Pathways for Centering Creative Youth in Community Development: A field scan commissioned by ArtPlace America
Authors: Poulin Jeff M. 
Published: December 2020

Young people are envisioning the future of their communities. The future is theirs. Youth see the challenges our communities are facing today and understand the need to use their creativity to dismantle our problematic systems. As adults, we must support the creative work of youth, cede power where possible, and uplift their visions for the future.

To do this, we must understand the immense and expansive impact of creative youth on communities. Through this research initiative, young creative people, their adult allies, and a team of researchers have reviewed literature, data sets, and case studies – comprised of interviews, narratives, and artistic works – to examine the challenges and opportunities that exist at the intersection of arts & culture, community development, and youth development.

This field scan seeks to answer the question: What impact do creative youth have on communities?

Following an introduction that includes the research design and methods, we provide an outline of the context of this work that emphasizes where the field is now, as addressed by the current literature and the combined crises and insights of 2020. We then present the key findings that seek to expand on our simple answer to the question posed above presented through the perspectives of young creatives.

Unabashedly, young creatives believe their projects benefit both people and places and promote more just and thriving communities.

In the following two sections, we provide emerging lessons that include both additional learnings from the research and a set of researcher-generated provocations articulating the ideas that young creatives shared about the future of their projects in communities.

Upon deep analysis, we conclude that through creative youth & community development projects, creative young people impact their communities in significant ways which too often go unacknowledged. We conclude that in communities where creative youth & community development projects are present, youth see a future where:
Youth increase creativity and cultivate greater agency in themselves and others
Communities (people and places) are more sustainable and responsive
Youth-serving organizations honor personal identity and build collective belonging
Places and their populations are healthier, safer, and better able to foster wellbeing
Youth and adults catalyze intergenerational cultural continuity
Further, we found an increased importance of partnering across sectors and among stakeholders to increase the impacts of creative youth in communities. Creative youth believe their projects benefit from working “in community” with others, meaning strategically investing time, resources, and relationships with other youth, adults, projects, and organizations. By doing so, they believe their projects have a greater impact on people and places. Through our analysis of the full sample of programs, we discovered a significant portion of the field uses youth development and creative placemaking approaches alongside deep engagement with an allied social sector. Creative youth also believe the impact of their projects was enhanced by an intentional mapping of the full range of stakeholders they sought to impact.

Finally, we conclude that creative youth believe their projects need new language and measures of success. In order to achieve this, the fields of creative youth development, creative placemaking, and their allied sectors need to evolve their approaches to defining, researching, and measuring success. We believe that young people and adults must work together to define and build these.

The intended audiences for this field scan include practitioners and supporters of creative youth & community development projects who work in the arts & culture, youth development, community development, creative youth development, creative placemaking, or allied sectors. Throughout the publication, we have provided tangible models in order to guide practitioners towards application of the ideas within their own work and context.

We researched and wrote this scan from June through November 2020, in the midst of several crises impacting communities throughout the United States: the global COVID-19 pandemic, the resulting economic recession, the political uncertainty of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and the community uprisings and racial reckoning resulting from the violence against Black civilians at the hands of police. Our findings reflect these circumstances and are presented with the urgency these events demand.

These circumstances – and the resulting actions of young creatives around the United States – are the precise reason why we do this work. The creative contributions of young people to their communities, particularly in times of crisis, exemplifies the urgency and responsibility of their adult allies to support their creative social change pursuits. Now is the time we need this work most.