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ANDREA: Thank you so much for joining us today. We’re 

just having a few IT issues. Alright. So my name is 

Andrea Robles from the Office of Research and 

Evaluation at the Corporation for National Committee 

Service. And our office’s objectives are to support 

our agency’s mission by building knowledge on civic 

engagement, volunteering and national service. We 

conduct in-house research but also fund research 

through competitive grants for researchers, scholars 

and dissertators at institutions for higher education 

and support research and evaluation of our programs 

and grantees. 

Our webinar series is one way to share our ongoing 

research and findings. Bi-ford (phonetic) communities 

and a bi-ford (phonetic) democracies are based on a 

strong community engagement and participation. And as 

an office devoted to building knowledge around these 

topics we’re also looking to highlight cross cutting 

research from a variety of disciplines that broaden 

how we define or impact civic engagement across the 

United States. 

Today we have the pleasure of collaborating with our 

National Endowment for the Arts Research and 
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Evaluation colleagues who will describe their 

initiatives regarding place spaced art, civic 

engagement and community impact. But before we begin 

I’d like to cover a few housekeeping items for Adobe 

Connect. 

JENELLE: Hello, everyone. Thank you all for your patience 

as we get started with Adobe Connect. This webinar 

will be recorded and posted online following the 

presentation. Unlike previous webinars there is no 

dial in phone lines. All audio is broadcast over the 

internet using your computer speakers. All 

participants will be in listen only mode until the 

questions and answer session following the 

presentation at which time you can ask a question 

using your computer’s microphone by using the raised 

hand feature from the menu above. You can also ask 

questions at any time during the presentation by using 

the Q&A or chat box below. 

As mentioned earlier this webinar is being recorded 

and if you have any questions or experience any 

technical difficulties, please let us know using the 

Q&A or text boxes below. I believe that takes care of 

all of the housekeeping items. Back to you. 
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ANDREA: Okay. Thanks Jenelle. And just one more 

housekeeping items. Here at CNCS we have our annual 

Halloween party going on at the same time as our 

webinar. And we have asked folks to keep it down in 

the hallway. But please be patient if it gets a 

little bit out of control and we will try to put that 

on mute. 

So our format today will be as follows. We have a new 

guest speaker that was not on the announcement and he 

will do a quick introduction of the work. And that is 

Dr. Steven Woolf from the Center of Society and 

Health, of Virginia Commonwealth University. Dr. 

Steve Woolf is a physician and Director Emeritus of 

the Center of Society and Health at BCU. 

Dr. Woolf has published more than 200 articles and 

concentrated on public policy issues and partnerships 

with colleagues and institutions devoted to population 

health and social justice. Dr. Woolf’s remarks will 

be followed by Sunil Iyengar, Research Analysis 

Director of the National Endowment for the Arts. 
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Sunil Iyengar has produced dozens of research reports, 

hosted periodic research events and webinars, led 

strategic plan development for the agency and 

established research and leadership partnerships with 

the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic 

Analysis. 

He and his team have partnered with organizations, 

such Census (unintelligible) Institution, the National 

Academy of Sciences and the National Institutes of 

Health to study the arts and relation to the topics of 

economic development, health and well-being. He will 

then introduce his team and they will each present. 

We will have very brief concluding remarks by Dr. 

Melissa Gouge who is a research analyst here at the 

Office of Research and Evaluation. And then we will 

open this up for Q&A. We expect the presentations to 

last no longer than 45 minutes. But during the 

webinar please feel free to ask questions or provide 

comments in the chat box. And we will get to those 

questions during the Q&A. I will now pass this to Dr. 

Steven Woolf. 
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STEVEN: Good afternoon. I just want to say a couple of 

words about where we are in the United States with 

current health trends and the potential role of civic 

engagement in the arts in bettering our circumstances. 

Many of you have heard in the news that U.S. life 

expectancy has been decreasing for the past three 

years. This while other countries that have high 

income are continuing to see improvements in their 

life expectancy and spending less on health care. 

So there is tremendous interest in understanding how 

we can improve the nation’s health and that brings us 

to the question of what shapes health. We know that 

health care is important, but is actually a minor 

factor in understanding our health. Our health 

behaviors, such as smoking cigarettes or unhealthy 

diet are probably more important in shaping our 

health. 

But we also know as more research is being done that 

our health is shaped very much by our environment. 

And that includes not only the physical environment, 

such as having sidewalks and playgrounds and healthy 

air, but also the social environment. And therefore 

there’s been growing interest on how social and 
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environmental community conditions are responsible not 

only for health disparities that we see across 

population groups and geographic areas wherein some 

cities 15 or 20 year differences in life expectancy 

exist, but also how improving social capital and 

improving our social well-being can help close those 

gaps and improve our health. 

And the arts figure prominently as a potential

strategy for creative expression, relief of stress and 

increasing civic engagement and connectedness. The 

research is still building on this, but we feel that 

this is an important area for us to emphasize to try 

to improve the social web of our communities, 

families, and young people. 

ANDREA: Okay. Thank you so much for your comments and 

for all your work on this. So I will now pass this 

onto Sunil. 

SUNIL: Thank you Andrea. It’s a pleasure to be able to 

present to you today, hosted by the Corporation for 

National Community Service. It’s also good to be 

joined by the Deputy Director for Research and 

Analysis at the Arts Endowment, Patricia Moore Shaffer 
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and two research grant project directors of ours, Lynn 

Osgood and Kate Bukoski. 

Before I begin I wanted to tell those of you who may 

not know the National Endowment for the Arts is the 

country’s lead federal funder the arts nationwide. We 

seek to strengthen the creative capacity of our 

communities by providing all Americans with diverse 

opportunities for arts education. Patricia Shaffer 

and I are in the Office of Research and Analysis as 

you’ve just heard where our mission is through 

research to expand public knowledge about the arts 

contribution to individuals and society. 

As Director of the office I get to co-chair an 

interagency task force on the arts and human 

development of which CNCS is a member. So this 

webinar opportunity came out of our work together. 

I’ll start with an unapologetic plug. The title of 

this webinar is The Arts and Social and Civic 

Engagement and Innovation. So I thought I’d bite off 

the innovation part by telling you about a funding 

program we have for anyone watching who might be 

interested. Through the NEA Research Labs Program we 
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award cooperative agreements and grants to trans 

disciplinary teams of researchers and arts 

practitioners who want to create and implement a 

multi-year research agenda around one of three topical 

domains shown here. 

We’ll be releasing new application guidelines toward 

the end of this year for March 2020 deadline. Awards 

typically total $150,000 each with a required one to 

one dollar cost share. We hope to announce a new 

round of awards we’ve made soon, but as you can see 

one of the categories for the labs program is arts and 

civic and corporate entrepreneurship in innovation. 

I want to call out in particular the work of two NEA 

research labs, one at Indiana University, Perdue 

University, Indianapolis, which is the collaboration 

with the San Francisco Bay Center for Cultural 

Innovation. They have been conducting several studies 

of artists’ careers, the resilience that artists show 

during economic downturn and how they innovate careers 

through crowd funding platforms. But another part of 

their work focuses on how artists can contribute 

problem solving skills to work environments, notably 

in the public sector. 
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The other lab here at Vanderbilt is in partnership 

with several organizations including the Arts and 

Business Council of Greater Nashville and with 

Northwestern University. This lab recently conducted 

a nationwide survey of arts based creativity, but it 

also examined an entrepreneurship training program for 

artists in Nashville to learn whether and how artistic 

creativity translates to innovative business 

practices. 

You can learn more about these labs and their research 

products by going to arts.gov or looking up these labs 

individual websites. 

Now I’ll pivot to the other phrase in the title of 

today’s presentation, social and civic engagement. 

You’ll hear more about these themes from our next 

speakers. But first I wanted to suggest that for 

those of us who apply social sciences and behavioral 

research to the arts there are many touchstones we 

often have recourse to when attempting to articulate 

the link between arts participation and social and 

civic engagement. 
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Through household surveys, such as the survey of 

public participation in the arts, which we co-sponsor 

with the U.S. Census Bureau, or longitudinal data sets 

maintained by the U.S. Department of Education, we’ve 

seen over and over that participation in the arts 

tends to correlate closely with social and civic 

activities. 

Generally adults who go to live performing arts 

events, for example, are at least twice as likely as 

those who do not to volunteer in their communities, 

after we control for socio economic and other factors. 

And youth from at-risk backgrounds who engage with the 

arts intensively in or out of school also show greater 

social and civic engagement than their non-arts 

engaged peers. Just as in young children arts 

participation has shown to be positively correlated 

with greater outcomes in terms of pro-social behavior. 

You also see not only through survey data, but in 

discreet studies of older adults who participated in 

the arts some of these same markers of social and 

civic engagement. And finally the arts sector it 

should be said is thickly constituted with volunteers 

of all ages. In fact, according to a study we did a 
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few years ago the total dollar value of hours donated 

by all arts and cultural volunteers in the U.S. based 

on going wages for those same tasks can be estimated 

at over 13 billion dollars. 

Patricia is going to hope on in a minute and talk 

about the Arts Endowment’s creative place making work. 

But right around the time we were setting up our 

flagship program in this area, Our Town, we got wind 

of some survey results the Knight Foundation in Gallop 

had produced. They surveyed nearly 14,000 people a 

year for three years in 26 communities nationwide. 

The results showed that the top three drivers of 

residents’ attachment to their communities were the 

perceived openness or welcomeness of those spaces, the 

availability of social offerings including the arts 

and place based aesthetics. 

Finally, I want to call out the work of Mark Stern and 

Susan Siferd (phonetic), a research team at the 

University of Pennsylvania who for the past several 

years have tracked arts indicators, but also social 

well-being indicators from a variety of secondary data 

sources grounded in qualitative research. They’ve done 

this for cities, such as Philadelphia, Baltimore and 
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recently in New York. Their data can tell you a lot 

about arts patience and social cohesion in those 

localities. We’ve funded this team’s work on a 

project called Culture Blocks, which examines those 

relationships at the street block level in 

Philadelphia. 

But another vehicle we can use to study the 

relationship of the arts to social and civic 

engagement is the Arts Endowment Research Grants 

Program. This is plug two. Now I just told you about 

our labs. But these are project civic grants to 

support studies of the value and the impact of the 

arts to individuals and society. They range from 

$10,000 to $100,000 per award and guidelines will be 

coming out later this years. 

Our website is loaded with examples of projects we 

supported. Some of them are listed here. In the 

interest of time I won’t read these out as this 

presentation will be archived, but as you can see from 

a cursory glance the topic of social and civic 

engagement figures prominently in many of these

examples. And, of course, we’ll be hearing from two 
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of our research grantees working in that space in just 

a moment. 

Now as I wind up I want to note that we’ve seen 

greater attention in the public sphere on how the arts 

can affect social determinants of health including the 

sense of engagement with one’s community. Dr. Woolf I 

think explained this very well. So these are two 

papers, publications I’d urge you to take a look at. 

One apparently just came out today. It’s Creating 

Activity Friendly Communities and was published by 

staff in our office and the Office of Design at the 

National Endowment for the Arts with staff from the 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s in 

the Journal of Physical Activity and Health. 

And another, it’s a white paper that’s produced by the 

University of Florida’s Center for the Arts and 

Medicine with Arts Place America called Creating 

Healthy Communities. A similar title, but it talks 

specifically about cross sector collaborations that 

can result in healthy communities through the arts. 

And finally just wanted to tell you about a couple of 

projects that we are doing also in this space. One is 
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actually in collaboration with several funders. 

Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, Kresge Foundation, 

Bush Foundation, Knight and again Art Place America 

focusing on understanding, really developing an 

exceptional framework to understand the arts in place 

and how they relate to social cohesion and all the way 

through to health equity. 

This takes the form of interviews, document reviews, 

and a literature scan. And we actually have had some 

workshops to discuss this work and to produce, to kind 

of field test it with practitioners in this area. And 

so we hope to produce the result sometime next year, 

from this work that could particularly guide funders, 

but also practitioners in this space. 

And the second project is actually looking at the arts 

in terms of opioids and pain management and how, what 

kinds of arts interventions rise above and impact in 

terms of evidence and also to understand the 

relationship between the arts and not only substance 

abuse prevention more broadly but also as I say pain 

management, which is of course critical to the opioid 

crisis. So thank you very much, with that I will turn 

it over to Patricia. 
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PATRICIA: Thank you very much Sunil. I'm delighted to 

share now some highlights from our work at the Arts 

Endowment towards understanding the community level 

outcomes associated with our national creative place 

making initiative, Our Town, Our Town is the Arts 

Endowment’s flagship creative place making program. 

Based originally on a white paper the Arts Endowment 

had commissioned from Ann Marketson (phonetic) and Ann 

Godwall Nikodemus (phonetic) the original goal of Our 

Town was to stimulate investments in local 

communities, urban and rural, across the country to 

leverage place based arts and cultural assets. 

As the program approaches its 10th anniversary we’ve 

been focused on identifying how our investments are 

affecting communities. So let’s start at the basics. 

What is creative place making? The Arts Endowment 

through its Our Town guidelines defines it as when 

artists, arts organizations and community development 

practitioners deliberately integrate arts and culture 

into community revitalization work. 

Through project based funding the agency supports 

projects that integrate arts, culture and design 
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activities into efforts that strengthen communities by 

advancing local, economic, physical and/or social 

outcomes. Successful Our Town projects ultimately 

laid the groundwork for systemic changes that the same 

integration of arts, culture and design into local 

strategies for strengthening communities. 

Now Our Town projects are highly varied, reflecting

the needs and assets of the local communities. In 

this example, for example, the Arts Quest Our Town 

project the former Bethlehem steel plant was 

transformed into a performing arts and independent 

film and jazz café. 

Outside of Washington, D.C. the New Hampshire Avenue 

project involved artists and community planning 

processes, such as these neighbors doing their own 

interpretive dance to inform the planning of the 

redesign of a nearby highway. 

And then in North Carolina Our Town supported the 

restoration of Vollis Simpson’s 200 foot tall 

whirligig, placing them in a new downtown park to 

create a new tourist site and in the process giving 
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local unemployed residents new jobs in art 

restoration. 

With well over 300 grant projects awarded since the 

Our Town program began the Arts Endowment was 

interested in harvesting the data to better understand 

how grantees implemented their projects; what were the 

common inputs into these projects and what the common 

outcomes were. But how do you make sense of the 

diversity and creativity of these projects when each 

Our Town project is as unique as the community that 

developed it? 

The Our Town convened a group of evaluation experts, 

mostly drawn from other federal agencies that had 

placed based initiatives. I’d like to acknowledge the 

support of Mary Hyde from the Corporation for National 

and Community Service for her invaluable 

contributions. This group of experts recommended that 

the Arts Endowment develop a theory of change that 

would help us to improve the tracking of outcomes. 

Through the support of our contracted researchers we 

were able to generate a theory of change for Our Town 

to again help us understand more about our projects. 
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In order to develop this theory of change we first of 

all looked at our past grants. We looked at the 

strategies that have been used by our grantees as well 

as the outcomes that they were reporting. 

What we found in developing this theory of change was

that we also reviewed the research literature to 

strengthen the model and the model itself which I'm 

looking at right now has revealed a lot about how we 

understand this program and how it works. So again 

looking at the model we can see here, and I'm going to 

look at it from the top left, swinging to the right, 

we first of all can look at local input. 

What do we typically see in an Our Town grant project? 

We do see local leadership playing an active role as 

well as the use of cross sectoral partnerships. There 

are financial resources of course that are invested in 

these projects including those of the Arts Endowment, 

but also other local financial resources, and, of 

course, community buy in that we see from residents as 

well from political leaders. 

Grantee projects look very different from place to 

place. But we do see some common overarching 
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strategies. For example, we see communities that 

envision or imagine new possibilities for community or 

place. We see connecting strategies, strategies that 

connect communities, people with places. We also see 

illumination or highlighting of key community assets 

and issues, as well as adding or injecting new energy 

into resources, activities and local place. 

We felt that these strategies increased integration of 

arts, culture and design strategies in community 

development efforts is theorized to lead to 

incremental local changes at the neighborhood or the 

community level. As creative place making continues 

to expand its reach in more communities, the vision is 

that we will begin to see a national impact, more use 

of the arts in a sustained way in community 

development efforts. 

The logic model that we developed for the Our Town 

grant program goes into more detail about how the 

operates on the ground level. And I'm not going to go 

into this in great depth, but do want to point out,

for example, that when we take a look at community 

level change we see change that is the economic change 
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in terms of local business growth, as well as physical 

change projects such as beautification efforts. 

But of interest today I’d like to highlight the social 

change that we see, for instance, improved social 

cohesion at the local level as well as the greater 

sense of community attachment. In some cases, and 

often as an outgrowth of these other local changes we 

see systems level change, a sustained change in the 

way the arts are utilized at the local level to 

support community development, the indicators of which 

may be long term funding changes or policies that 

enable creative place making. 

We recently completed a survey of our Our Town 

grantees to validate this model and we’re expecting to 

make some minor adjustments to this model, but 

generally this model website was confirmed when we 

spoke to our grantees. 

Now the value of this model is in terms of allowing us 

to track impact and outcomes. And to that end I’d 

actually like to turn it over to one of our 

researchers who was supported by an Arts Endowment 
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research grant, Kate Bukoski from East Carolina 

University. Kate? 

LYNN: I think I’ll jump in there. This is Lynn Osgood 

from Austin, Texas. And telling about the Forklift 

Danceworks project. And so my name is Lynn, the 

Executive Director of a nonprofit organization called 

Civic Arts. We work at the intersection of arts and 

community development processes. And today I’ll be 

presenting the results of a research that was done 

with Forklift Danceworks, an arts organization in 

Austin, Texas run by Artistic Directors Allison 

Outreach and Chrissy Mary, and talking specifically 

about their My Park, My Pool, My City project. 

We were very fortunate to have support from the 

National Endowments for the Arts for a three year 

research cycle, which allowed us to be embedded with 

the arts organization as researchers. And they cocreated performances with three different East Austin 

communities over a period of three years. 

So Forklift as an arts organization traditionally 

works with staff, they create performance about the 

everyday life of the work that people do. For these 
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performances they bring in Grammy award winning 

musicians and lighting artists, but most importantly 

the performers of these performances are the staff 

themselves, the staff and their equipment. Thousands 

of people come to see the shows and perhaps the most 

famous one is called Trash Dance where they worked 

with the folks from the sanitation department in the 

city of Austin and it was the staff and their 

equipment, all the large trucks that made up the 

evening performances. 

So the circumstance for the My Park, My Pool, My City 

project was the Aquatic Master Plan. In the city of 

Austin we have a wonderful system of neighborhood 

pools that the pools are 50 years old and 

traditionally pools last 30 years. So across the city 

the pools were just literally falling apart. And as 

an issue of the infrastructure investment their of 

course disproportionate impacts on communities of 

color where the pools in these neighborhoods were in 

much greater need of care. 

So the city tried to address this situation through 

the creation of an Aquatics Master Plan. But it was 

very technical and not very well received by the 
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community. So the Director of the Parks Department 

asked Forklift Danceworks if they would come in and do 

a project about the pools. And it was interesting 

because when we first went in and talked with the 

Director we asked her what is it that you would like 

the artists to do and her first answer was that please 

help us communicate what is in the Aquatics Master 

Plan. We created it, we tried to come up with a very 

logical and rational approach to how to work with the 

city pools, but we’re not getting good feedback and 

we’re having a hard time communicating. 

So to give some context about these practices in 

general the work that’s happening at the intersection

of arts and community development in the larger view 

these practices are as old as humankind themselves. 

But we have seen a growth of professional community 

development practices in this area, particularly over 

the last decade in many parts thanks to the work of 

the NEA and their creative place making initiative. 

What we know today through these many years of work is 

that the arts can be particularly effective in helping 

to get people to the table to help create a compelling 

focal point that people can focus on to bring forth 
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new ideas and conversations and shift frames and 

preconception. They can help create connections with 

and for the community and they have the ability to 

increase capacity within a community. 

So for this particular project we wanted to ask how it 

was that Forklift Danceworks and specifically as an 

arts organization could impact civic capacity within a 

neighborhood. This was a moment of growth for the 

arts organization themselves, you know, traditionally 

they worked with city staff and over this period of 

three years they learned to work in this unbounded 

seals and different communities and different 

neighborhoods. 

And so for a research process we had a three year 

embedded research cycle that was, where we looked for 

emergent outcomes we did participatory observation and 

interviews. We had community led interviews and 

surveys and I think most enjoyable was there was a 

cohort of teams in the different neighborhoods who 

were paid both as performers and as researchers. And 

they helped with our interviewing. They also helped 

us with data sorting and me making as we called it. 
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When we looked over the series of the three years what 

we found was that the impacts that Forklift was 

creating were happening at many different levels. And 

so we borrowed the ecological model from the field of 

social work that really understands the impacts that 

are happening as interrelated, because we saw impacts 

happening at the individual, the departments, the 

neighborhood and the systems level. 

And so for these impacts what we saw with that, for 

example, on the individual level people really began 

to feel a greater sense of self as a creative person. 

And at the department level there was a much more, 

greater not only communication, but a sense of pride 

that these guys were out there every night performing 

in front of hundreds and hundreds of people really 

about the work that they do. Here you can see them, 

they’re actually slipping the tools that they use to 

measure the PH. 

In the neighborhood we saw again the same types of 

results about greater communication and connection. 

And specifically in many of these neighborhoods they 

were experiencing either early or late stage 

gentrification and the co-creation of these 
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performances enabled many people who had moved away 

from the neighborhoods to come back to tell stories 

and to reconnect. 

And what was most surprising at the end of these three 

years was to see the impacts that happened at a 

systems level, at a municipal level. The Forklift 

performances were part of a perfect storm that brought 

about a $40 million aquatic bond package to help 

remedy the situation with the neighborhood pools. And 

an additional 1.2 million dollars annually in funding 

that could help continue the maintenance for these 

pools. 

And so I want to bring just as we finish up the 

conversation that we had with the Parks Director 

because we asked her again at the end of the second 

year what was it that Allison and Chrissy and the 

Forklift performers and the neighborhoods had done, 

what was the impact they had? And she phrased it that 

the performances were able to show the decision makers 

why we care about what we care about. 

From the staff in the Parks Department they’re from 

the community. They work in and with the community 
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every day and they do their job because they care and 

they have a deep sense of service. But when staff go 

to the decision makers with their plans and their 

budgets, which are all very needed and fundamental it 

is difficult to show that other dimension of the work, 

either the urgency by which people experience these 

realities on a day to day basis or the deep love and 

pride and affection they have for the places that they 

call home. 

So it was really the Forklift performances that gave 

the department a way to voice that and to help create 

specific impacts that they were really hoping could be 

achieved. And so with that I will turn it over to the 

next story and Kate Bukoski. 

KATE: Good afternoon folks. Can you all hear me? 

Okay, some folks are typing. Great. My name is Kate 

Bukoski and this afternoon I'm going to talk to you 

about a project focused on a glass blowing studio as a 

catalyst for creative place making in a small former 

tobacco town in the South. I’ll discuss how this 

effort impacted civic engagement and how the glass 

studio improved the community. 
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Farmville, North Carolina has been trying to reinvent 

itself in an era of declining values of agriculture 

products, world to urban migration and an aging 

population, much like much of the rural United States. 

Farmville is part of the Greenville Metropolitan Area, 

a city of approximately 90,000 and the home of East 

Carolina University, a regional public university. 

The focus of Farmville’s creative place making efforts 

is a public private partnership called the Glass 

Station. A local group of businessmen, the Farmville 

Group, reached out to East Carolina University to work 

on revitalizing the town’s historic downtown utilizing 

the arts. 

With many interested in engaging in the arts and 

revitalization the group’s initial idea was to develop 

an art gallery to attract art enthusiast and regional 

artists. The idea evolved over time into a glass 

blowing studio that would enhance the academic 

offerings of the School of Art and Design at East 

Carolina and provide opportunities for the public to 

view hot glass work, take workshops and purchase 

artwork. 
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After a local trust acquired and renovated an historic 

filling station, the University purchased and 

installed the glass blowing equipment opening the 

studio to instruction in January 2017. 

The Farmville Group and partners from East Carolina 

thought that this project provided a unique 

opportunity to evaluate the impact of the arts 

creative place making in a rural setting. NEA artwork 

grant generously funded a research project that 

brought together anthropology and economics to 

evaluate how the Glass Station impacted Farmville 

socially and economically. 

The research team includes a professor and graduate 

students in cultural anthropology who conducted 

interviews with residents. At the same time economic 

data were collected with the goal of evaluating the 

Glass Studio’s impact over time. 

Now at the end of a research process what have we 

learned about how the Glass Station has impacted the 

community of Farmville and civic engagement? The 

process of revitalization involves soul searching

regarding identity, the attempt to forge a collective 
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idea of where the community has been, where it is 

going and what is to be done to move in a positive 

direction. 

The Glass Station has been incorporated into the life 

of the downtown in an active capacity, playing a role 

in linking its community events to one another. While 

the Glass Station is an instructional art studio for 

East Carolina with one faculty member and 

approximately 30 university students taking courses 

over a year, engagement through and with the arts in 

Farmville has grown. 

The things that artists and community members are 

participating in are broader than glass blowing 

classes and demonstrations. For example, there is a 

Bluegrass event that involved the demonstration 

creating a guitar out of glass that drew around 200 

people to the town. 

There was also a library event that brought students 

to the Glass Station that connected the work at the 

Glass Station to readings about butterflies. Many of 

the themes that emerged during conversations with 

residents about the Glass Station indicate that its 
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benefits in many ways have a great deal of symbolic

depth. Discussions surrounding the Glass Station 

engage multiple themes, many of which signify a break 

from Farmville’s agricultural past, turning to a new 

rejuvenated emphasis on the arts. 

The Glass Station has added new stimulus to an old 

perhaps latent identity bringing it to the surface and 

serving as a connecting hub of all kinds of artistic 

activity, performance glass blowing, painting, music, 

dance, iron work and more. Although the town’s 

identity is beginning revolve around the arts rarely 

did people talk about this development without lapsing 

into discussing the development of Farmville’s 

economy. 

Arts activity has drawn new visitors and businesses to 

town, create shared space for artists to work and 

generate community events and activities. All of which 

play a role in generating revenue for the community. 

However few community members believed that the Glass 

Station has been successful in attracting overnight 

visitors encouraging people to move to Farmville or 

keeping youth in the community. 
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By the same token community members did not agree that 

the Glass Station was the key source in the town’s 

revitalization or responsible for the respect the town 

has achieved recently. To quantify the economic 

impact we examined indicators of the quality of life 

in Farmville. We collected data from Yelp.com in 2017 

and 2019. Though these samples sizes were small we 

identified some interesting outcomes. 

The average star rating for dining establishments in 

the historic downtown district increased from 2.65 to 

2.92. Similarly property value within the downtown 

district increased from $102,000 in 2015 to 

approximately $106,000 in 2019. 

Two overarching themes from this research project are 

authenticity and connection. Perhaps the most 

important is the Glass Station’s contribution to the 

town’s process of redefining its identity as a hub of 

arts activity. The community’s perception of 

Farmville’s new growth as a restoration of an 

identity, as an arts hub that dates back more than 40 

years is also visible within the town. 
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More than ten murals have been commissioned. Many of 

these are restored painted signs that celebrate the 

town’s history as a tobacco and agricultural center. 

The focus on restoring signs is a tangible connection 

between the resurgence of the arts in Farmville with 

its past and links transformation with tradition. 

Further the Glass Station connects to East Carolina 

University to Farmville through a tangible physical 

space. The sense that arts are intrinsic to the 

history and fabric of the town and authentic to its 

identity has perhaps spurred community members’

adoption and embrace a creative place making on the 

Glass Station. Viewed through this lens the arts are 

not an innovation but a restoration and a connection 

to the town’s history. 

The community’s positive perceptions of the Glass 

Station, the growth of the visual and performing arts 

alongside the Glass Station and residents’ interest 

and work with the Glass Station indicate the positive 

impact of this project on the community and the 

community’s increased civic engagement. 
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In other words, this creative place making endeavor 

has been successful not only because it has a new 

glass facility, but because the arts and an arts’ 

focused economy felt true and authentic to the 

community of Farmville. Thank you all for your time. 

I'm going to now turn over the conversation to Andrea 

for the Q&A session. 

ANDREA: Thank you so much. Before we open the line for 

Q&A, Melissa Gouge, research analyst will give a few 

brief closing remarks. So we are just trying to 

figure out the sound. So if you can hear me, can you 

let me know? But for now I'm going to turn it over to 

Dr. Melissa Gouge. 

MELISSA: Hi, there, this is Melissa Gouge. And thank you 

so much to our wonderful presenters today. And I just 

wanted to offer a couple of thoughts as I listened to 

the great presentations. I'm really appreciative of 

Dr. Woolf’s introduction and grounding us and really 

understanding the connections between the built and 

the social environments and civic engagement on 

community health actually having very material 

consequences for people. 
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I'm very appreciative of the discussion of research 

that is hot off the press, just released today and 

learning about the wonderful grant opportunities at 

the NEA. 

One of the themes that I think came up throughout all 

of our presentations was the idea of connectedness and 

connection. That is something that is very important 

at CNCS as well. For those of you listening we also 

have a study on senior core where it also demonstrated 

that decreasing social isolation allowed for folks to 

report better health outcomes over the long term being 

involved in volunteerism. So we have some very 

similar observations we’re able to make across 

agencies. 

Something that additionally came repeatedly was 

strengthening communities in the lives of everyday 

people. I think that that is part of the reasons that 

a lot of us do what we think every day. This has to 

do with some of our goals. And as we see through these 

two examples of these projects that are happening at a 

grassroots level they’re really bearing fruit on 

building connections between people and revitalizing 
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communities, increasing civic engagement, things that 

we all care very much about. 

And I think that hopefully we have always got a 

vigorous conversation and lots of questions that are 

asked by our regular webinar attendees and I think we 

have even more excited people that have been brought 

in by NEA this time so I hope that all of this 

conversation has generated ideas for some cross sector 

collaborations perhaps, like those supported by NEA 

and ORE and perhaps ignited your creativity about some 

connection between the role of national service and 

volunteerism in arts in creating a vital democracy in 

the United States. 

Thank you so much and I’ll turn it over to Andrea to 

begin our question and answer session. So please hop 

in and ask anything you’d like. 

ANDREA: Thank you. Thank you, Melissa. So thank you to 

all our speakers. And again we’re going to start the 

Q&A. So for our in-person audience, please state your 

name before asking your question. For our on-line 

audience can you ask a question by typing it in the 

Q&A box? You can also ask a question using the 
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microphone on your computer by selecting the raised 

hand feature from the menu above and we will grant you 

microphone rights in the order questions come in. And 

again I hope you could all hear me. 

So we do have a first question by Mary Alice Crofton 

and this has more to do with CNCS. But I think we 

should think about how we are able to fund this work 

in general and how we convince folks that art has a 

place in economic development, given that you all had 

these wonderful examples. 

So she asks in our rural state we are very familiar 

with the power of the arts in helping to reinvigorate 

downtown districts and to create strong redevelopment 

foci for struggling communities. The significant 

challenge for those of us in the State Commission, and 

that’s associated with CNCS, is that CNCS has failed 

to incorporate support for the arts as an economic 

development engine in AmeriCore funding priorities 

performance measures. 

Given this research when can we expect CNCS to 

recognize the value supporting AmeriCore state and 

national (unintelligible) that want to deploy member 
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teams in support of municipalities and nonprofits that 

are operating in New York State. When can we expect 

CNCS reviewers to stop assuming that arts programming 

is not intervention that impacts disadvantaged 

populations? 

So I ask those of you who are CNCS working in state 

commissions or work with state and national to answer 

that as well, but I just want to ask our speakers how 

does this start? I mean, this is part of a larger 

understanding of what economic development can do. So 

is it that, I mean, you are obviously (unintelligible) 

but how do communities enter into this space? 

SUNIL: Well, I thank the requester for that question. I 

guess, I would say, this is Sunil, that one of the 

things, for example, the Our Town program, creative 

place making program that Patricia described, one of 

the things that it requires is this local agency 

involvement. So, you know, even though it may be an 

arts organization or a design organization doing the 

heavy lifting or find for an Our Town grant requires a 

hand shake with municipality or the local government. 
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And that cross sectional intent is very visible 

throughout the program. And I think what we’re seeing 

with the creative place making phenomenon broadly 

described is this very linkage between, art really 

being interwoven into these other sectors. And so the 

Our Town program by virtue of incentivizing it and 

even looking at the way we evaluate these programs is 

to some extent trying to enshrine these values. 

But I also think that one thing to keep in mind is 

that every state has its own state arts agency and, 

you know, about 40 percent of the Arts Endowment 

Awards go to states through a combination of formula 

and competitive grants. So there’s a lot of work that 

states are doing and then trickling it down, you know, 

to the local arts agencies and art providers. They’re 

often increasingly thinking in a cross sectoral lens. 

So I mean we can only, we try to make the money go as 

far as it can. But I think it’s problematic if there 

are barriers at the local or state level for enabling 

other public agencies to engage with this work in a 

robust manner. 

ANDREA: Patricia? 
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PATRICIA: Well, I think that part of this, I mean, not to ... 

I am a researcher, I think it is important that, I 

mean, Mary Alice asks an important question, but part 

of this is also showing impact of this work, which is 

what all have been working on. And the reason why

again we’re trying to do this kind of collaborative 

work because we as researchers in CNCS see this link 

with NEA. 

And so I think part of this is using the study that 

NEA has and us being able to produce the kinds of 

research and evaluation that actually shows that the 

arts has this very important role that all the 

speakers have described as well. 

I’d also like to hear from any of you who actually are 

speakers. Katie and Lynn or other people who are on 

line in terms of how you have been able to provide 

funding for the kind of work you do or be able to 

obtain that kind of funding to do that work. 

LYNN: This is Lynn. I can speak to the work that 

Forklift does. It is, Austin is very fortunate to 

have Forklift Danceworks as an arts organization, 
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because they as a more mature organization they are 

able to fund raise for the work that they do as 

artists, but they always work in deep, deep 

collaboration with their city partners. And so part of 

that is that the city will support their work in terms 

of the staff time allowing them relief time, sometimes 

overtime for the work that they put into the project. 

So I think one of the important things on the funding 

is that it always happens from multiple sources in 

partnership and very often as I see these projects 

happen that they happen not all at once, but they 

develop over a number of years and many times the 

partnerships evolve and funding sources evolve with 

the project itself. 

KATE: This is Kate Bukoski. And I can add to that as 

well and build on what Lynn said. The partnership 

that became the Glass Station was really based on a 

relationship between the Dean of the College of Fine 

Arts Communication here at East Carolina University 

and members of the Farmville Group. So there was a 

deep history of trust between those folks and it ended 

up that that’s how the initial ask came from the town 
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of Farmville to engage the university, the college and 

also the School of Art and Design. 

In terms of funding what’s made the Glass Station 

successful is that both the town of Farmville through 

the trust, the families that donated the facility and 

the Farmville Group which is this group of businessmen 

and then the university at the college level and the 

School of Art and Design level we all have a financial 

stake in the success of Farmville because the school 

and the college are renting the space. 

We purchased the equipment, but the cost of the 

revitalization of the space, which was over a million 

dollars, that burden was taken on by the town and the 

trust. And certainly that’s a concern moving forward 

with the Glass Station is how do we make this 

economically sustainable moving forward. Thanks. 

ANDREA: Thank you. And here we have a couple of 

questions. What was the name of the study that Dr. 

Gouge just said was released today? 

SUNIL: That was ... I’ll tell you. It’s actually a 

commentary article. But it’s in the Journal of 
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Physical Activity and Health. And it’s called Creating 

Activity Friendly Communities Exploring the 

Intersection of Public Health in the Arts. So it has 

a lot of good examples I think of really the sort of, 

the arts kind of affecting social determinants of 

health and how that may include programs that foster 

social cohesion in the arts and it also talks from 

CDC’s perspective or staff perspective, which is 

really interesting. 

And this coming together, I just want all of you out 

there to why we’re exceedingly grateful to have Andrea 

and her team, people here at CNCS help to amplify this 

work. This coming together of these organizations, 

it’s very difficult to do and at the federal level 

we’ve certainly been trying to model that good 

behavior by trying to reach out to our partners so 

when we struck up a relationship with the Centers for 

Disease Control and Prevention, for example, we did on 

a mutually beneficial topic of looking at, you know, 

they’re interested in fostering physical activity in 

health and they talk about walkability a lot. 

Well, clearly a lot of arts activities are conducive 

to those behaviors. And so we tried to get our hands 
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on the kinds of studies and sources that would inform 

that article. So Patricia’s a co-author of that 

article and as are at CDC. 

ANDREA: Thank you. And maybe we could type it into the 

chat box. We’ll try to attempt that, to do that. 

Another question for NEA, when is the literature 

review about the arts, opioids and pain management 

projected to be available? 

SUNIL: Patricia, I think it’s like the spring, I think, 

or Spring/Summer. I know that’s a vague, it’s not 

even one season, mid-season. We’re actually in the 

process of, we’re getting the first draft back after a 

lot of attention to how a literature scan is conducted 

and the kinds of programs that were selected. There 

were interviews that took place, there’s a technical 

working group which has been really vocal in helping 

guide the shape of the product. 

I think one of the things about this is rather than 

look at the arts and opioids head on we really wanted 

to break it apart in central components. One is 

substance abuse, prevention and substance abuse 

management and relapse and recovery issues. And also 
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look at the nexus with pain management, because a lot 

of research about arts and pain, treating chronic or 

acute pain are being used, the complementary 

treatment. But there’s also work on sort of substance 

abuse and we broke it down. We also were looking of 

course specifically at what we suspect will be a 

smaller number of studies related directly to arts and 

opioids. But were trying to make the review, set it 

up by talking about these other related themes. 

So a lot of that work also consists of figuring out 

what kind of evidence are we going to admit for this 

report. And so a lot of discussion about what 

qualifies along the continuum of evidence, making the 

cut into this report. So we’ll be sharing that with 

our chairman soon and then actually Patricia just 

handed me a note. I was a little too optimistic in my 

timeframe, it’s more like summer/fall. But who knows 

we could surprise you by getting it out in time for 

spring. We’ll see. 

ANDREA: So thank you. We have another question by Selena 

Cheetah. I'm sorry if I pronounced your last name 

incorrectly. I find it fascinating, the economic 

development and the building of community/social 
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cohesion are being presented as a side science 

benefit. Can one of the presenters or all of you 

respond to the issue of economic development leading 

to gentrification and displacement, thus undermining 

social cohesion of preexisting low income communities? 

And that’s a good question. So I don't know which of 

you ... 

SUNIL: I guess as a representative funder. I don’t want 

to too much and I certainly want to hear from actually 

the real stars and the practitioners in the states, 

Kate and Lynn you could probably speak from a more 

informed, on the ground perspective, but since we are 

putting out guidelines all the time about programs 

like Creative Place Making, I think it’s incumbent on 

us to also address issues of gentrification. 

So to say that we have given, we’ve spent a lot of 

time around this and, you know, certainly this is 

something that comes up I know in our Creative Place 

Making staff. And, of course, we’re a research office, 

we’re the research office here today. But if we talk 

to our leaders of that program, the Our Town program, 

they really educated themselves and the field I think 

to a large degree in the arts about the adverse effect 
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for gentrification and doing exactly what you’re 

talking about. 

I think there’s been a lot of discussion lately around 

culturally specific art forms and understanding sort 

of organic arts districts, if you will, and 

recognizing we need to preserve in many cases what’s 

going on already and not bring new fresh or not 

necessarily confuse it with broke from the outside. 

It really depends on community to community. Some 

communities really are striving for in their 

application greater immigration, you know, greater 

influx of people, whether it’s tourists or residents. 

And they need that sometimes for economic development. 

But even in those cases I know that a lot of these 

practitioners have been very mindful in recent years 

about how to stave off that versus effects of 

gentrification. So just to say that one of the 

things, a while ago we created some indicators which 

we thought that the field could use to understand 

relationship of the arts and livability, indicators 

came from secondary data sources. And one of the 

things we found valuable is in the toolkit is looking 

at income diversity and genie coefficient, for 
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example, which is the metric for understanding these 

very factors that undermine communities sometimes from 

an economic sort of, from an equity point of view. 

So we have been trying to ... this is a sloppy answer,

but just to say that we are very mindful of this in 

all the work we do and I think if you look around a 

lot of the art funders are getting wise to this too. 

I should shut up and turn it over to somebody else. 

Anyone else? Kate or, not to put you on the spot, but 

Kate or Lynn? 

LYNN: I'm happy to jump in there, sort of 

diagrammatically I think that the question is 

excellent and very often in these conversations people 

start differentiating between creative place making 

and creative place keeping as Sunil was talking about, 

how is it that we recognize the power of the arts. 

But the power of the arts can be a double edged sword. 

That it can, they are very powerful and so you don’t 

want to be implementing arts based approaches in a way 

that are going to negatively impact the community and

done incorrectly they certainly can. 
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And so what I find is that, you know, certainly in the 

Forklift project the name of the game from the 

beginning was partnership and there was no sort of 

mantra of never doing anything on one’s own, that it 

was always about the multiple perspectives. And so I 

find with these arts based and culture based 

approaches that it’s very important not to throw the 

baby out with the bath water, that these are very, can 

be deeply effective for communities who are looking to 

serve as voice and history and narrative and bring 

that forward to themselves and to others. 

But in that the issues of gentrification and economic 

development required many, many different approaches. 

And so then very carefully, and always in conversation

and always in partnership figuring out how it is that 

the arts and culture approaches can serve those 

greater community good in concert with other efforts. 

And I’ll turn it over to Kate if she wants to add 

anything. 

ANDREA: Kate? Hopefully you’re still on. But just chime 

in if you could figure out, maybe you muted your 

typing. Let’s see. Okay. So do you want to ... let me 

just go onto the next question. We could come back to 
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this. So now Areola asks what are the steps set in 

place during projects in order to translate research 

to become a program that the community is able to 

continue in the long term? And I think that is 

something we definitely struggle with in our office is 

how do you utilize research findings and how do you 

use that program development for improving a program 

and so forth. So I’ll turn it over to the two of you. 

PATRICIA: This is Patricia. So in designing the logic 

model for this program we were very conscious of 

trying to build in mechanisms for sustaining and 

growing programs. So prior to, when the program first 

began, when Our Town first began, that wasn’t really 

part of the language and was not what we were 

communicating to grantees. And through the process of 

designing this model we changed our grant guidelines. 

So now in our guidelines we can now talk about the 

desire to replicate programs and sustain programs. 

So we’re trying to build in a mechanism to encourage 

grantees to take what they’ve done, to measure it, to 

collect evidence and then share that with their 

partners, so that these programs can have a life 

beyond the grant period. Thank you. 
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ANDREA: Go ahead Lynn. 

LYNN: I just wanted to follow up on what Patricia was 

saying. Also from working with these practices in the 

field, working with arts based approaches, I think one 

thing that’s always important, specific for community 

development folks who are coming into this work who 

may be have not worked with arts and culture 

approaches before, one of the most wonderful things 

about the arts is that when you work with artists and 

culture bearers is that whatever the project is that 

you create it will be different every time. 

And I think this can sometimes be new to community 

development practitioners who look for replicable 

models, look for things that they can find out that 

worked and then very responsibly repeat. And so I 

think the trick is when you start integrating arts 

approaches is to acknowledge that when you bring on an 

artist that you don’t want to be asking them to repeat 

say what another artist did, but you want to be 

identifying community goals, organizational goals that 

then they can bring their own inspiration and ideas 

towards. 
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Artist and culture bearers have a wonderful way of 

mobilizing community, their ideas, their visions 

around the energy of a community desire. And so to 

give them the space and the freedom to come up with 

those solutions as they’re working. 

SUNIL: Another aside I just wanted to make is we, some 

of us take this for granted if we work at agencies or 

places where we support creative place making, but for 

those of you to whom this conversation may be somewhat 

new, I would encourage you to look at a couple of 

resources online if you get a chance. One is called 

Exploring Our Town, which has a bunch of vignettes 

about what these projects actually look like on the 

ground. So you’ve heard about Forklift, you know, 

that kind of work. 

And another one, just to let you know there’s a 

coalition of funders, Art Place America that has done 

some outstanding work in this space as well. And 

their research approach is quite different, but they 

also have done a lot of really, particularly on the 

cross sectoral front, they’ve done a lot of evidence 

building. So Our Place America would be another place 
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to look. And they also fund projects of course on 

their own too. So you see a lot of great projects 

descriptions and vignettes there as well. 

ANDREA: Okay. And I just want to mention with CNCS we do 

have a research grant program to scholars as well as a 

few of them 18 did a participatory research grant 

program where we funded 16 scholars and communities to 

do participatory research, so to work together, to 

identify issues of concern and to be able to tackle 

those. And one of our grantees is Fielding University 

and they are partnering with Arvis Folk School in 

Olympia, Washington. And they are working with crafts 

folks, and I don't know if any of them are on, from 

five different communities doing research together on 

how to promote, how to promote crafts in that area, 

which is very exciting as well. And I could send you 

the link to that work. 

Okay. So I just want to see if we have ... Kate, are you 

back on? Okay. And we have a few people, I think some 

questions. Kate, do you want to ... okay, she’s having 

trouble fixing the audio. So any other points that 

any of the speakers would like to make, something that 
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you thought of that you couldn’t get in during your 

presentations? 

SUNIL: I don't know if it’s directly relative, but we 

kind of talked about economic development in the same 

breath as civic engagement, at least we have been. In 

some of these answers we’ve been talking about them. 

So just another resource to plug here. We do a lot of 

work, I think a lot of us agencies try to reach out to 

other federal agencies to get better data sometimes. 

And in our case we work with the Bureau of Economic 

Analysis to get at every state level, at the state 

level what arts industries are in every state, what 

arts organization, what sort of economic value is and 

also what it adds to the state domestic product. 

And I say that because if you’re looking for 

benchmarking, you know, for the purposes of local

economic development, I don't know exactly how it 

would tie with service learning, but if some of you 

were talking about economic development, you know, 

please be aware of that resource, which is the state 

by state economic value of the arts kind of data 

that’s provided on an annual basis, which you can get 

from arts.gov. 
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If you keep giving me time, I’ll keep giving more and 

more advertisement. 

ANDREA: Here we have another question. This is from 

Karyl Chase, I love the collaborative nature of these 

ideas presented. It makes me think of how senior 

centers have become isolated just for seniors. And 

this could expand the reach and connection and 

possibilities to integrate these centers into the 

community. Lots to think about. Community is able to 

continue. Lots to think about for the community to 

continue in the long term. So that got a little bit

messed up, but any comments, especially Anthony we 

have someone has a senior core longitudinal study and 

issues around social isolation. 

ANTHONY: We know that involvement in any type of 

volunteering activity has an impact on social 

isolation on wellness, their self-perceived health and 

their physical capacity. And so we can see that 

there’s a connection there. And naturally some of the 

places that there would be opportunities to volunteer 

include schools, senior centers, homes where folks are 

trying to age in place, and senior citizen centers. 
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And we recognize that national service has had 

something of a, sort of a peripheral relationship with 

the arts through some of its national service grants 

particularly with Vista. I'm not sure with senior 

core so much. But I believe that it would be a 

wonderful opportunity to do a collaborative process. 

But in the past Vista has gone into neighborhoods and 

have organized youth and have done a lot of artwork to 

kind of create memorials and monuments and art 

projects within a city. 

And we know that from our longitudinal study in 

AmeriCore that service in AmeriCore and volunteering 

is also associated with better outcomes both for 

health, education, employment and so on. So I think 

there’s a place for us to come together. I don't think 

we’ve explored it fully with seniors. But it would be 

a very interesting thing to do, particularly as they 

represent a tremendous resource of age, experience, 

time and so on. So I think it would be a good thing to 

do. 

ANDREA: Sunil? Patricia? 
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PATRICIA: I was just going to add that there is substantial 

research evidence on how the arts can really benefit 

seniors especially. And Sunil you know the research 

much better than I do. But I'm thinking of one of the 

studies looking at choirs. 

SUNIL: Yes. 

PATRICIA: And seniors. 

SUNIL: Right, right. That’s a great program by Jolene 

Johnson at the University of California, San 

Francisco, who has done work on choirs, and this must 

be voluntary work certainly older adults singing in 

choirs and how it affects their own well-being and 

sense of well-being. And socialization must be a big 

part of that. I don’t want to try to crudely 

summarize the results, but you should take a look at 

them for sure. 

PATRICIA: And the question is how do we take senior centers 

and prevent them from being isolated just to seniors. 

And so connecting that ... 
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SUNIL: And also, I mean, and I think this is something 

that I need a different setting to talk about, I know 

it’s not a senior center, but I was visiting the 

Cleveland Clinic not too long ago for work and they 

have a really interesting arts curatorial program, 

which brings in the community to come into a hospital, 

which is probably the last place any of us want to be, 

but on a Sunday afternoon, just go into look at the 

art and to engage. 

And it does, I mean, the sense of openness that I was 

referring to from one of the studies in my Gallop 

work, the openness of the community, the ability of 

the arts to be a conversation starter, to bring 

different groups together. I mean, all that’s well 

documented in the literature. 

It may not be as well documented at the program level, 

because we don’t have a lot of great evaluation 

studies that we can point to and say look how great 

this program is, you can definition replicate it. But 

the phenomenon of the arts being able to do that for 

individuals is very well documented in a lot of 

studies. 
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ANDREA: Great. And Kate I know you’ve having trouble so 

in the chat box you can just if there are any comments 

that you want to add, including how to reach you, you 

can go ahead and add it in the chat box. So we have 

another person who’s talking about being confused 

about CNCS, our office focus and our RCT_QED studies 

on building an evidence base for large grantees and 

all the wonderful other kinds of research and webinars 

like this. Can you help me understand the connection? 

So I have colleagues here, but just to think, just one 

thing to remember is that evidence building is done 

very differently and it depends on the goal and the 

questions. 

And one of the things we do is of course support 

programs in building evidence that is part of a larger 

questions that require impact studies, which do 

require a different kind of goal. And then we also 

have research grants that really try to work with 

scholars in communities to ask questions around civic 

engagement that we wouldn’t necessarily consider an 

impact study. And so it really just varies. So I'm 

going to turn to Anthony and Rashmi for any comments. 
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ANTHONY: I think it’s important to see impact level 

research, RCTs and quasi experimental design studies 

as one element of an overall picture of knowledge that 

we can tend to think of more important or focus on. 

In fact, I don't know that it is. I mean, some things 

are relatively intuitive and we know them. We know 

art causes us to feel a certain way. I don’t need a 

study to tell me that. We know that there are 

contributions that are made when people gather around 

and perform an activity that are in and of themselves 

worthwhile. 

And I think there’s research to show that along a 

continuum that these things make a contribution. 

We’re in an age of trying to quantify value and hence 

these types of research projects RCTs, QEDs, ROIs, 

they help make an argument for the overall impact of 

something that intuitively already has an impact on 

us. And it’s great that we can try to measure these 

things, but we try to measure them as we move along 

the continuum of knowledge. We really focus our 

questions on what is the impact or how much is the 

impact? 
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And so it’s important not to get too hung up on those 

things. I think that anybody who starts to work in 

this field is going to see things. Over time they’re 

going to try and raise questions about that. Over 

time they’re going to get some money and try to 

measure that. Over a greater amount of time they’re 

going to get greater amounts of money and try to make 

an argument for its impact. And I think it walks that 

way. 

So wherever you are, wherever folks are along that 

continuum that’s where you are. And just know it’s a 

journey. I hope I made sense there. 

ANDREA: You did. So I'm looking at the time. I'm waiting 

to see if there are any questions, but I’d just like 

to see if there is any closing remarks that our 

speakers may want to make. 

KATE: This is Kate. Can everybody hear me? 

ANDREA: Kate, you’re back. 

KATE: Sorry everyone. I'm going to sort of add a 

couple of insights based on what Sunil was just 
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talking about and research methods. And that’s 

actually sort of how the arts work grant that we 

received developed was that I saw an opportunity to 

use a mixed message research design to really capture 

diverse perspectives on the impact of the Glass 

Station. 

And I think that’s actually one of the benefits of 

doing both qualitative and quantitative research 

simultaneously is that you get very different lenses 

to begin to evaluate and analyze and understand 

things. The other piece of this is that sometimes, in 

my situation our partners really wanted the economic 

impact data, but I was also interested and the 

university’s interested on these social impact data. 

So doing that parallel mixed message design allowed us 

both to reach our sort of research goals by the end of 

the project as well. Thanks. 

ANDREA: Thank you. 

LYNN: And I’ll just jump in one last comment, for those 

that are on the line who are in community development 

contact but may not have the luxury of getting a 

formal researcher on board there are many things that 
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can be done as community based researchers with 

residents to capture what is it that they’re seeing, 

what the outcomes are that they’re identifying and 

even catching the stories that they tell about what 

they do. 

So I think a lot of the information that was presented 

today and a lot of the context of the conversation can 

get complex quickly, but I would never want that to 

put anyone off in the ability of communities to 

identify the impacts of what’s affecting them and 

what’s affecting them. And there’s lots of work out 

there on how you can bring people into the work you’re 

doing at just a basic level of basic questions, but 

really finding compelling evidence for the impacts 

that you’re making, both with individuals and for the 

larger system. Thank you. 

PATRICIA: This is Patricia. Lynn thank you for that 

response. I wanted to follow up and mention that we 

have a resource on our website at the National 

Endowment for the Arts that focuses on community 

engaged research. And it does focus on how you 

develop as an organization a partnership with a 

researcher, which might be from your local university 
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or it could be from a university not near your 

location. 

But the idea is to enter into a research practice 

partnership and really take advantage of the strength 

of the researcher and their knowledge base, but to 

bring your expertise as a practitioner, which 

researchers also need when they’re developing studies. 

And this can be a very low cost way to conduct 

research, and very meaningful. 

ANDREA: Yes. And just following up on what Patricia is 

saying here at CNCS we are trying to do a similar 

thing through our research grant program. But to those 

of you who work at CNCS through the commissions or 

other offices, we would love to hear from you. We’re 

very open, we have lots of things and experiments we 

try with our different programs and different offices. 

And it’s something we can work out and match you to 

our research grantees or to other universities as 

well. Sunil? 

SUNIL: Yeah. I just hope that this webinar, and I 

suspect it will be, is a start of a closer bond 

between people in the CNCS community and the broader 
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family in our own grantees in our world, because I 

would like to see much more of the arts infused in 

volunteers and in service learning in terms of fields 

of practice. But also BIFERSA (phonetic). And I think 

we can, you know, I just want to really thank very 

sincerely the Corporation for National Community 

Services, ORE, your team here, ORHE? Is that how it 

is? Research and evaluation. 

You’re really doing great work and you should all know 

that you’re ... in D.C. we constantly look at their work 

and praise it to help the HR effectiveness as well. 

And we’ve learned so much working alongside them, 

Patricia and I have. So anyway just to say if you 

have any questions about what we presented. I think 

the presentation has our website, which is a little 

long. I mean, arts.gov, but to get to research. I 

guess backslash artistic dash fields backslash 

research and analysis. You probably won’t remember 

that, but when you go to arts.com you can figure it 

out. 

But if you have any questions you want to just email 

us directly please email research at arts.gov. Thank 

you. 
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ANDREA: And just so all of you know this has been 

recorded and we will have it up on our website and all 

of you will get an email and all the information that 

was presented on these slides will also be there. So 

anyway thank you for all of those who joined. Thank 

you for any new callers who have come and we’re always 

open to any suggestions. So thank you and have a 

great afternoon. 

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