangible but no less important ways, through the exercise of community leadership in community plan development and implementation and other collective efforts. In 

doing so, they trade extensively on their reputation for excellence, their local prominence, 

their reservoirs of community trust, and their status as neutral conveners.

The returns associated with deeper engagement in comprehensive initiatives are the 

some of the same as those reaped by community partners: new and better programs 

through better cooperation, heightened institutional visibility, broader constituencies for 

the institution’s work, and increased resources. What distinguishes these efforts from the 

many other forms of community engagement is the decoupling of institutional efforts from 

the narrow goal of increasing audience participation.

It should be obvious that none of this is particularly easy to do. Our telephone interviews 

did not allow us to explore the difficulties these institutions faced in much depth, but 

we did surface a number of comments that spoke to the challenges institutions should 

expect to face in making internal changes and in navigating new external relationships. 

Despite these challenges, those we spoke with believed that facing them was well worth 

the effort in view of the rewards. And the community partners we spoke with affirmed the 

value of these contributions.

For this report, we tried to strike a balance between extensive coverage of many examples of museum and library involvement and the benefits of exploring individual experiences. We spoke with representatives of 25 different museum and library initiatives that 

met some of our criteria for inclusion in this report, and did more in-depth discussions 

with 28 representatives from nine institutions.
4

All of our work was carried out by telephone or by review of documentary material available online, in our archives, or sent to us by the organizations we contacted. The material 

is based on review of documentary evidence from several museum and library initiatives and short telephone conversations with institution staff and selected community 

partners recommended during our interviews. We cast a wide net to identify cases for 

review, ultimately covering about 50 examples of museum and library efforts that connected somehow to broader efforts to revitalize communities or deliver social and public 

services more effectively. 

For more on the methods of identifying key examples, see Appendix 1. For a full list of the 

groups we contacted, see Appendix 2.

Our case studies fell into two groups. The extended case studies found in the full-page 

boxes throughout the text were selected because they best represented the levels of 

engagement in comprehensive initiatives that are the subject of this report. That said, 

many of the other cases we reviewed yielded insights into several important topics—the 

variety of contributions museums and libraries make and the opportunities and challenges they present. These are highlighted at various points in this paper, and their 

response helped shape our thinking throughout.
5

2. Converging Trends in Revitalization and 

Museum and Library Practice

Over the past 20 years or so, both the role of museums and libraries and the practice of 

revitalizing communities have undergone major changes. Libraries and museums have 

embraced a broader range of social purposes than they dedicated themselves to, historically, and have invited their patrons to help shape their core activities. Community revitalization practitioners have embraced the notion of comprehensiveness—change across 

multiple domains of neighborhood life—which requires meaningful community engagement to be effective. These parallel trends have created optimal conditions for profitable 

mutual collaboration.

The Broadening Public Purpose of Museums and Libraries 

For many years, museums confronted what they viewed as a patronage problem: a declining number of older visitors and supporters relative to the increasing numbers and associated revenues required to deliver high-quality programs. Traditional audience-building 

through marketing and efforts to convert casual visitors to more active supporters had 

important but ultimately limited success. Libraries confronted their own fiscal challenge 

as municipalities faced mounting expenses and declining revenues, causing them to dial 

back spending on core services.

But library and museum leaders, both, began to see these problems as symptoms of a 

deeper problem. If they could not reach the people they needed to reach and deliver real 

value to them, then they could not fulfill their mission effectively, and by implication, could 

make no compelling claim on increasingly scarce public and private support. In our discussion, Matt Poland, Chief Executive Officer of the Hartford Public Library, argued that 

because “libraries are no longer central to broad information access, we must become 

more entrepreneurial and act more emphatically as a community-based institution. Our 

goal is to make ourselves indispensable so that we are not ‘discretionary’.”
6

One way library and museum directors responded was by recognizing that they could contribute value in multiple areas of community life. That they were not simple conservators 

and interpreters of cultural and information assets. Recent studies have identified library 

contributions in fields as diverse as human capital development, new information infrastructure, streamlined information access for special topics and populations, workforce 

development, small business support, and place-based economic development strategies.1 A recent National Endowment for the Arts report outlined the contributions arts 

(and arts institutions) make to community cultural, educational, social, economic, environmental, and political development.2

Another way institution leaders have responded is by inclusion. Some have moved beyond 

audience development into deeper forms of engagement, including recruitment of patrons 

to help co-create the museum experience. Chris Seifert Deputy Director of the Children’s 

Museum of Pittsburgh reported that: “We found a lot of collective expertise outside the 

walls of the museum. The youth voice turned out to be important, and we developed a lot 

of newfound alliances.” The Wing Luke Museum in Seattle and the Museum of Mexican 

Art in Chicago are expert practitioners of this art. 

The Changing Practice of Community Revitalization

These twin trends of diversification and inclusion are strong currents in community revitalization. For a number of years, the community development field emphasized creation of 

affordable housing and the physical renewal of blighted neighborhoods, following land use 

plans developed by specialized development agencies using fairly conventional methods 

of community consultation. Even many community-based organizations—with close ties 

to resident leaders—stayed in their lane as bricks-and-mortar developers. But as the 

field digested the somewhat disappointing results from their work—poor neighborhoods 

stayed poor—leading community development practitioners embraced the more expansive 

notions of comprehensiveness and community-building. 

Comprehensiveness is founded on the explicit recognition that the multiple problems 

of low-income communities—blight, crime, joblessness, poverty, disease—are deeply 

interconnected. In the early 1990s, national foundations began to implement programs 

to take on multiple challenges simultaneously in carefully-selected neighborhoods. The 

1 For example, Urban Libraries Council (2007) “Making Cities Stronger: Public Library Contributions to Local Economic 

Development (ULC: Evanston, IL: January, 2007) 

2 National Endowment for the Arts. How Art Works: The National Endowment for the Arts’ Five-Year Research Agenda, with 

a System Map and Measurement Model (Washington DC: NEA, 2012)
7

Surdna Foundation’s work in the South Bronx was one of the more successful of these 

efforts.3 The spectacular transformation of vast tracts of blight into recognizably livable 

communities proved a test case for whether the approach could work in one of the most 

distressed urban neighborhoods in America.

These early efforts stressed that community involvement was crucial if comprehensiveness could be developed and sustained successfully. This is because community 

leaders—civically-minded residents, nonprofit organizations and staff, business leaders, 

public officials—knew best what their communities needed, could hold major institutions 

accountable, lent expertise to the solution of community problems, and could themselves 

help stitch together a stronger social fabric to support the diverse initiatives that comprehensiveness required. This emphasis became known as community-building.

In the early 2000s, and drawing heavily on the approach developed in the South Bronx, 

which the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) supported, our Chicago office introduced its pilot Community Building Initiative in three of the city’s neighborhoods, later 

expanded into 16 neighborhoods and renamed The New Communities Program (NCP). The 

NCP embraced both comprehensiveness and community-building in a well-structured way. 

The NCP approach calls for an extended period of community organizing in each neighborhood to identify leaders in all walks of life, invite their ideas for neighborhood renewal, and 

elicit their participation in community change efforts. Everyone’s commitments are ratified 

in a quality-of-life plan that outlines roles and responsibilities for concerted action across 

multiple sectors, including housing, economic development, public safety, education, and 

health. Under the direction of a lead agency responsive for convening, oversight, and fiscal 

and programmatic accountability, community partners implement elements of the plan. 

As managing citywide intermediary, LISC helps marshal support from civic leaders—city, 

county and state government, local corporations, and philanthropy.

Early successes in Chicago prompted LISC to extend the approach into other cities, such 

as Indianapolis, San Diego, and Boston. By 2013, LISC had begun comprehensive initiatives in 110 neighborhoods in 28 US cities. And LISC is not the only proponent of the idea. 

Comprehensiveness has become enshrined as a guiding principle in spatial approaches 

to change across Federal agencies, as exemplified by the US Department of Education’s 

Promise Neighborhoods Initiative, HUD’s Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, and the Byrne 

Criminal Justice Innovation Program from Department of Justice.

3 Burns, Tom and Anita Miller, Going Comprehensive: Anatomy of an Initiative that Worked CCRP in the South Bronx. 

(Philadelphia: OMG Center for Collaborative Learning, 2006)
8

Moreover, a form of comprehensiveness with special application to social services and 

education has taken hold under the label of Collective Impact. Just as community developers recognize that the contribution of multiple parties is required to achieve a common 

revitalization goal, educators, social services providers, workforce agencies, and others 

have understood that their objectives can best be reached through explicit cooperation 

among multiple parties serving the same clientele.

For example, STRIVE in Cincinnati and other cities seeks to improve educational outcomes 

for children and youth by harnessing the efforts of schools, day care providers, out-ofschool time agencies, social services agencies, and other organizations devoted to youth 

well-being. As popularized by FSG, a national consulting firm, Collective Impact calls for 

multiple parties to reach toward common outcomes, supported by a “backbone” organization to manage the collective effort, and guided by valid and reliable outcome measures 

that enable partners to track progress, identify opportunities and challenges, and adjust 

their efforts accordingly.4 The most well-known extension of the collective impact concept 

is the Harlem Children’s Zone, the model for the federal Promise Neighborhoods Initiative. 

What Museums and Libraries Offer to Communities Pursuing Revitalization

Museums and libraries play important and traditional societal roles that alone justify their 

long-standing community support. But as museum and library leaderships increasingly 

have embraced broader conceptions of these roles, they have been brought more explicitly into the community revitalization frame. One job of this paper is to help community 

leaders understand just how helpful these institutions can be to them.

Consistent with the dual emphasis on programmatic diversification and a trend toward 

community inclusion in both museum and library and community practice, we find it helpful to classify museum and library contributions into three categories of comprehensive 

work: aid to community development program delivery, as traditionally understood, participation in collective impact strategies, and community-building efforts, all of which are 

treated at greater length in the next section.

Overall, it is striking how well the National Endowment for the Arts’ recent accounting of 

the social benefits of arts and culture comport with community aspirations expressed in 

LISC-supported quality-of-life plans. These cover nearly every possible aspect of community life, in arenas as diverse as housing, public safety, economic well-being, health, community strength, and arts and culture. The scale of these plans, therefore, is ambitious. 

4 Kania, John and Mark Kramer, “Collective Impact” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011
9

But there will never be enough money from traditional sources of support to enable meaningful change across all of these domains. This means that community goals will only be 

achieved if educators, police, housing agencies, public works departments, and other 

mainstream institutions more actively support community-based efforts through their 

ordinary course of doing business.

Public libraries and the many museums located in urban neighborhoods are important 

cases in point, bringing core competencies to the stock of collective capacity for community change. In addition to capital and other project funding that goes directly to community-based organizations (as in several of our case studies) these institutions have 

considerable expertise on staff, including among our extended cases, real estate development, urban design, job skills development and computer literacy, community gardening 

and other placemaking, community-building, and so on. And these are not small contributions. As Andrew Tyskiewicz, Director of Community Education of the Hartford Capitol 

Region Education Council and leader in a new preschool initiative put it: “We must realize 

that the libraries are probably the second most concentrated deliverer of knowledge in 

the country next to schools and universities.” 

Museums and libraries bring core assets to bear on community-building challenges, as 

well. Although one important goal of most initiatives is to develop and communicate a 

consensus vision for the neighborhood, this does not remove all conflict over community 

priorities or competing claims for community leadership. We found in our extended cases 

that museums and libraries can play a vital role as neutral conveners, trading on their 

reputation for excellence, community trust, and institutional presence in ways that community-based organizations and many public agencies cannot.

Further, the accelerating emphasis on the value of cultural assets in community revitalization magnifies the value cultural institutions—including museums and libraries both—

bring to community work. Mark Stern and Susan Seifert, professors at the University of 

Pennsylvania, have found that cultural assets are linked statistically to subsequent neighborhood revitalization outcomes, a relationship they explain by the impact of culture on 

the civic life of urban neighborhoods.5 Culture—like other forms of community-building—

strengthens relationships among neighborhood members as well as their determination 

to be involved in community life. 

5 Stern, Mark and Susan Seifert, “Cultivating ‘Natural’ Cultural Districts” (The Reinvestment Fund and Social Impact of the 

Arts Project, University Pennsylvania, September, 2007)
10

To understand the variety of benefits that museums and libraries potentially convey to 

communities, it may be helpful to think of them as “anchor institutions” akin to the large 

medical establishments and educational institutions that employ large numbers and send 

significant amounts of money throughout the local economy. These anchors are almost 

literally rooted in communities by virtue of their spatial immobility which creates a strong 

economic stake in the health of their surrounding community, but also by less tangible 

factors as mission, relationships, tradition, and urban identity. And as Clopton and Finch 

have it, anchors can be thought of as “institutions that support the development and 

maintenance of social capital and networks at the community level and provide an attachment for the collective identity for that community.”6 In fact, the Institute of Museum and 

Library Services embraced the concept of anchorage as one of its core strategic plan 

goals, as it seeks to “promote museums and libraries as strong community anchors that 

enhance civic engagement, cultural opportunities, and economic vitality.”7

What Communities Offer to Museums and Libraries

All forms of comprehensive community development demand contributions from multiple 

resident activists, public agencies, community-based organizations, and others. Networks 

among these actors act as a kind of platform or infrastructure that becomes available for 

further cooperative action. This is especially important in poor neighborhoods and rural 

areas, where organizational capacity is in short supply. To any individual participant, the 

platform affords access to both on-going programs and community constituents, obviating the need to develop these each time. 

Museums and libraries can access the platform in the same way, as they continue efforts 

to diversify their offerings and adopt inclusionary practices. 

The quality-of-life plans that form the basis for community action treat, as a group, nearly 

every possible realm of public policy, seeking improvements in arenas as diverse as housing, public safety, economic well-being, health, community strength, and arts and culture. 

In other words, these efforts offer museums and libraries a full menu of programmatic 

options as they diversify their offerings, enabling them to deliver new and better programs 

in cooperation with other community agencies.

6 Clopton, Aaron and Bryan Finch “Re-conceptualizing social anchors in community development: utilizing social anchor 

theory to create social capital’s third dimension” in Community Development 42:1 (January-March, 2011, 70-83)

7 Institute of Museum and Library Services, “Creating a Nation of Learners: Strategic Plan 2012-2016, (IMLS: Washington 

DC, January 2012).
11

Moreover, community efforts offer heightened institutional visibility and broader constituencies for the institution’s work, perhaps most critical in smaller communities with fewer 

numbers of people who are attracted to the institution’s core offering. Tom Sokolowski former Director of the Warhol Museum told us that they “needed to diversify our constituency 

through identification with community. We’re not located in London or Berlin or Washington 

D.C., and thus be able to get by on tourist traffic alone. Therefore, we had to appeal beyond 

those who would just be interested in Warhol or pop or contemporary art more generally.” 

The constituency-building effect of community engagement was a common theme across 

all institutions, even those, like libraries, that have natural constituencies among those 

in neighborhoods that routinely patronize their programs and services. “Visibility for the 

Children’s Museum was an important benefit. In turn, the trust and respect accorded to the 

museum helped with park fundraising. People now wanted to be a part of it,” says Siefert.

Here again, the notion of an anchor is helpful. For museums and libraries, the twin emphasis on diversification and inclusion requires a further extension of the re-conceptualization 

of museum and library roles. Porter urges adoption of a concept of shared value—that both 

communities and institutions gain by effective anchoring—that represents a move away 

from thinking of community contributions as something of an “obligation.”8 

8 Porter, Michael, “Anchor Institutions and Urban Economic Development: From Community Benefit to Shared Value (pow

erpoint, Inner City Economic Forum Summit, October 2010)
12

3. Physical Revitalization and Related Initiatives

Many museum and library leaders have long known that construction or renovation of their 

facilities can convey important community and economic development benefits. Prominent 

new central libraries and museum buildings have spurred economic growth in a number 

of downtown precincts. New library branches and museum buildings can produce similar results in neighborhoods, just as investment in any other kind of real estate can. This 

can happen if only because improved facilities remove blight, which improves community 

well-being, erases some of the neighborhood stigma that accompanies deterioration, and 

encourages other investment.

These results are more likely when museum and library efforts are directly tied to those 

of other community revitalization initiatives. At the least, new museums and libraries have 

been placed in mixed-use buildings that also provide housing or contain space for community services. Some have been developed as part of an explicit area-wide community or 

economic revitalization strategy. At the most advanced, museums and libraries themselves 

have taken a leading role in explicitly comprehensive, multi-sectoral, initiatives. In our scan 

of museum and library participation in community work, we uncovered examples across 

this continuum of practice.

Community Development

Community developers are accustomed to looking at housing, commercial real estate, and 

other buildings as platforms for delivering benefits to a broader community. For example, 

affordable housing projects often contain community space for social services, health, 

or other agencies that help residents. We find that museums and libraries sometimes 

do this too, especially as it pertains to youth services, as in the Children’s Museums in 

Indianapolis and Pittsburgh. 

Community developers especially value “leading” investments—those that come early 

in a revitalization program, where attracting private investment is especially difficult. In 
13

these same two instances, Museum leadership opted to take their facilities’ expansion 

as a springboard for more active engagement in a neighborhood that was in need of the 

new and prominent leadership these institutions could provide. And for the institution, this 

engagement was part-and-parcel of a renewed effort to serve as diverse a constituency as 

possible, including poor families in the immediate neighborhood. 

The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis has led comprehensive community revitalization 

efforts in a way that few institutions have. This is due in part to the depth of the commitment made by museum leadership, and in part to favorable civic circumstances that 

offered a ready-made framework within which an already-prepared leadership could be 

effectively exercised. 

Shared Spaces for Housing and Other Services

Cornelius, Oregon: Elderly housing and library development

The community of Cornelius has been trying for years to build a new library, and there are no 

public after schools programs or community spaces for senior citizens. A partnership between 

the city and a developer are solving both problems at once, to be financed by a voter-approved 

bond proposal. The library gets new space, older people get housing, and the community gets 

materials, services and programs that respond to youth and elderly needs. 

Casper, Wyoming: Museum partnership on affordable housing

Nicolaysen Art Museum understood that an unsafe and crime ridden derelict building across 

the street deterred neighborhood investment. When it was announced that the building 

would be replaced by affordable housing, the museum worked with developers to establish 

a relationship with forthcoming residents. To help erase the stigma that unfairly marks lowincome housing, the museum took steps to welcome residents as a valued museum audience. 

The museum held a public art competition and invited the public to take part in the selection 

of the artwork. In this way they demonstrated a commitment to their new neighbors and other 

agencies in the community

Denver, Colorado: New library as a center for redevelopment

The Denver public library branch in West Colfax, under development, is a central building 

block of an effort to revitalize one of the city’s gateway corridors, and involving a number of 

transportation, housing, and community facilities improvements, carried out by a diverse range 

of partners, including the Urban Land Conservancy, Del Norte Neighborhood Development 

Corporation, non-profit organizations and area schools. The library branch itself is co-located 

with a childcare facility and boys-and-girls club, and additional programming will support a 

nearby public school.
14

One of the more unusual aspects of the Children’s Museum’s involvement is its direct 

financial support to revitalization efforts in the form of nonprofit-sponsored single-family 

housing construction or rehabilitation. Capitalized by an estate gift from a major donor, 

the museum’s $2 million revolving loan fund is available to two local development organizations—Near North Development Corporation and Mapleton Fall Creek Development 

Corporation—supplemented by $1 million in funds available to fill financial gaps identified 

in strategic projects.

The civic framework consists of the city’s formal comprehensive initiative, managed by 

LISC, and which has designated seven neighborhoods, including the Mid-North neighborhood surrounding the Museum. Each neighborhood’s lead agency, including the 

Museum, organized neighborhood leaders to develop a community vision and a concrete 

workplan to realize it. The workplan links seemingly disparate activities as housing and 

education, which together contribute to a better community. Moreover, better housing 

makes for better educational outcomes for children, and higher-quality education nearby 

makes neighborhood housing more desirable. This mutual reinforcement is a central 

premise of comprehensiveness.
15

The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis is the largest children’s museum in the world and the 20th 

most-visited museum in the country. Located in the Mid-North neighborhood, the museum hosts more 

than 1 million visitors each year. Established in 1925, the facility has more than 470,000 square feet, 

holds 120,000 artifacts, has 400 employees and 1,500 volunteers and houses a full service public 

library branch. 

After resolving to expand in the neighborhood rather than to build new facilities downtown, the Museum 

committed to act as an active partner in community revitalization, willing to bring its resources and 

relationships to bear on behalf of the community. At first, the museum brought in experts to help develop 
16

a Children’s Museum District Plan, which called for a series of physical improvements along a once-vital 

commercial corridor. This led to some early-win transportation enhancements along the 29th and 30th 

Street corridors: street paving, sidewalks, power line burial, and signalization, all requiring extensive coordination with the city department of public works. 

Then, the museum acquired blighted brownfield sites to create green space, following the Plan’s emphasis on real estate development of close-by commercial and residential properties and area beautification. 

Staff were guided throughout this process by a working group of local organizations, businesses, and 

resident leaders, which helped extend the institution’s reach into the neighborhood. 

From here was a short step into a leadership role in the city’s Great Indy Neighborhoods Initiative (GINI), a 

comprehensive development effort managed by LISC, which involved extensive community organizing and 

community planning. The Children’s Museum acts as lead agency of a multi-sector collaboration, drawing 

on the extensive relationships formed in the working group. “The Children’s Museum has been a major factor—they are the quality-of-life plan convener—a platform for conversation. The involvement of the museum 

puts a recognized name on it: in effect, they’ve contributed brand name equity,” says Leigh Riley Evans the 

Executive Director for a local coalition member, the Mapleton-Fall Creek Development Corporation. 

 The plan urges residents to participate in the Children’s Museum’s Cradle to Career initiative with free 

museum memberships and scholarships to the museum pre-school as well as an assortment of public 

programs for all ages. The plan supports business development through youth entrepreneurship, work 

study, internships, and apprenticeships. Meanwhile, the museum continues to work on housing rehabilitation and vacant building demolition, and the museum and the city has recently redeveloped an empty 

hospital into 50 units of high quality affordable housing and public green space.

“Going forward, the Children’s Museum will remain the lead convener—the hub of the wheel. Community 

organizations, including Mapleton-Fall Creek Development Corporation, do the implementation. The 

museum has to continue to be engaged in the process... to empower residents to be involved in realizing 

the action steps,” says Riley Evans.
17

Economic Development

Few areas of neighborhood change are as difficult to realize as economic development, 

understood as the process by which many types of assets—physical, financial, commercial, and human—increase in the value they produce to those who invest in them. (These 

investors can be anyone—residents, business owners, bankers, landowners, municipalities, and so on.) In view of the multiple parties and types of assets at stake, economic 

development efforts are especially rewarded by effective forms of collaboration.

The private investment necessary for neighborhood economic development decisively 

depends on any investor’s confidence in overall community prospects and the likelihood 

that others will invest, as well. Creating this confidence is difficult, and one important role 

prominent local institutions can play is to lend their visibility to efforts to brand neighborhoods as interesting and supportive places to live and do business. This is one classic 

role played by anchor institutions—universities, for example—in many metropolitan areas.

Physical Revitalization and Economic Development

Danville, Virginia: Renovation of a derelict train station into a science center

In 1995 in Danville, VA, a derelict train station was rehabilitated into the Danville Science 

Center, initially as a satellite branch of the Richmond Science Center. Historically a textile and 

tobacco manufacturing town, Danville City has worked to reinvent Danville’s image including 

revitalizing the largely vacant downtown. The presence and success of the science center 

has attracted other businesses and government offices to revitalize old warehouses and the 

surrounding neighborhood.

Fargo, North Dakota: Art museum that jumpstarted downtown revitalization

In Fargo, North Dakota, the Plains Art Museum was moved to Fargo in the early 1990s 

to jumpstart the process of revitalizing downtown. The success of this move led to other 

rehabilitation projects in the area and in 2001, the area was designated a “Renaissance 

Zone” by the city. The Plains Art Museum has continued to play a central role in this process by 

partnering with local arts and community groups to install public art pieces and run programming 

in the rehabilitating area.

Fitchburg, Massachusetts: Museum-led arts and culture program for economic growth

Fitchburg Art Museum in acknowledges that abandoned buildings in business districts detract 

potential investors. The museum worked with city leaders to cut through red tape then 

coordinated area artists in the Main Street Art Project, bringing visual art into vacant storefronts 

and enlivening the area in an effort to attract young entrepreneurs. The needs of the business 

district presented an opportunity for the museum to bring its talents in coordination off-site and 

promote the value of art and in a new way.
18

Museums and libraries also create value directly: the patrons they attract generate activity that spins off into demand for nearby retail and more vibrant street life. In turn, more 

and better retail and a more vibrant street life can help create patronage for museums 

and libraries. Economic developers’ role is to kickstart this and other virtuous cycles, 

often by creating small town and urban neighborhood civic associations that promote residential, business, non-profit, and government cooperation. But in addition, museums and 

libraries contribute not only to street traffic, but also to the diversity of uses much-prized 

by economic developers as they seek to multiply the attractions a neighborhood commercial district offers.

In Walterboro, SC, the Colleton Museum and Farmer’s Market illustrates a number of the 

themes treated in this section.

They created a physical impact on the community when it opened, removing the blighting 

influence of a shuttered supermarket—a marker of community decline. By co-locating the 

museum and a farmers market, they created two complementary uses that reinforced 

one another: space for local farmers to sell their products generated economic value 

for them and patronage for the museum. The space also became available to support 

another use—community gathering—that contributes to the vitality of the city as a whole.

In most of the examples we explored, including this one, initial cooperative efforts that 

yielded community benefits did not settle into a new routine, however valuable that might 

have been. Rather, cooperation produced a platform for further growth. In the case of the 

Colleton Museum and Farmers Market, the County now plans to capitalize further on their 

newly-created asset by introducing a Kitchen Incubator. With a $1,000,000 grant from 

USDA’s Rural and Economic Development Project, the incubator will provide local farmers 

and entrepreneurs with a space in an adjacent lot to commercially process and package 

local food products for sale and distribution. The site will enable local farmers to sell to 

wholesale buyers and process their raw food products to obtain a higher market value. In 

addition to benefiting the local economy and, hopefully, drawing business from Charleston 

and Savannah, the site will also house a test kitchen for use by the public for testing 

food-related business and by the Farmers Market and Museum for cooking classes and 

nutrition education.
19

The Colleton Museum and Farmer’s Market in Walterboro, SC serves small rural communities in Colleton 

County—the largest county in South Carolina geographically but one of the smallest in population (38,892). 

The Colleton Museum’s staff of five, supported by community volunteers, maintains a collection of artifacts 

to help explore and explain the history of Colleton County. Together with the Farmer’s Market, which provides 

space for local farmers and artisans to sell their products, it occupies a 7,500 sq. ft. renovated supermarket. 
20

In 1995, Clemson University Extension Services spearheaded a Farmers Market Advisory Committee to 

find a permanent market location for local farmers. With funds from the state, the county, and the US 

Department of Agriculture, the Committee purchased an old grocery store on the edge of downtown to 

develop the market, which Clemson Extension Services would run. But before the market could open, the 

state cut funding, leaving the County with a completed structure and some grant money, but no staff to 

occupy the building or run the market. Meanwhile, Colleton Museum, a branch of Colleton County government, occupied inadequate space and welcomed an opportunity to expand into the old grocery store. 

To their credit, the Museum recognized the possibilities that merger created. Together, they attracted new 

partners and created a place where the community could come together, build trust, and begin to recognize 

the assets various partners and community members offer to one another. By creating a physically accessible space that doubles as a town hall and community center, the museum now benefits from increased 

community support, is able to better serve its constituents, and has seen a rise in participation from among 

Colleton’s low-income residents. The conjoined museum and market has offered Colleton County residents 

a newfound sense of ownership and pride for their local history, farming, and community welfare. Moreover, 

the merger revitalized what had been an unsafe physical space at the edge of downtown. 

The success of this partnership as a direct service and a community space inspired the county to build on 

its success. Recognizing high levels of chronic diseases in the County, the museum and market engaged 

multiple partners to provide health education to the low-income population. The farmers market accepts 

vouchers from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program (EBT/SNAP) and the museum supplements 

this service by working with schools and community organizations to offer cooking classes and health 

education to families. The success of the site has also enabled them to elevate their existing involvement 

in South Carolina’s Eat Smart, Move More program. 

The museum also has reached out to low-income seniors through a local housing organization. The 

museum created a garden for residents and in exchange, the seniors help with the garden, take classes 

on gardening and nutrition, attend lectures, and add their own oral histories to the museum’s collection.
21

Creative Placemaking

The community and economic development field has become increasingly attentive to the 

possibilities that arts and cultural activities offer. Sometimes known as “creative placemaking,” arts, culture, and we would argue, lifelong learning is thought to contribute to 

formation and strengthening of community ties, the transformation of physical spaces in 

ways that speak to the aspirations and identities of people who live in communities, and 

the development of clusters of economic activity that are especially suitable to neighborhood development.9

Museums and libraries have only begun to explore creative placemaking understood in 

this formal sense, although these institutions have long contributed to aspects of placemaking that draw on arts and cultural assets. Public art and design is one such area, and 

found in many of our case examples. New museum facilities in Pittsburgh, Greensburg, 

Pennsylvania, Indianapolis, and other communities often were accompanied by arts-anddesign improvements to the public infrastructure, including nearby transportation facilities 

and community parks. 

Physical Revitalization and Creative Placemaking

Greensburg, Pennsylvania: Public input in museum renovation

Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, PA is in the process of redesigning its 

current building but felt it needed to confront an unattractive bridge connecting the museum 

to the community. Seeing the opportunity in renovation to extend art outside of their building 

and establish a community focus, the museum has planned a public art design competition to 

engage the community and redefine the bridge from community to organization. The next step: 

a park at the museum entrance.

The renovation and expansion of the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh initiated a longer 

placemaking effort that illustrates many of the principles associated with comprehensiveness and creative placemaking as practiced elsewhere. The Museum incorporated more 

and more partners into its implementation efforts as it moved from a focus on its own 

facilities and those it acquired nearby to the broader physical design and economic devel9 See Markusen, Ann and Anne Gadwa, “Creative Placemaking” White Paper for The Mayor’s Institute on City Design” 

(National Endowment for the Arts, 2010) and Nowack, Jeremy, “Creativity and Neighborhood Development: Strategies for 

Community Investment” (The Reinvestment Fund, December, 2007)
22

opment challenges of the neighborhood. It emphasized the power of small and relatively 

inexpensive projects that help forge new partnerships and introduce diverse and interesting new uses into underutilized public spaces. And it was unafraid to put its institutional 

reputation behind a collaborative effort to take on some of the endemic challenges of 

Pittsburgh’s Northside neighborhood.
23

Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh is located in the culturally rich Northside community, home to the city’s 

planetarium, aviary, Andy Warhol Museum, and an historic residential district where streets are named 

after notable sites of the Mexican War. But elevated highways physically fragment the neighborhood and 

it harbors one of the city’s largest concentrations of poverty households. 

The Museum itself is a mid-sized and highly-regarded institution, staffed by 55 full-time and 126 parttime employees who welcome 276,000 visitors annually. The Museum committed itself to help create 

a family district in Northside through community partnerships, educational programs, renovation, and 

historic preservation.
24

The Children’s Museum’s decision to expand in the neighborhood was accompanied by extensive consultations with citywide and community stakeholders on the design of the campus, the building and the 

Museum’s programming. Upon reopening in 2004, it became home to nonprofit groups providing Head 

Start, literacy, media and other children’s services.

Expansion laid groundwork for a joint venture with the Andy Warhol Museum and the Northside Leadership 

Conference—a development entity—to transform an adjacent historic structure, from which the Pittsburgh 

Public Theater had recently decamped, into space for the New Hazlett Theater, thereby sustaining an 

important cultural asset. The partners were soon joined by a diverse group of organizations dedicated to 

a unique effort to overcome the Northside’s persistent physical and cultural divides. The Charm Bracelet 

Project made small grants to partnerships among arts, cultural, social, and other organizations—the 

Charms—to carry out activities as varied as cross-generational storytelling, programming at a farmer’s 

market, and public art installations. This proliferation of smaller projects broadened the effort’s visible 

effects and range of project and funding partnerships. In the words of Tom Sokolowski, previous Director 

of the Warhol: “Charms were way better than plunking down $200,000 on a public sculpture.” 

Under the auspices of the Charm Bracelet Project, the UNDERPASS public art gallery brought an annual 

series of high-quality art installations to a dark passage underneath an elevated railway, helping animate one of the underpasses that act as gateways from downtown and the Northside’s cultural area to 

the broader neighborhood. Most recently, the Museum transformed the sunken, rundown plaza in front 

of the Museum and at the center of Allegheny Commons, the heart of the historic Northside, into Buhl 

Community Park. The transformation further advances design concepts outlined in the urban design competition the Museum sponsored early on in its post-expansion era.
25

4. Community-Building and Formation of 

Collective Efficacy

Community-building consists of efforts to strengthen the ties among people in neighborhoods for the purpose of creating better communities. A large part of community-building 

is the attempt to create social capital, which Coleman succinctly defined in his seminal 

work—Foundations of Social Theory—as the relationships between people that make 

effective action possible.10 These relationships are powerful because they enable people to do four basic things: surface and publicly affirm people’s values, enable people 

to share information with one another about challenges, opportunities, and successes, 

enter into mutual agreements to work on things together, and redefine relationships with 

authorities so that they work better for ordinary people.

One form of social capital—collective efficacy—seems to exert an especially powerful 

influence over the fortunes of neighborhoods. Harvard’s Robert Sampson defines collective efficacy as social cohesion combined with shared expectations for social control.11

His extensive research in Chicago has shown that collective efficacy makes the difference 

between poor neighborhoods that suffer widespread crime and other symptoms of social 

disorder, and those that carry on in relative safety. This explains why those most seriously 

engaged in community revitalization pay a great deal of attention to community-building. 

But however important social capital is to neighborhoods, it is extremely difficult to create. 

It’s usually not hard to bring people together once, but their competing responsibilities and 

the uncertainty of a reward make it difficult to do so again and again. Communities are 

sometimes divided, so engagement risks surfacing and sharpening those divisions. And 

if organizing people leads nowhere in particular—defining and achieving concrete results 

10 Coleman, James, Foundations of Social Theory, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)

11 Robert Sampson, Great American City, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
26

is hard—they will resist involvement the next time someone tries. These difficulties explain 

why LISC’s comprehensive community initiative, which relies heavily on resident and business owner engagement, emphasizes creation of an ongoing committee convened by a 

lead agency responsible for sustaining participation and seeing it to a practical end.

When museums and libraries lead community-wide discussions of important public 

issues, they are community-building. 

Community-Building Through Discussion and Debate

Chicago, IL: Art program with deep involvement in community issues

Yollocalli Arts Reach, an initiative of the National Museum of Mexican Art, teams with local 

artists, Chicago Park Services, schools, and community groups to improve the quality of life 

for local youth and involve them more substantially in the arts and civic process. Through arts 

projects around their neighborhoods, classes, and mentoring opportunities the youth in these 

neighborhoods engage in conversations pertinent to their lives and communities including: 

immigration, homelessness, femininity and masculinity, counteracting traditions and making new 

ones, environmental responsibility, community activism, mortality, gang violence, youth violence, 

teen romance, graffiti politics, and even heroes and monsters.

Ann Arbor, MI: Library site of sustainability discussion program

To pursue a city sustainability project, the City of Ann Arbor wanted to reach a wide and diverse 

audience, so it turned to the Ann Arbor District Library for meeting space, convening capability, 

and a means to carry out broad outreach to all citizens. The central library hosted a series of 

extremely well-attended events, digitally recording the series and posting it to their website so as 

to reach a broad audience.

Delaware: Community pride and identity 

The Delaware Division of Public Libraries served as a forum within which public and private 

agencies came together to reaffirm the value of a community hit hard by the economic downturn. 

The library system used its “We Geek Delaware” campaign to improve morale and collect 

information on the aspirations of its citizens, how they perceived Delaware and their community, 

and examine how the Division of Public Libraries could help achieve their goals. The library 

system held six public conversations across the community and now is planning on how to shift 

its role from “transactional to transformational.”

Omaha, NE: Convening across social divides

Omaha Public Library thinks of itself as a “nexus” or convening organization that helps solve 

community issues by serving as a community space, where people occupying disparate 

organizational, individual, civic, business roles can come together to fulfill their mission 

collectively. For example, working with the Metro Area Continuum of Care for the Homeless 

(MACCH), staff led a discussion of homeless people’s issues, concerns, needs, and 

interests. Within the library’s safe and neutral space, participants spoke openly, sharing 

sometimes difficult details about their experiences. MACCH staff members were amazed at the 

amount of information that came out, far surpassing past attempts to get people to open up.
27

The Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling is an integral part of a new mixed-use development 

on the northern boundary of Harlem’s Sugar Hill neighborhood. Developed by the nonprofit Broadway 

Housing Communities, it contains 124 affordable apartments, including 25 for homeless households, 

a community art gallery space, an early childhood center, and the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & 

Storytelling. The Museum occupies about 17,000 square feet of flexible artmaking, installation and exhibition space showing artwork generated in or inspired by Sugar Hill.

Suzy Delvalle, the Executive Director of the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, explains, 

“The museum grew out of Broadway Housing Communities’ 30 years of experience in the community. 

Since 1997, BHC has hosted community art galleries in buildings designed to provide supportive housing 

for formerly homeless adults and families, and since 2003 has provided quality arts-based early childhood 

education programs for resident and neighborhood children. It became clear that access to the arts plays 

a powerful role in generating meaningful change and opportunities for children, adults and communities. 

Having cultural and educational programming that you can come to with your kids has really changed the 

experience of those living in our community.” 
28

Located at the intersection of two ethnically distinct communities, the Sugar Hill housing model hopes to 

be transformative both physically and culturally by providing affordable housing, early childhood education 

and cultural resources in a densely populated area of Harlem and Washington Heights. While cultural and 

educational programs have been a core part of BHC’ service model since 1997, the museum and a partnership between the museum and the on-site Sugar Hill Museum Preschool will extend and strengthen the 

impact of BHC’s unique approach to the challenges of deep generational poverty. Museum programming, 

including in-depth relationships with local schools and community organizations, will focus on the developmental needs of children ages 3-8 and their families. 

Among other goals, the Museum will encourage a sense of community ownership and welcome children 

and families to the museum setting, removing the stigma too often associated with art museums as 

exclusive. Partnerships with other museums in New York City will support exhibitions of important artwork, 

including work of artists associated with the legendary Harlem Renaissance, the cultural legacy of the 

Sugar Hill neighborhood. The Museum also will partner with Cool Culture, which offers cultural experiences 

to over 50,000 low-income families through a network of 90 cultural institutions.

Programmatically, the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum will offer inter-generational programs that encourage 

families to share their cultural histories and personal stories through art projects that create opportunities for conversations regarding ethnicity, heritage, customs, and community history. In this capacity, the 

museum will provide a sense of cultural legitimacy and authority that will increase access to high-art for 

the community while also providing residents and community members with an outlet and physical gathering space for their own creative and cultural expression.
29

These forms of community-building bring people together to express their aspirations for 

the community, encounter those who may be different from them by virtue of place of 

birth, race-and-ethnicity, language, social class, or political affiliation, and to learn about 

ways to effectively solve their problems. What is important about the leadership of museums and libraries in this context is their neutrality; all offer places where debate can take 

place without the situational intimidation of a city council hearing or some other official 

community forum. This function played by arts, cultural, and educational institutions—like 

museums and libraries—is why some writers have praised the anchoring role they can play.

In addition to leading community-wide discussions around issues of immigration, discussed below, the Hartford Public Library has started an initiative to engage community 

residents in discussion and debate on major public issues. The adult learning “community 

conversation group” is quite diverse, ranging from ordinary citizens to government staff to 

local academics. According to the lead workforce agency director, the monthly meetings 

helped nail down practical strategies to assemble adult learning assets in the region. The 

agency then went on to get funding for one such strategy—a “learner web”—which is an 

online learning support system for low-level adult-literacy students.

Surfacing and debating issues of community concern is an important, and longstanding, 

role played by libraries, in particular, across the United States, and the box above displays 

examples of this practice. This form of community-building presumes, for the most part, 

that people already come prepared to articulate their values and concerns in a public setting, and that they can expect to be heard at least somewhat sympathetically by others.

Not all communities are prepared to do this, however, and an important strand of community-building in the past is the use of arts and culture to foster community cultural 

development, understood as embrace and confident expression of community history and 

identity and reconciliation of competing identities and interests within communities—core 

themes of community-building more generally. In fact, under the leadership of William 

Cleveland, an entire sub-discipline of arts-based community development arose to better 

conceptualize the points of connection between culture and community development and 

advance best practices in the field.12

The Queens Museum of Art has become a leading practitioner of community cultural 

development, as practiced both by museum staff and the artists with whom they work 

in the community, as well as in their efforts to transform the blighted and under-utilized 

12 Cleveland, William, “Making Exact Change: How US arts-based programs have made a significant and sustained impact 

on their communities” (Art in the Public Interest, November 2005)
30

Corona Plaza outside the Museum into a public space that fosters community-building 

in one of the most multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic communities in the United 

States. The Queens Museum has done its share of convening, but in addition, has mobilized other organizations to sustain work on community problems over time. As well, the 

Museum has devoted itself to “integrating art as a strategy for both personal and community development,” according to the Museum’s director of public events, by sending artists 

into the community to help give authentic voice to the people who live there and whose 

voices are seldom heard.

In Seattle, as another example, the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American 

Experience partners with community members and local groups to create exhibits and 

programming that give voice to the various racial and ethnic groups that make up the 

community. The museum also offers neighborhood walking tours that bring museum 

visitors into the community, guides them through the neighborhood, interprets the cultural 

significance of various points, and encourages patronage of local businesses.

The involvement of libraries and museums in helping local residents build a sense of community and to explore key local issues can range from serving as a trusted meeting place 

and resource to a catalyst for the process to a leader and main institution in the work. 

The Hartford Public Library has rightly gained a national reputation for civic leadership 

in creating, implementing, and institutionalizing a broad-ranging effort to bring the city’s 

immigrant communities into full membership in the community of Hartford residents. 

What is important about the Hartford Library’s effort is the extraordinary degree of leadership and active staff involvement in practical programs to help immigrants navigate an 

unfamiliar terrain. The Library went on to help forge a working partnership across many 

types of immigrant-serving organizations, which in turn served as the springboard for 

creation of a formal city government commission that institutionalized this cooperation. 

So the initial efforts by the Library to deploy its own assets strategically in pursuit of an 

important civic goal ultimately shaped the citywide landscape in important ways.
31

Queens Museum in New York City serves one of the most densely populated and culturally diverse communities in the United States. Much of what the museum has done in the past few years is to host projects and programming inside and outside the museum’s walls that strive to marry art with civic and social 

practice. “Our reason to do it was not around audience development, though that has happened. It has 

been about challenging us as a public institution and what niche we could fill in this particular community” 

says Prerana Reddy, Director of Public Events of the Museum.

The borough’s many new immigrants are separated by language, culture, and sometimes physical barriers, 

which inhibits formation of a genuine sense of community. Museum staff help build community by forming 

direct relationships with community members: as “listeners,” conveners and facilitators for conversations. 
32

Another example: the Museum worked with artist Tania Bruguera on a multiyear project that views the immigrant as a global citizen in a new post-national world. She believes that arte útil offers a way to help people 

find a language to debate social, political and scientific issues. Free experimental learning workshops led 

by artists and community members helped adults learn English through performance art, and children play 

music through the Venezuelan El Sistema. The program acts as a kind of think tank for visiting international artists and activists interested in creating a more humane and dignified legal and economic reality 

for future migrants, guided by activists now in training. “For us, this approach helped us create a clear 

identity for ourselves and name what our values are. We were able to bring in [staff] people from different 

backgrounds beyond museum studies and art history into the museum; we are now looking for people with 

social media, community organizing, and popular education facilitation skills. It has freed us to do work that 

is not just about situating art in the public realm, but integrating art as a strategy for both personal and 

community development,” says Reddy.

The museum formed a loose coalition of more than 40 organizations that has worked on specific issues 

within the community. In doing so, the Museum operates under a philosophy of “participating in the ecology” of the local community.

As so often happens, physical revitalization was a precursor to community-building. In partnership with an 

economic development corporation and Queens College, the Museum convened businesses, community 

organizations, and cultural groups to help turn nearby Corona Plaza, a deteriorated and under-used space, 

into a site for deep civic engagement. Museum staff dedicated themselves to educating, engaging, and 

helping people make sure that the physical design reflected their wishes and that programming affirmed 

the cultural diversity of the neighborhood.
33

The Hartford example points to the importance of an institutional home for initiatives 

that might otherwise falter for lack of a sustaining presence. The Children’s Museum of 

Indianapolis’ experience also highlights the value of active leadership in creating and 

sustaining community forums where community-building and collective efficacy are nurtured. The museum’s initial community consultation effort morphed into a board subcommittee—the Neighborhood Development Working Group—that enabled the museum 

to communicate with stakeholders, help the museum “stay in its lane,” and allow the 

neighborhood to better understand what the museum was doing and why. It then became 

the nucleus for the community’s more ambitious comprehensive community revitalization 

effort, described in brief in the preceding section. 

The collective efficacy that Sampson regards as so important to the quality of life in very 

poor communities has nearly evaporated in neighborhoods long isolated from the mainstream economy. One aspect of this is the loss of social cohesion, in which people are not 

particularly apt to trust one another and fail to form relationships that could advance each 

other’s well-being. 
34

Hartford Public Library’s staff of 129 greet more than 865,000 visitors annually at its 10 locations 

throughout Hartford, a mid-sized city with many economic and social challenges. Construction of a new 

and architecturally noteworthy Downtown library afforded an opportunity for self-reflection about the role 

and future of the library, leading to a transformative commitment to deepening community engagement 

throughout the city. Matt Poland, Library CEO says, “Our tagline is ‘A Place Like No Other.’ We don’t tell 

people what this means; it’s the people we serve who decide that for themselves. It’s not abstract, but 

connected to each individual’s experience. In other words, the future of the library is developed in concert 

with the people we serve.” 

Part of the Library’s change is deeper engagement in issues traditionally part of a library’s mission—new 

and more strategic involvement in community-wide early childhood education and workforce systems, 

for example. 
35

But the Library also has embraced completely new roles. As is true elsewhere, Hartford experienced an 

influx of immigrants, introducing a social and political divide between long-time residents and newcomers 

facing barriers of language, culture, and legal status. To pave a way forward, the library’s We Belong Here 

initiative deploys library collections and services to help new Americans acclimate to and engage with the 

broader community, and lead both them and the receiving community to a shared vision of an America 

where each belongs. The library created An American Place, which provides referrals, resources and services to help immigrants become citizens, learn the language, develop or burnish employment credentials 

and skills, and participate politically in community life. The library recruited and supported community 

mentors or “cultural navigators” to assist newly-arrived individuals and families. 

The library also helped align the efforts of immigrant-serving social, civic and educational agencies 

because, as Poland put it, “working alone doesn’t work anymore. We have become a de facto immigrant 

center, with connections to government and the Catholic Church, and others to form a significant welloiled partnership. It’s become a huge part of our practice—passport services, adult literacy, naturalization 

ceremonies, all embedded in the core work of the library.” Hartford Public Library had also taken a leading role in convening the discussion around immigrant assimilation. They lobbied the mayor to create an 

Immigration/New Americans Commission through a recognition that citizen leaders need to be to be part 

of the city hall “collection of commissions.” Citizens need to be closer to the core machinery of government 

than the library can get them. It is only here that they can focus on citywide policy and ensuring greater 

immigrant access to community decisionmaking.
36

A companion attribute is lack of efficacy, in which people lack confidence that any efforts 

to improve their lives will amount to much. These are related: if people don’t trust one 

another, they won’t cooperate to get things done. 

The Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance embarked on one of the few sustained efforts 

to build collective efficacy in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago. The 

Conservatory itself is a repository of expertise on plant life, a major cultural institution in 

the city, and one of the few organizations in the neighborhood with the money, staff, and 

physical facilities on which to found neighborhood improvement efforts. Conservatory 

staff clearly saw that the demoralization of the community—its lack of collective efficacy—threatened to undermine the vitality of the institution itself. So they took on the 

challenge of acting as the lead agency for LISC’s comprehensive initiative in Chicago, 

similar to the role taken on by the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Further, they recognized that in a community as devastated as East Garfield Park, revitalization meant first 

and foremost, the repair of collective efficacy. Drawing on the strength of their own institution, they embarked on a community gardening campaign that brought people together 

in a common enterprise (social cohesion) that led to more than 40 community gardens 

throughout the neighborhood (efficacy). 
37

The Garfield Park Conservatory is located in East Garfield Park, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago. 

Operated by the Chicago Park District, the 1907 facility is one of the nation’s largest and finest historic conservatories, covering more than 4 acres under glass. The Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance employs 20 full 

and part time employees and 160,000 people visit the exhibits, programs and events annually.

A severe winter cold snap in 1994 on top of long-deferred maintenance caused damage leading to loss of 

large portions of the Conservatory’s historic collection. The crisis prompted creation of the Garfield Park 
38

Conservatory Alliance, charged with helping the institution regain something of its previous prominence. 

The Alliance raised funds quickly. But keeping the institution going within a community politically and 

economically demoralized by decades of poverty and isolation was no certain prospect. “The community 

has to take ownership to survive. We didn’t want [the Conservatory] to be in decline in another 15 years—it 

needed to be sustained. I felt strongly that the conservatory would succeed if the community survived,” 

says Eunita Rushing, the President of the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance.

Garfield Park saw community gardens as a way to build resident ties, as have other conservatories. But in 

2003, the Alliance led the East Garfield neighborhood’s entry into LISC Chicago’s comprehensive community initiative, the New Communities Program, taking on the job of organizing residents, and with them, 

creating a Quality-of-Life Plan that affirmed the neighborhood’s rich cultural past and identified the community assets that could be brought to bear to help neighbors realize their vision.

“So much of what the New Community Program did was building community gardens, initiating community 

activism. We were responsible for 40 community gardens, maintained by local residents. We helped them 

build their own greenhouse. This was all a real benefit to the community reputation of the conservatory. 

We want to do even more, and with more community engagement, so that they see the conservatory as a 

resource,” says Rushing. 

In addition, “community engagement and our New Communities Program leadership did have value in 

fundraising. Previous development directors had to “get” why we were doing community engagement. Was 

this part of the mission? Why make this choice? But no funder believes that we shouldn’t impact the community. They view us as obliged to respond to community need. And there is a great funding opportunity in 

appealing to socially-motivated investors, who recognize the desperate need for investment and activation 

and education. The Conservatory is the place where that happens on the West Side,” says Jill Antoniewitz, 

Development Director for the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance.
39

5. Collective Impact in Services Delivery

The core mission of museums and libraries is to provide services to their patrons—

access to exhibits, books, multimedia, lectures—and to the broader community, which is 

why they have become engaged in the kind of community initiatives we describe in this 

report. Although foundations have been supporting comprehensive community initiatives 

for some years, it is only recently that practitioners have come forward with a formalized 

conception for how these could and should be done. This conception—collective impact—

was tested early by STRIVE in Cincinnati and subsequently popularized by the consulting 

firm FSG.13 It advances thinking about how collaborations among organizations doing 

complementary things can become more effective by orders-of-magnitude compared to 

those in the past. Ideally, five elements come together in a pure collective impact effort:

• A common agenda among multiple parties to pursue a common goal and adopt a 

collective approach to solving it.

• Mutually-reinforcing activities by multiple and diverse partners, including nonprofits, 

public agencies, corporate entities, or anybody else based on the different capabilities each brings to address some aspect of a complex community problem.

• Continuous communication, involving regular meetings and a structure within 

which collaborators can exchange information with one another.

• Shared measurement systems to track common outcomes, sustain the attention 

of the participants, hold people accountable, and learn lessons as the initiative 

progresses.

• Backbone support organizations—separate intermediary organizations and staff 

with skills in coordination, logistics, data management, and facilitation

13 Kania, John, and Mark Kramer. 2011. “Collective Impact,” in Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011.
40

Collective impact as a more general concept need not have all of these elements. After 

all, valuable community development work for years has adhered to many core aspects 

of the approach. Nevertheless, the emergence of collective impact as a term-of-art has 

been quite valuable to everyone working in the social policy arena.

Here, for example, is Gary Wasdin, Executive Director of the Omaha Public Library, 

describing why collective impact makes sense for his organization and community: “We 

have so many organizations sort of working on the same issue, not intentionally competing with each other, but of course they are competing with each other for resources, for 

grants and private funding, for an audience even. So what can we do to help bring those 

organizations together? So that they are working together, collaborating, sharing, building 

on each other’s strengths. And in some cases, maybe even deciding somebody else is 

already doing this so I’m going to focus on something else. Getting them together, getting 

them working on common sets of goals with common sets of measurements?”

It can easily be argued that in communities where resources are scarce, it is all the more 

important to maximize the effectiveness of organizations’ efforts to serve those in need. 

The central premise of collective impact is that explicit cooperation among multiple 

partners to offer a suite of non-duplicative services to the same population dramatically 

improves the effectiveness of each. In other words, we each work better when we all 

work better. 

Chicago, IL: Museum role as community center

The DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago is dedicated to promoting 

achievements and experiences of African Americans. It collects, preserves and interprets 

specialized materials significant to community residents and acts as a steward of cultural 

identity and heritage. At times the DuSable Museum takes on the role of community center, 

sponsoring or hosting dialogs on health or youth issues. The museum’s director of community 

partnerships, however, expressed some frustration that special programs to promote 

engagement around these issues do not trigger a corresponding follow-up action by other 

community organizations, a problem that a collective impact approach would help resolve.

Los Angeles, CA: Gang prevention through the library

Los Angeles County Public Library in California received funding to hire a Teen Gang Prevention 

coordinator who works with county sheriff, probation, mental health, and parks departments, 

as well as community organizations, to plan and customize programs that appeal to local teens. 

The library has offered more than 100 programs since 2010, which range from topics like health 

and yoga to video editing and art, and plans to expand these services in a continued effort to 

help teens get off the streets, feel more empowered, and focus on more positive outlets for 

expression. Notably, the library has focused considerable effort on creating continuity within the 

programming by tracking in detail the formation of partnerships and community ties.
41

In Detroit, the nationally prominent Focus: HOPE enlisted the Detroit Public Library and 

eight other nonprofit organizations to help all residents in a 100-block area by providing 

wrap-around services to residents to enable them to become economically self-sufficient. The Parkman Branch library enrolls residents in services and programs the library 

provides based on individual and family needs, including personal finance, health, career 

planning and family support. Each client is tracked as they receive services provided by 

multiple organizations. The Parkman Branch Technology Literacy & Career (TLC) Center 

also provides many enrollees with computer access and technology guidance. 

Cooperation around workforce issues is a natural fit for public libraries, as it plays to one 

of their traditional strengths; throughout the recession, library attendance has reached 

new heights, fueled by job seekers perusing want ads or taking advantage of job-readiness services. 
42

The Detroit Public Library is the largest library system in Michigan with 21 full service branches in addition to the Main Library. It reported more than 5 million visitors in 2011 and employs more than 300 

staff members. The system’s Parkman branch is located in a neighborhood of Detroit that is poor, like 

many Detroit communities. But unlike in many places, the neighborhood’s branch library participates in 

several comprehensive initiatives that involve cooperation with other entities to achieve a common end.

As in most other large cities, many young people would like to get decent-paying jobs that offer the 

opportunity to get onto a career ladder, but they lack the skills to do so. There are skills training programs around, but even those with high-school diplomas often lack the reading and math fundamentals 

they need to qualify for them. In Detroit, civic and governmental institutions banded together to create 

a network of Learning Labs to connect adults with limited literacy and math skills to career pathways in 

such fields health, information, and manufacturing. One of these is the Parkman Branch, which sup-
43

ported by a large Knight Foundation grant, created its Technology, Literacy, and Career (TLC) Center. The 

Center’s large bank of computer stations enables flexible on-line learning tailored to the goals and pace 

of each user, and is supported by staff able to help with tutoring, job coaching, resume building, interview skills, job search, and life skills.

The Branch also participates in the HOPE Village Initiative Neighborhood Network—a network of seven 

organizations working together to provide opportunities for neighborhood residents to become self-sufficient. The Initiative serves a 100-block area. The Parkman Branch is one of the community assets assembled by Focus: HOPE, a community organization born in the civil-rights era and dedicated to overcoming 

racism, poverty and injustice. “The goal of the HOPE Village Initiative is that, by the year 2031, all people 

who live in this neighborhood will be educationally well-prepared, economically self-sufficient, and living 

in a safe and supportive environment,” says Margaret Bruni, Interim Director for Public Services for the 

Detroit Public Library. Clearly, the TLC Center is one important contributor to the effort and also provides a 

pathway into the highly-regarded skills training programs offered by Focus: HOPE.

Finally, the Branch is part of a community referral program that links individuals to area agencies offering 

assistance with health care, parenting and emergency needs, and it works with the Accounting Aid Society 

as one of 20 store-front sites to help people with tax preparation. “Libraries do a significantly better job of 

outreach [than do other sites] says Kathleen Hatke Aro, of Detroit’s Accounting Aid Society.
44

As part of its commitment to collective efforts to improve economic and social outcomes 

in the city, the Hartford Public Library has joined with Capital Workforce Partners, the 

local Workforce Investment Board (the Federally-funded jobs agency) and its collaborators. The library’s role is to supplement the board’s traditional set of technology access 

and skills development services. 

“Connecticut has high unemployment and lots of discouraged or part-time workers. How 

can we recover? Federal stimulus money is gone and we’ve relapsed to a point where 

even our core funding is 27 percent less than it once was. This invites consideration of 

collective impact: how can we come together and use existing resources better? How 

can we ease access to the workforce system? How can silos be better-aligned?” says 

Thomas Phillips, President and CEO of Capital Workforce Partners.

The Harford Public Library has also built on its long-standing programming to move 

toward collective impact in summer reading. Library staff recognizes gaps in development of vocabulary and gross motor skills from infancy to age four, and to realize the 

Hartford Promise—which commits to college support for every student who graduates 

from Hartford Public Schools—every child must be reading at grade level by Grade 3. 

The library wants to create a model where parents support their children in this area, 

and they’ve begun by checking in with daycare providers on the needs of their charges, 

find ways to connect the library to daycare providers, and then go on to measure how 

well-prepared children are when they enter kindergarten.

Neighborhood children and families are at the heart of the Children’s Museum of 

Indianapolis’ cradle-to -career initiative, now in planning with Ivy Tech (the Central 

Indiana community college) and modeled on the Harlem Children’s Zone. The plan is 

to provide programs and services for all educational stages including neighborhood 

scholarships to the museum preschool, summer camps and apprentices programs for 

school age students. As another example of joint delivery of community services, the 

Indianapolis Public Library operates a full service library branch within the Children’s 

Museum, called the InfoZone. 

A museum or library can also take on the role as convener for a collective impact partnership. For example, as lead agency for the neighborhood’s New Communities Program, 

Garfield Park Conservatory is at the center of many community plans, including an ambitious plan to rethink the spectrum of education options available for local youth. The NCP 

wants to work with schools to develop community-based mentoring, preparatory college 

coursework, and specialized arts or vocational programs. The partners are calling for 
45

some schools to be open in the mornings, evenings and weekends and provide training 

in conflict resolution, as well as encouraging parents to form teacher relationships early 

on so that the education process becomes seamless from home to school to employment. Residents also recommend formally rewarding student academic success within 

the community.
46

EdVenture Children’s Museum in Columbia, SC is the largest children’s museum in the South and located 

in a state with one of the highest obesity rates in the United States. The museum welcomes some 

200,000 visitors annually into eight exhibit galleries, a library, learning laboratories, resource centers, 

and two additional outdoor gallery spaces. EdVenture is particularly focused on STEM, early learning, and 

health initiatives. It has a variety of partnerships, including one with five other museums across the state 

for a simultaneous “countdown to Kindergarten” each year.

Beginning in 2006, EdVenture embarked on a new master planning process to develop exhibits and programs that better respond to community needs. Funded in part through an IMLS Museums for America 

grant, EdVenture looked to revamp its exhibits and programming for young children and redefine its relationship with the community. The process moved the institution towards a perspective that emphasized 

the shared impact the museum could achieve if it worked extensively with others, and encouraged staff 

to go outside the museum’s walls, take risks, and invest time in partnerships without necessarily having a 

specific outcome known in advance.
47

This institutional shift became an important capacity-building step that enabled the museum to expand 

its reach, form more creative and beneficial partnerships, and begin to systematically address important 

issues in its community. EdVenture Children’s Museum is currently using this community impact model to 

address three initiatives: health, early learning, and STEM education.

EdVenture’s health initiative exemplifies the impact and efficiency of this new ethos. As a visible and 

trusted entity in the community, EdVenture leadership worked to capitalize on its existing health exhibit: 

Big Eddie, a four-story “boy” featuring exhibits on anatomy. The museum recognized a need to educate 

the public on prevention and nutrition and worked to grain credibility with local schools by partnering with 

major universities and research institutions in the area. Once the science piece was firmly established, 

the museum moved towards nutrition by creating a farm to table program, offering cooking classes, and 

partnering with groups to plan how to promote physical education outside of school programs. Finally, 

EdVenture is now looking towards statewide efforts to capitalize on its own successes and improve health 

programming across South Carolina. 

EdVenture Children’s Museum hopes to replicate the success of its health community programming with 

early learning and STEM education initiatives. The museum leadership prioritizes institutional awareness 

and stresses a clear analysis of a program’s lifecycle to determine the appropriate timing for growth, 

capacity building, and increasing credibility and partnerships to further community goals and transition 

from “a nice museum to a necessary museum.”
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6. What It Takes: Terms of Engagement for 

Museums and Libraries

All of the examples discussed in this report require partnerships between museums and 

libraries and other community institutions. Such relationships are not new, although in 

our examples of comprehensiveness, they do tend to mean deeper engagement with a 

broader range of partners than is typical of more traditional forms of cooperation. 

We often found that the efforts museums and libraries were a part of involved many 

partners at once, sometimes led or managed by committees or other groups made up 

of the participants. In these instances, no single organization decides everything for the 

group, although those who hold the lead sometimes exercise more influence than others. 

As we point out, this group decisionmaking helps ensure some kind of continuity, important in a field where community improvement initiatives tend to come and go. 

Throughout our conversations with museum and library staff, we often heard comments 

about how their institutions had become “outward-focused” or “committed to the community.” We wanted to unpack what this means in with a bit of care—to signal some of 

the changes that museums and libraries might expect to face. For their part, community 

organizations also should know what their partners face as they extend themselves 

deeper into community practice. 

As museum and library executives and staff spoke about how their institutions changed 

as they deepened their engagement in community initiatives, five different aspects of 

this engagement came up repeatedly. These aspects or dimensions of their experience 

are likely to be encountered by others, as well, and could be considered as markers of 

effective and rewarding engagement practice. These are:

1. Institutional commitment: the degree to which creation of community value is 

embraced as a core part of the organization’s mission, as witnessed by practices 

of multiple departments and programs and the support they claim from senior 

executives and board.
49

2. Locus of decisionmaking: the degree to which program decisions that most 

affect the community are made together with community leaders, as a matter of 

consensus. 

3. Embeddedness within community networks: the degree to which an institution’s 

projects and programs are a part of initiatives that involve multiple parties linked 

to one another in a cooperative effort to accomplish a common goal.

4. Continuous involvement: the difference between episodic projects or programs and 

those that continue over time with the same organizations or types of organizations.

5. Level of effort: the level of resources devoted to the project or program relative to 

other organizational activities, as in expenditures of staff time, money, and attention by senior managers. 

Each of these dimensions can be thought of as a spectrum, containing a range from 

weak to strong displays of institutional engagement. We could not assess these attributes across our cases with any precision, as we were limited to relatively short phone 

conversations. Because we picked case examples likely to show deep engagement, they 

seem to illustrate, for the most part, the “strong” end of each dimension. That said, not 

all seemed strong on all factors, suggesting to us that these dimensions are at least 

somewhat independent from one another; that is, strength on one dimension does not 

necessarily mean strength on another. 

Institutional Commitment

Much previous research on community engagement, and museum involvement in particular, highlighted a widespread attitudinal shift within institutions, reflecting underlying 

changes in a deeper “core philosophy,” “ethos” or “mindset.” The extended cases we 

reviewed were no different. Nearly everyone within museums and libraries we interviewed described this, and nearly all of their community partners we spoke with recognized this fundamental turning-outward in their counterparts.

This speaks to museums’ and libraries’ institutional commitment—whereby community 

engagement is seen throughout the organization as integral to its mission. Multiple 

departments and program areas foster engagement, and this is supported by senior 

executives and board.

Looking across our case material, several common themes emerge. A change in philosophy was sometimes dramatic, sometimes less so, but never an instantaneous pivot. It 
50

always involved a process of change that evolved. It almost always came from top leadership, certainly the executive director, but also members of the board. It usually entailed 

creation of specialized positions within the organization that embodied its commitment 

to community-oriented projects and programming. And over time, this commitment 

became more deeply infused into the operating practices of multiple departments within 

the organization.

The Hartford Public Library’s transformation began when the former executive director 

recognized that the library system was unlikely to survive—or at least, thrive—without 

significant changes. In the words of the current director, they had become a “sleepy, 

old, decrepit” system by the mid-1990s, and although they were an integral part of the 

municipal “vascular system” they had become increasingly removed from the actual 

life of the community. The slow drain of revenues and public support in a shrinking and 

increasingly poor city offered little prospect that this would change.

What did change was senior management’s willingness to ask and answer a fundamental, 

outward-looking question: How can we make ourselves more central to the life of the community? Which led to more questions: How could they create these connections, which 

were not those created by the government funding streams on which they traditionally 

relied? How could they alter outsiders’ perceptions that they were obsolete and irrelevant? 

What cultural changes would be required inside the institution to make this happen? 

Their answers we have seen: committed community-building to extend their work into 

immigrant communities and participation in multi-party collaborations to achieve a collective result in youth education and workforce development.

Though not as dramatic a transformation as experienced by the Hartford Public Library, 

the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, and the 

Garfield Park Conservatory also extended their reach into their nearby neighborhoods 

after concluding that their core mission had remained unrealized in important ways. To 

emphasize: their mission didn’t change, but it came to be understood more expansively. 

And they too extended their reach after major reconstruction of their facilities, which 

sparked an interest in physical transformation of their surrounding communities and the 

economic and social wellbeing of their neighbors. 

For example, the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis chose to expand in its existing neighborhood site rather than relocate to an emerging downtown cluster of arts and cultural 

institutions. A visionary board member encouraged the museum to think more broadly 
51

about their future in the city. “The questions on the table were: What opportunities 

would there be if we stayed? And help build a network of partners? And together make 

a collective investment in the neighborhood?” reports Anthony Bridgeman, Director of 

Community Initiatives of the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.

It may be no coincidence that this board member was a real estate developer, who 

thought about the museum’s future the same way he was thought about development 

strategies. He argued that the museum should “think like a developer” and consider 

how value could be created throughout the community. (He further reasoned that the 

museum benefited more economically from staying put than through a costly relocation.) 

This community-benefit perspective shaped much of what followed: creation of a capital 

pool for redevelopment, start-up of a co-located library branch, and development of a 

formal consultative structure with the community.

Locus of Decisionmaking

Comprehensive community development means participation by multiple parties in 

diverse sectors to accomplish common goals. Ideally, community partners work by 

consensus, guided by an overall strategy or framework for implementation, to pursue 

practical collaborations with one another. Compared to traditional one-on-one partnerships, where a larger institution or a public sector agency often exerts the most influence 

over what gets done, these efforts diversify the participants with potential influence over 

community choices.

This kind of “distributed decisionmaking” takes place in most of our case study communities. Decisions on program design and implementation no longer rests primarily with 

the museums and libraries involved, but include a number of community actors from very 

different domains.

The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh’s initial project—to revitalize and renovate the 

nearby New Hazlett Theater—began as a partnership with only a few influential players. 

As happens in real estate projects, decisionmaking was tightly held. By design, however, 

the Charm Bracelet Project that followed created a broad array of stakeholders. Many 

neighborhood nonprofit organizations—non-cultural “sister institutions”—submitted ideas 

or participated on peer review panel and the result was a proliferation of partnerships 

under the Charm Bracelet umbrella. The executive director of the Allegheny Commons 

Initiative (housed within the Northside Leadership Conference), the site of many Charms 

was on the program’s Steering Committee. 
52

“There was no formal structure to the Charm Bracelet Project; it was nimble and flexible. 

But it would be impossible if there were no consensus. There was no obvious answer 

to, ‘Who’s the decisionmaker?’ So everyone had to have a certain trust that none were 

more equal than others. Because of our size, we had to persuade people of that. It was 

very democratic; everyone got a fair shake,” says Chris Siefert Deputy Director of the 

Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.

The Charm Bracelet Project is an example of something else we often see: a shift in the 

effective ownership of community initiatives. Early leaders of the Charm Bracelet, and 

especially the Children’s Museum, began to assume a supporting role, with others taking the lead on grants management, selection panels, oversight, and operations (which 

alleviated some of the burden on the Museum). An energetic young professional from 

the New Hazlett Theater assumed informal leadership of a whole new group of community-minded people who were picking up the work and keeping the momentum going. 

Creation of this new leadership cadre is an important outcome of the venture, only made 

possible by the Museum’s willingness to relinquish control. It’s fitting that the new leader 

is a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs, a program to develop emerging professionals dedicated 

to working across sectors to find solutions to chronic community problems.

In Chicago, Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance (GPCA) was formed as an adjunct to the 

Garfield Park Conservatory to raise money, organize volunteer support, and develop ties 

to the community. They initiated several projects including gardening and youth entrepreneurship. When LISC approached them to suggest a lead role in the New Communities 

Program—the Chicago comprehensive community initiative—it seemed a natural evolution 

of their emerging community role. At the time of LISC’s designation of GPCA as the lead 

agency, Conservatory and Conservatory Alliance leadership promised that they would in 

due course spin off an independent organization to carry out lead agency responsibilities. 

This organization would accept a much-expanded mission to promote economic and housing development in East Garfield Park. It took ten years. During the recession, the GPCA 

board did not want to launch a new organization, but in 2011 the GPCA director reminded 

the board what they were charged to do, and they agreed to create the Garfield Park 

Community Council (GPCC). The resident-led Open-Space Committee of GPCC has overseen the now-extensive network of community gardens in the neighborhood, and it is now 

expanding its work into the intersection of open-space, health, and leadership development.

In both instances, the impetus for engagement came from the institution itself, and at 

least in the initial stages, the locus of decisionmaking remained closer to it than to any 
53

other member of the community partnership. In other cases, Detroit and Hartford, for 

example, initiative came from outside the organization and lead direction has been exercised by others. It doesn’t really seem to matter where it begins.

Embeddedness Within Community Networks

Embeddedness, as we use the term, refers to the role of a single organization within 

a network of organizations seeking to achieve a common end. To what degree are an 

institution’s projects or programs (or better, a series of projects or programs) linked to 

the activities of multiple organizations? This can be understood in the formal sense of 

Collective Impact, described in an earlier section, or it might be more loosely applied to 

attempts by organized groups to pursue a single goal following complementary strategies 

within a framework that supports sustained cooperation, like a committee or governing 

body of some kind.

In Detroit, for instance, the Parkman Branch of the Detroit Public Library participates 

as one of many partners in the Hope Village Initiative. The Initiative is led by Focus: 

HOPE and includes the Accounting Aid Society, which provides tax preparation services, 

Joy Preparatory Academy (elementary education), Lutheran Child and Family Service 

of Michigan (social services), Neighborhood Service Organization (supportive housing 

and mental health services), New Paradigm Glazer Elementary (elementary education), 

and Youthville Detroit. The network is in the difficult process of aligning each organization’s mission to meet its community change goals. All have agreed to participate in 

shared information collection on client participation and outcomes, a hallmark of formal 

Collective Impact efforts.

“Partnerships are essential, and these partners are working closely to provide services to 

community residents. The library has been in its current location for a long time, and still, 

some community partners are surprised by the library’s participation: people are not really 

aware of the range of services the library provides. Overall, I am excited about the collective impact concept. As in the Harlem Children’s Zone model, you look at correlations 

between services delivered and outcomes. Keep at it, and if it doesn’t work, do something 

else, says Kathleen Hatke Aro at the Accounting Aid Society.

The Hartford Public Library’s immigrant support activities included a range of educational 

and advocacy programs supported by volunteer community organizers it trained and 

deployed. In so doing, they created a network of community leaders and organizations that 

laid the foundation for a city-level commission dedicated to this purpose. In moving the 
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initiative’s center-of-gravity from the library to the city, the library moves from being a prime 

mover to being a participant among others—embedded in a broader community effort.

In more recent initiatives, the library has been enlisted as a prominent participant in community improvement activities led by others. The library director participated in cross-sectoral discussions held at the regional level to retool the workforce development system. 

Led by Capitol Workforce Partners, the effort aims to marshal the collective resources 

of workforce providers, educators, job developers, businesses, and public agencies to 

fashion a more accessible and flexible suite of services to those seeking employment. 

Something similar is happening in early childhood education.

“In Hartford, the library often was going it alone, calling in partners after doing the design. 

Now we seek partners to create designs with us, a conscious decision that has made 

the library a sought after partner as well. Now the library participates in a wide range 

of community initiatives that may never have happened otherwise. Being intentional is 

important and we’re gaining incredible expertise about how to do this,” says Matt Poland 

the library’s CEO.

In Chicago, efforts by the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance to jumpstart small collective 

impact initiatives within the quality-of-life plan framework have proceeded slowly. This is 

because East Garfield Park has relatively few community-based organizations and these 

tend to be small and weakly-funded groups without much history of cooperation with one 

another. That said, some of the committees charged with cooperating on joint projects 

worked well—the housing group and business group had some successes—and GPCA’s 

resident-led open space committee oversees its very successful gardening program.

Continuous Involvement 

The record of museum and library activity is replete with examples of partnerships in 

myriad areas of interest, from arts and culture to education to workforce development to 

many others. Conversations in the field strongly suggest that most of these take place 

over a relatively short time and are concentrated on projects with a very specific purpose, 

scope, and clientele.

However valuable these partnerships may be, comprehensive community initiatives 

embrace a deeper conception of engagement involving work with the same partner or 

group of partners over longer periods of time. All of the extended case examples in this 

analysis have done this. Some started with more narrow project-focused and time-limited efforts and evolved from there. In most instances, some kind of guiding framework 

helped sustain the continuity that long-term engagement requires. To date, the Children’s 

Museum of Indianapolis has been lead agency for the neighborhood’s comprehensive 
55

initiative for some six years; the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance was lead for ten years 

prior to passing it off to an independent entity it created. The Detroit Public Library’s participation in the Hope Village Initiative is planned through 2031.

The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh offers a case in point for sustained commitment. 

Its first outside collaboration began in 2004 with a partnership with the Warhol Museum 

and Northside Leadership Council to renovate the New Hazlett Theater. Executive Director 

Jane Werner asked staff where the museum should go next, which produced a number of 

creative ideas and led ultimately to the Buhl Community Park revitalization and the Charm 

Bracelet Project. What marked these as a significant departure from the project-focused 

theater renovation was a design competition that seated the new park within a vision 

for the whole area. This vision imagined all of the local institutional assets—the Science 

Museum, the Aviary, the Mattress Factory, and others—as part of the same cultural complex, with public spaces among them that could draw people easily from one to the other. 

This design vision of a more interconnected Northside underlies the Charm Bracelet 

Project, a durable multiparty effort, and lends coherence to what might have become 

simply a collection of one-off projects—charms without the bracelet. 

Similarly, the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis District Plan, and later, the LISC community quality-of-life plan, lent a framework for pursuit of infrastructure and other investments along the corridor and a point of reference to partners’ activities along these lines. 

The Children’s Museum credits the quality-of-life plan for keeping the institution’s momentum going. They already had financed 25 home renovations and the conversion of 20 lots 

into parks, which involved a good bit of citizen engagement. They convened community 

conversations throughout the 2009-2011 quality-of-life planning process, which built on 

this initial engagement. The planning process became a platform for further work. 

Level-of-Effort

Our final attribute of institutional engagement—the resources devoted to community initiatives—is a marker of the seriousness with which museums and libraries pursue this form 

of engagement. As noted, most of the extended examples we reviewed dedicated staff 

to their community initiatives. For example, at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, the 

Charm Bracelet Project effort alone required about one-third to one-half the time of the 

deputy director responsible for oversight and a full-time mid-level program staff person. 

These positions were supported by staff from the marketing and other departments.
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Hartford Public Library organizes the activities mentioned here—immigrant services, 

immigration services, adult education, and jobs and career services—under its Adult 

Services division. Organizing and promoting immigrant services required a fairly major 

investment of staff time into creating and sustaining English-language learning services, 

citizenship classes, immigration assistance, and community and civic engagement. One 

interesting way of multiplying staff capacity is their effort to recruit and train volunteers to 

serve Cultural Navigators—mentors to newly arrived immigrants as they transition to life in 

Hartford and the United States.

In Detroit, the Detroit Public Library decided that it needed to be at the table in the Hope 

Village Initiative, and they recognized that it would require, from all partners, more funding 

than would be covered by the project grants alone; that is, participation meant reallocating existing resources. This was achieved by integrating the initiative into the core services the Parkman Branch already provides, under the overall supervision of the Assistant 

Director for Branch Services and the Branch Manager. In this instance the core service is 

access to the fairly extensive computer lab and supporting staff, which was initially paid 

for by a large Knight Foundation grant.

In Columbia, SC, strategic staffing decisions were vital in EdVenture’s success as they 

hired staff who were trained in BioMedical Sciences, health education, and community 

development who could vacillate between the museum and science worlds and function 

as “bridges.” Becoming more involved in the community allowed EdVenture’s staff to take 

risks and create an environment where staff were as committed to outside programming 

and non-museum projects as they were to programs within the museum. The museum 

culture became one in which there was an “almost seamless [transition] between what is 

in the building and what is outside in the community.” 
57

7. Barriers to Museum and Library Engagement

It should be obvious that none of what is discussed in this paper is particularly easy to 

do. Our interviews with key practitioners around the country uncovered challenges that 

institutions should expect to face. Acknowledgment of and preparation for these type of 

hurdles will be invaluable to institutions and community partners in creating successful 

museum and library participation in comprehensive community initiatives.

Internal Changes

The decision to engage in comprehensive efforts is often tied to changes in institutional 

mission, which are sometimes evolutionary, not an instantaneous pivot. It inevitably 

requires organizational change and commitment from senior leadership; it doesn’t seem 

to happen only at the staff level or within one organizational unit.

“Community change is a long-term process. It is not always linear. Sometimes there are 

two steps back for each step forward. If other [museums and libraries] want to do this 

intentionally, they have to understand that it will happen outside usual programming 

cycles, exhibition cycles, and grant cycles. It must become part of the institutional DNA, 

and you need specific people with specific skills that often museums don’t have. And those 

people have certain language skills, cultural competencies, social networks, or experiential 

backgrounds that may be different than what might be expected of a traditional museum 

professional,” says Prerana Reddy, Director of Public Events at Queens Museum.

We found that for many of the museums and libraries that have done this type of engagement, there was a willingness to bring in leaders and staff from non-traditional backgrounds and to add staff positions that were not typical for institutions of that kind. The 

Hartford Public Library director was a Roman Catholic seminarian, then did retail banking, 

human resources, general management and finally was Senior Vice President Human 

Resources at Fidelity Capital and a Vice President at The Hartford Courant. The Deputy 

Director of the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh has a background in landscape architec-
58

ture. The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis has a community-builder on staff; the Hartford 

Public Library directly supports outreach workers, trained and deployed by the Hartford 

Public Library. 

New systems, programs other changes internally are needed to support the work, as well. 

“Challenges range from how do we measure impact in effective way, create the database 

system, form the right approach to encourage residents to participate in network services, and create network sustainability through continued funding. This project tracks 

clients as they move from organization to organization—there are of course strong privacy 

issues and challenges for the library, and those are not worked out just yet,” Margaret 

Bruni, Assistant Director of Branch Services with the Detroit Public Library

It should be emphasized that playing a leading role in community initiatives does not 

require involvement in all areas of community life. The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis 

acts as convener of the Mid-North comprehensive community initiative and provides loan 

and grant support to development projects (admittedly, an unusual role) but takes the 

lead only on the education component of the quality-of-life plan.

Navigating External Relationships

Working with new partners, in new relationships, around new activities certainly comes 

with challenges. “Be at the table. Learn how the networks of agencies operate. Become 

aware of potential partner’s interests and priorities. Understand that there are aspects of 

community partnering that won’t apply to the library, but be connected anyway. Look for 

ways that the library can make unique contributions and educate other services providers 

on what is possible. Don’t expect partners to be specific about what they need from you,” 

advises Margaret Bruni at the Detroit Public Library.

In some initiatives, accountability has proven difficult to ensure as multiple organizations 

pursue their own agendas in the absence of a controlling authority to ensure that they 

carry out promised activities. The latest generation of comprehensive initiatives aims to 

counter this with strong lead agencies—in the LISC Building Sustainable Communities 

case—or with strong “backbone” organizations called upon to manage the collective effort 

(which also includes LISC’s intermediary role). Coordination of the work of multiple parties, 

which can also be troublesome, is another challenge improved by locating managerial 

responsibility in an accepted lead or in a backbone organization.

More troublesome is the chronic lack of resources needed to mount an initiative of sufficient breadth and depth to effectively respond to the serious economic and social chal-
59

lenges characteristic of low-income communities. While we have seen examples of public 

and private funders channeling new resources into comprehensive efforts, these are 

episodic, and over the long term, unlikely to be sustained.

Commitment to engagement with comprehensive efforts places museums and libraries into partnerships that may include a role that is more public and involved with local 

civic life than they are accustomed to. Navigating these new relationships is not always 

straightforward; these are challenges that have to be actively managed.

“People need to know that there is some amount of political risk and strategizing that 

has to be done. One is often asked to take positions that are difficult or where we as an 

institution might not be in 100 percent agreement. There are a lot of things that museums don’t typically have to take positions on but because we are part of coalitions or 

our community partners are present in public forums we do have to make a statement—

whether it is about private development in our neighborhoods or campaigns that particular advocacy organizations need to take on. Dealing with those kinds of issues requires a 

lot of coordination and communication between front-line workers and the institution as 

a whole, from the executive director to the PR and development people to our community 

organizers and teaching artists. We need to create a sense of trust that we are all strategizing together and communicating outward in a consistent manner,” says Prerana Reddy 

at the Queens Museum.

Encumbered by traditional conceptions of institutional roles, prospective partners don’t 

always recognize the limitations of museums or libraries. A mismatch of size and competencies between these institutions and smaller, more local community groups and social 

service organizations can easily engender mistrust.

“I’ve observed a big difference in capacity among participants with the Museum, and 

some will look to it to do everything. We have to recognize the inequality of capacity; it’s 

okay if we all understand it. We also have to understand that the museum is restricted as 

well. It all points up the need for discussion and understanding, to be clear on respective 

self-interests—work in the sweet spot of mutual interest; mission overlap. This produces 

equality, not condescension. It’s hard to do; some others can’t find this intersection,” says 

Alida Baker, Project Director of the Allegheny Commons Initiative.

One clear piece of advice offered by the people we spoke to was to be clear on what 

interests each party has to collaboration and who does what in a re-aligned organizational 

field. “I think one of the challenges is to formally connect what the library does in immigration services to adult education service providers in the region. Then you can articulate 
60

the curriculum better and avoid duplicating services that are already available in the community. It is refining the niche: what services do they offer and how do they complement 

and enhance the total picture. The key is continuing to refine the role,” Andrew Tyskiewicz, 

Director of Community Education of the Hartford Capitol Region Education Council

The need to clarify may be particularly urgent in the context of community-based initiatives. In the words of Alida Baker: “If you take on new roles, there is a potential collision 

with those who have traditionally occupied these spaces, especially at the neighborhood 

level where “space” is constrained.”
61

References

Burns, Tom and Anita Miller, Going Comprehensive: Anatomy of an Initiative that Worked CCRP in the 

South Bronx. (Philadelphia: OMG Center for Collaborative Learning, 2006)

Cleveland, William, “Making Exact Change: How US arts-based programs have made a significant and sustained impact on their communities” (Art in the Public Interest, November 2005)

Clopton, Aaron and Bryan Finch “Re-conceptualizing social anchors in community development: utilizing 

social anchor theory to create social capital’s third dimension” in Community Development 42:1 (JanuaryMarch, 2011, 70-83)

Coleman, James, Foundations of Social Theory, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)

Institute of Museum and Library Services, “Creating a Nation of Learners: Strategic Plan 2012-2016, 

(IMLS: Washington DC, January 2012).

Kania, John and Mark Kramer, “Collective Impact” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011

Markusen, Ann and Anne Gadwa, “Creative Placemaking” White Paper for The Mayor’s Institute on City 

Design” (National Endowment for the Arts, 2010)

Maurasse, David, “Leveraging Anchor Institutions for Urban Success” (CEOs for Cities, August, 2007)

Nowack, Jeremy, “Creativity and Neighborhood Development: Strategies for Community Investment” (The 

Reinvestment Fund, December, 2007)

Porter, Michael, “Anchor Institutions and Urban Economic Development: From Community Benefit to 

Shared Value (powerpoint, Inner City Economic Forum Summit, October 2010)

Robert Sampson, Great American City, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 

Stern, Mark and Susan Seifert, “Cultivating ‘Natural’ Cultural Districts” (The Reinvestment Fund and Social 

Impact of the Arts Project, University Pennsylvania, September, 2007)

Urban Libraries Council (2007) “Making Cities Stronger: Public Library Contributions to Local Economic 

Development (ULC: Evanston, IL: January, 2007) 
62

Appendix 1: Methodology

To identify potential cases we scanned blogs, listservs, awards and honor listings, articles, association 

newsletters and reports from organizations, including the American Alliance of Museums, Americans for 

the Arts, American Library Association, Animating Democracy, ArtPlace, Association of Academic Museums 

and Galleries, Association of Art Museum Directors, Association of Children’s Museums, International 

Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Local 

Initiative Support Corporation, National Association for Museum Exhibition, Promise Neighborhood 

Institute, Public Library Association, National Endowment for the Arts, State Arts Councils, and Urban 

Libraries Council. 

In addition we reviewed lists of grants and grantees from Arts Work Fund for Organizational 

Development, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Franklin, Gund, Irvine, Knight, Kresge, 

MacArthur, and Mellon Foundations.

The director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services e-mailed research project descriptions and 

case study selection criteria to museum and library leaders, State Library Administrative Agencies, and 

library and museum service organizations to request referrals and submissions. We requested submissions 

from members of library and museum listservs if their programs matched our criteria. The result was a list 

of potential institutions and programs involved in comprehensive community revitalization efforts.

We contacted institution directors and public affairs, community engagement and education departments 

to discuss their projects and possible links to community revitalization and other comprehensive initiatives. During initial phone interviews we discussed program achievement, funding sources, links to community based initiatives and partnerships. Generally our conversations lasted thirty to forty minutes. 

Once we reviewed the first round of results, we scheduled a second interview with our major case studies 

to discuss program and project benefits, community engagement, ongoing community collaborations and 

partnerships, and advice for other institutions involved in community revitalization projects. We asked to 

contact community partners to discuss their organizational goals and activities, their role in the program 

or project, their perceptions of museums and libraries contributions, as well as challenges and asked 

their advice to other community organizations working with museums and libraries in accomplishing 

community goals.
63

Appendix 2: List of Interviewees

Indianapolis, IN

Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, Anthony Bridgeman, Director of Community Initiatives 

Ivy Tech Community College-Central Indiana, Dr. Kathleen F. Lee, Chancellor Dr. Darrel Cain, Vice 

Chancellor for Student Affairs 

Mapleton-Fall Creek Development Corporation, Leigh Riley Evans, Executive Director

Pittsburgh, PA

Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Chris Siefert, Deputy Director

Allegheny Commons Initiative, Alida Baker, Project Director

The Andy Warhol Museum, Thomas Sokolowski, former Director

Detroit, MI 

Detroit Public Library, Margaret Bruni, Assistant Director for Branch Services, Regina Smith, Parkman 

Branch Manager

Focus: HOPE, Logan Sheehan, former Neighborhood Network Project Coordinator

Accounting Aid Society, Kathleen Hatke Aro, President

Harford, CT 

Hartford Public Library, Matt Poland, Chief Executive Officer

Hartford Public Library, Homa Naficy, Chief Adult Learning Officer

Capitol Region Education Council, Andrew Tyskiewcz, Director of Community Education

Capitol Workforce Partners, Thomas Phillips, President & CEO

Chicago, IL

Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance, Jill Antoniewicz, Director of Development

Eunita Rushing, President

Garfield Park Community Council, Mike Tomas, Executive Director

Queens, NY

Queens Museum, Prerana Reddy, Director of Public Events
64

Manhattan, NY

Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, Suzy Delvalle, Director

Dominican American Visual Arts Collective, Diogenes Abreu

LitWorld, Madison Graboyes, Global Community Builder

Walterboro, SC

Colleton County Museum and Farmer’s Market, Gary Brightwell, Director

Colleton County Government, Kevin Griffin, County Administrator

South Carolina Artisans Center, Gale Doggette, Executive Director

Clemson Extension Services and Eat Smart Move More, Alta Mae Marvin, Extension Agent

Columbia, SC

EdVenture Children’s Museum, Catherine Wilson Horne, President and CEO

YMCA of Columbia, Wendy Broderick, Chief Development Officer

Other Museum and Library Interviews

Arizona State University Museum, Elizabeth Johnson, Coordinator of Social Engagement Practice, Greg 

Esser, Desert Initiative Director

Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Judith O’Toole, Director/CEO, Amy E. Baldonierie, Associate 

Director for Development, Joan McGarry, Director of Education and Visitor Engagement, Barbara Jones, 

Chief Curator

Johnson County Library, Kasey Riley, Director of Communications, Angela Dew, Central Youth Services

Pima County Public Library, Kendra Davey, Supervising Children’s Services Librarian

Kenya Johnson, Community Relations Manager

Ann Arbor District Library, Tim Grimes, Manager, Community Relations and Marketing,

Josie Parker, Director

Braddock Carnegie Library, Dana Bishop-Root, Art Programs Coordinator, Ruth Stringer, Circulation Manager

Denver Public Library, Letty Icolari, Director, Shirley Amore, City Librarian

Arlington Public Library, Peter Golkin, Public Information Office 

Brooklyn Public Library, Maud Andrews, Programs and Outreach

District of Columbia Public Library, Rebecca Renard, former Teens of Distinction Program Director

Fitchburg Art Museum, Jerry Beck, Marketing & Community Engagement Director
65

Tides Institute of Art, Hugh French, Director

Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Ryann Holmes Community Programming Director

Anchorage Museum, Julie Decker, Chief Curator

Tulsa City-County Library, Steve Barrett, 

Bass Museum of Art, Silvia Karman Cubiñá, Executive Director

Nicolaysen Art Museum, Connie Gibbons, Executive Director

Cleveland Museum of Art, Dyane Hanslik, Associate Director, Family & Youth Programs

Toledo Museum of Art, Jennifer Bandeen, Community Gallery Manager

Hennepin County Public Library, Johannah Genett, Senior Librarian 

South Chicago Art Center, Sarah Ward, Executive Director

High Plains Library District, Janine Reid, Executive Director

Minnesota Museum of American Art, Christina Chang, Director of Educational Services and Public Programs

New Museum, Corinne Erni, Project Manager, Idea City

DuSable Museum of African American History, Pemon Rami, Director of Community Partnerships

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Melissa Green, Director of Community Partnerships

Emerging Terrain, Anne Trumble, Chief Creative Officer

L.C. Bates Museum, Deborah Staber, Director

Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, Andy Kitzman, Project Manager

Children’s Storybook Garden and Museum, Judy Wait, Founder & President

Cornelius Public Library, Karen Hill, Library Director

Art Museum of South Texas, Joseph B. Schenk, Director

C. H. Nash Museum of Chucalissa, Dr. Robert P. Connolly, Director

Timber Lake and Area Historical Society, Cathy Nelson

Nashville Public Library, Tricia Bengel, Collections & Technology Services; RSL Research Group, Keith 

Curry Lance

Omaha Public Library, Gary Wasdin, Executive Director

Plains Art Museum, Colleen Sheehy, Director and CEO

County of Los Angeles Public Library, Debbie Anderson, Youth Services Administrator

Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, Cassie Chinn, Deputy Executive Director
66

National Museum of American Art’s Yollocalli Arts Reach, Vanessa A Sanchez, Director, Nancy VillafrancaGuzmán, Director of Education, Anita Smrdel, Corporate, Foundation & Government Relations Manager | 

Mississippi Museum of Art, Carol Cox Peaster, Director of Family Programming

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Blair Benjamin, Director of Real Estate & Community 

Development and Project Director, Assets for Artists

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Lauren Cross, Community Programs Coordinator

Ohio Center for the Book, Amy E. Dawson, Manager, Literature Department

Detroit Institute of Art, Bradford Frost, Detroit Revitalization Fellow, Special Assistant for Community & 

Economic Development, Kathryn Dimond, Community Relations Director 

Miami-Dade Public Library System, Raymond Santiago, Director

Chippewa Valley Museum, Susan McLeod, Director

Danville Science Center, Jeff Liverman, Executive Director

Delaware Division of Libraries, Annie Norman, State Librarian / Director

Flathead County Library System, Kim Crowley, Director

Oakland Public Library, Gerry Garzon, Interim Library Director, Jamie Turbak, Associate Director and Nina 

Lindsay, Head of Children’s Services.
67

Appendix 3: Abbreviated Case Descriptions

Anchorage Museum - Northern Initiative

The Anchorage Museum in Alaska employs art as a catalyst in a series of public art productions, exhibitions, performances, symposia, and residencies discussing various aspects of life in arctic climates. The 

initiative uses experts in the fields of science, economics, history and art in an international arctic dialog 

so goals are not formed in isolation. 

Ann Arbor District Library - Sustaining Ann Arbor

The city of Ann Arbor, Michigan developed an environmental initiative addressing city sustainability and 

green living. In order to reach the broadest possible audience the city turned to the Ann Arbor District 

Library to guide the initiative in planning and producing events which would engage audiences on site 

and online.

Arizona State University Museum - Cultural Connections

The Arizona State University Museum in Tempe along with community partners devised performances 

and temporary issue driven art installations establishing community connections to cultural facilities in 

an area where in-fill development is needed. The program reinforces pedestrian access and safety while 

highlighting artwork with social messages aimed to sustain community dialog. 

Bass Museum of Art - TC: Temporary Contemporary

TC: Temporary Contemporary, is a public art program developed by the Bass Museum of Art in Miami 

Beach Florida that presents art installation in a Miami Beach Art District. The temporary site-specific projects are produced by a range of contemporary national and international artist. 

Braddock Carnegie Library - Library Screen Printing Lab

The Braddock Carnegie Library, along with local artists, designed and operates a community print studio 

used for promotion, fine art projects, public classes and artists in residency programs. The studio offers 

small organizations and residents affordable printing options to market themselves and events while 

allowing artists to further their study of screen printing.

Brooklyn Public Library - Power Up Business Plan Competition

The Brooklyn Public Library’s Business department convened area partners to assist community members in starting and sustaining local businesses through a business plan competition. The project connects participants to resources, mentors, organizations, and accepted practices in the development of a 

viable plan while corporate sponsors provide cash prizes; many participants have established successful 

small business throughout their neighborhoods. 

The Children’s Museum of New Hampshire - Community Driven Public Art Installations

The Children’s Museum of New Hampshire in Dover developed an informal coalition with the Business 

and Economic Industrial Authority, the Recreation Department, Dover Arts Commission, and Dover 

Chamber. The city’s public art policy emerged from the coalition and served as the guide for the 

Children’s Museum’s first temporary public art project directly outside the museum. 
68

The C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa - African-American Cultural Heritage Exhibition

The C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa in Memphis, provided small stipends to high school students in 

a co-curated exhibition focusing on the history of Civil Rights in a Southwest Memphis community. The 

overwhelming success of this exhibition, surpassed all project goals encouraged the museum to continue 

community engagement with co-curated exhibitions, focus groups and community based projects.

Chippewa Valley Museum

The Chippewa Valley Museum, partnered with the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library, Eau Claire 

Regional Arts Center, Eau Claire Children’s Museum and other community organizations to create a 

cultural vision for Eau Claire County, Wisconsin. Funded by the Institute of museum and Library Services, 

the museum trained staff in cooperative planning and served as a convener for other community organization to discuss the cultural future and community vision for Eau Claire. The museum is now using the 

cultural visioning report, entitled “The Good Life,” to advise the City’s current planning process. 

Cleveland Public Library - Ohio Center for the Book

The centers main efforts surround the production of Octavofest, an annual festival that bring authors, 

book makers, and the public together to celebrate paper arts. The festival has brought together a number 

of partners and resulted in community programming. 

Corcoran Gallery of Art - ArtReach

The year-round outreach programming at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC focuses on the 

exploration of personal creativity and identity within the context of art history. ArtReach, provides free 

off site art instruction including family workshops, after-school and summer art classes and oversees a 

community gallery, an exhibition venue for program participants, local artists, community organizations, 

and schools. 

Cornelius Public Library - Mixed Use Library and Community Center

A small community in Cornelius, Oregon is attempting to establish a library and community center in a 

region with lower income and education levels as well as sparse senior and afterschool programming. 

Within the last year, the city partnered with Hillsboro Housing developer on a building plan for a three 

story building with a first floor library and two floors of senior affordable housing. 

Danville Science Center

The construction of the Science Center in an abandoned Southern Railway passenger station launched a 

series of economic development efforts in the Danville area as restoration projects are completed in the 

newly designated “River District.” Through partnerships and community planning efforts with the City of 

Danville, the State of Virginia, and regional stakeholders, the Danville Science Center is able to serves as 

lynchpin in Danville’s cultural and economic revitalization. 

Delaware Division of Public Libraries - We Geek Delaware

Based on OCLC’s Geek the Library campaign, the Delaware Division of Public Libraries, explored what 

it means to be from Delaware and what Delaware residents aspired to through the We Geek Delaware 

campaign. Holding six “conversations” across the state coupled with more localized We Geek Delaware 

programming, the library system collected data on Delawarean aspirations and sorted them by the Dewey 

Decimal system to further categorize and understand how the State of Delaware could best serve and 

support the needs of its residents. 
69

Denver Public Library - West Colfax Branch Library

Because of the proximity to local agencies, The Denver Public Library’s proposed branch in West Colfax 

will foster community collaborations with the Urban Land Conservatory, The Del Norte Neighborhood 

Development Corporation, non-profit organizations and area schools. The Denver Public Library system is 

committed to quality early childhood programming and community computer access and training at the 

proposed library branch.

Detroit Institute of Art

The Institute leveraged a public millage campaign as a tool for increasing its engagement and relationships with the community. The result is a series of programs geared towards placemaking, economic 

development, and encouraging community identity. The success of the millage campaign has committed 

the Institute even further to these initiatives as well as committing the institute to further development of 

community partnerships and community development. 

District of Columbia Public Library - You Have a Home Here

Teen employees at the District of Columbia Public Library joined staff to consider issues of violence and 

aggression towards homeless customers through a photography and oral history exhibition. Teens presented 

compelling stories of homeless library patrons and library and community partners addressed homelessness 

through a series of public discussions exploring tolerance and messages of social responsibility.

DuSable Museum of African American History - Civil War in Art

Recognizing teachers needed social studies 3.0 curriculum support, the DuSable Museum of African 

American History in Chicago, along with educational partners, developed a Civil War in Art database 

examining the Civil War through images and artifacts. Because visits to cultural institutions are too 

expensive for most school districts, the DuSable Museum now connects educators to high quality online 

classroom resources presenting a wealth of materials on issues, events and people of the era. 

Flathead County Library

As part of a community planning process, the library system is revitalizing a building for a new state-ofthe-art library that will serve as the “living room” of its community. In addition to placemaking benefits, 

the library is being built specifically with civic engagement in mind and has included input from the City 

of Columbia Falls, Columbia Falls Community College, Glacier National Park, local hospital, other cultural 

and business organizations. 

Fitchburg Art Museum - Main Street Art Project

Recognizing abandoned buildings and vacancies in business districts detract investors, the Fitchburg 

Art Museum and city of Fitchburg in Maine developed the Main Street Art Project to bring visual art and 

performances into downtown storefronts. The project is designed to inspire young entrepreneurs to view 

vacant spaces as sites while enlivening the area and making potential customers feel safe. 

Hennepin County Public Library - Work of Art: Business Classes for Artists at the Library

The Hennepin County Public Library in the Twin Cities metro area has partnered with Springboard for the 

Arts to offer free ten-session business classes to area artists. The participants, including a surprising 

number of senior citizens and those dependent on public transportation, become part of a network aimed 

at creating simple, practical solutions and systems to support artists in creating local culture movements. 
70

The High Plains Library District - City of Evans Library Branch

The High Plains Library District and the City of Evans in Colorado are proposing a library branch with 

shared meeting spaces including a police substation, a café and nonprofit organizational offices. 

Located on the east side of the City of Evans, the oldest, culturally diverse and low-income area of Evans, 

the library branch aims to initiate neighborhood revitalization by featuring an outdoor amphitheater, playground, community garden and edible landscaping. 

LC Bates Museum - Educational Outreach and Programming

The LC Bates Museum is a natural history museum in Hinkley, Maine that provides transportation costs 

to schools so students can learn onsite. In a community where poverty and limited educational resources 

undermine education, the museum also covers the costs of family visits, provides classroom resources, and 

routinely evaluates the impact of their programming and educational involvement with schools and teachers. 

Los Angeles County Public Library System - Teen Gang Prevention

The Teen Gang Prevention Program works with community organizations, teen clubs, law enforcement, 

parks, school-based probation officers, educational organizations and schools to find ways to reach out to 

teens before they are in troubled situations. The program works closely with local teens to better understand their interests and provide services and activities that encourage teen participation and engagement. 

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art

In North Adams, Massachusetts, the museum has coupled with Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, the 

City of North Adams, and a board of 30 people representing community organizations, local businesses, 

health and education groups, and cultural organizations to create a Master Plan for Economic Development. 

Miami Dade Public Library System - The Art of Storytelling

The Art of Storytelling: explores storytelling for parents/caregivers, teachers and residents in the hopes all 

will become involved with the library and thus impact their lives in a positive way. This program enriches 

the lives of residents by encouraging them to embrace diversity and to share their culture and history 

through storytelling in adult workshops, storytelling camps for children, and in an International Festival

Minnesota Museum of American Art - Project Space

In an effort to engage community artists the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul established a 

series of programs connecting artists to artists and extending the museum’s support beyond exhibitions. 

The museum also partners with a range of community based and educational organizations to transform 

Minneapolis and St. Paul’s appearance from cultural competitors to complimentary communities.

Mississippi Museum of Art

Through a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Our Town Grant, the museum built an outdoor Art 

Garden for educational programming, multidisciplinary performances, and film screenings. The space 

will strengthen the downtown cultural district and serve as a catalyst for the creation of new entryways, 

way-finding signage, and connections to adjacent entertainment and historical districts. 

Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts - Soul of Brooklyn Block Parties

In an effort to support local businesses currently facing competition from large scale franchises the 

Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn established a local festival engaging community partners and highlighting local retailers. The result has been fun and inviting events for various 

audiences including arts, food, film and music that fosters networking between neighborhood retailers 

and restaurants. 
71

Nashville Public Library - Limitless Libraries

In an effort to leverage the city’s resources, Nashville Mayor Karl Dean came up with the idea for the 

Limitless Libraries partnership in 2008, which brought together Metro Nashville Public Schools with 

Nashville Public Library. Through Limitless Libraries, the library has helped modernize and expand school 

collections by weeding out outdated books and by using the city’s purchasing power to efficiently acquire 

new material. Additionally, students and teachers have near-instantaneous access to NPL’s entire collection, plus several local university collections. School-issued student IDs are used as city library cards.

National Museum of American Art - Yollocalli Arts Reach

Yollocalli Arts Reach works with local teenagers and several Chicago communities on public art projects, 

early childhood education, and community identity development. Recently, Yollocalli has partnered with 

Chicago Park District to provide local students with a space for exploring civic engagement and issues of 

race, ethnicity, and culture through the medium of art. 

New Museum - Idea City Festival

This festival grew out of monthly lunch meetings where leaders of cultural institutions discussed how to 

harness the power of the creative community and embrace multi-discipline design projects in high density 

communities. Today’s event offers panels, workshops and demonstrations engaging city residents in urban 

grass roots initiatives where presenters must partner with another organization in order to participate.

Nicolaysen Art Museum - Public Art Project

When an abandoned apartment building was finally declared unsafe and demolished across the street 

from the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, WY, the museum immediately engaged the new apartment 

developers in an effort to form an early connection with new residents through a public art project. A 

total of 80 artists submitted interactive designs inspired by the region and the community participated in 

selecting a final project. 

Oakland Public Library

Oakland Public Library and the Oakland Unified School District partnered to explore the the feasibility 

of creating a joint use library that could serve both the general public and schools in a very low income 

neighborhood. The Library, serving as the lead agency, conducted a comprehensive needs assessment, 

applied for and secured a California State Library construction grant, obtained the required local match 

from the Oakland Redevelopment Agency, and designed and built a 21,000 square foot library in an 

underserved Redevelopment District. 

Omaha Public Library

Omaha Public Library embarked on a community-centric strategic planning process which worked to define 

the community’s needs first. Through a series of community interviews and data collection, Omaha Public 

Library was able to better understand how its residents viewed Omaha and what they identified as the 

biggest issues facing the city. The library then worked to define how it could be serviceable in addressing 

these issues. Through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Omaha Public Library 

has trained several of its employees to be Community Facilitators to address city-wide issues. 

Plains Art Museum

Plains Art Museum used its relocation to Fargo, North Dakota as an opportunity to lead efforts in community development and art place making. These efforts included the Defiant Gardens campaign which 

transformed underused public spaces into gardens and public art projects. The museum has also par-
72

ticipated in a significant role in the City of Fargo’s comprehensive planning process and partnered with 

Intermedia Arts to recruit fellows for the Creative Community Leadership Initiative.

The Art Museum of South Texas - Antonio E. Garcia Arts and Education Center

The Art Museum of South Texas and the Antonio E. Garcia Arts and Education Center partners with Texas 

A&M University, the Junior League, the City Parks and Recreation Department, area food banks and the 

west side business district in supporting the economically challenged area of west downtown Corpus 

Christi. The collaborations address a need for resident participation in planning and programming of art 

exhibitions, free summer art camps, after school care, homework and computer help, counseling, health 

and wellness services, community gardening, and permanent outdoor art installations. 

Tides Institute of Art - Artsipelago

After a longstanding community gallery tour had run its course in Eastport, Maine, the Tides Institute of 

Art coordinated cultural organizations and artists in effectively marketing regional cultural, art and history 

venues. The result is a cultural guide to area galleries, ferries, festivals and historic locations cross pollinating and increasing cultural audiences across disciplines and regional boarders into Canada. 

Timber Lake and Area Historical Society

The historical society has been at the forefront of a variety of initiatives in its region including unique 

partnerships with the local Sioux tribe, Black Hills State University, the Rodeo Association, and local 

schools. Their efforts have included educational programming around paleontology and Native 

Americans, as well as, leading efforts to build a community library. 

Toledo Museum of Art - ArtReach

The Toledo Museum of Art’s ArtReach program, forms community-based organizational partnerships 

with detention centers, Canine outreach centers and faith based organizations in serving disadvantaged 

youth with arts programming. 

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art - Lighten Up

The project, titled, Lighten Up: A Public Art Project by the Teen Advisory Group, is comprised of a series 

of public light-based artworks created jointly by museum MATRIX 164 artist Jan Tichy and The Amistad 

Center’s Teen Advisory Group. This partnership encouraged youth in the community to use public art 

projects to engage with the community and public spaces. 

Westmoreland Museum of American Art - Bridging the Gap

The Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, PA coordinated transportation agencies, 

funders and residents in an initiative to resurface unappealing twin concrete bridges connecting the 

museum to the downtown area of Greensburg. The project involved various stakeholders, community 

partners and neighborhood residents in multiple stages to select a project artist. 

Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience

Through a combination of community tours and community-based exhibitions, the Wing Luke Museum 

encourages the exploration of Asian Pacific American heritage and the patronage of local businesses. 

The museum highlights community experiences and shared history through its community curation 

approach where museum curators work with local community groups and individuals to create exhibits at 

the museum.