A Platform for Community
By: Sabina Bokhari
Tags: Art, Culture, Chicago, Urban Planning, Community

At the corner of 68th and Stony Island Avenue, in Chicago’s Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood, the Stony Island Arts Bank is a neighborhood anchor in a community that once was a mainstay of Chicago’s black middle class before decades of divestment. Formerly a savings and loan bank, today the Stony Island Arts Bank provides the South Side of Chicago with 17,000 square feet of space for innovation and community space for artists, scholars, curators, and collectors worldwide to research and engage with Chicago’s South Side history and foster community dialogues around issues of race, social justice, and healing.

Founded by artist Theater Gates, Rebuild Foundation demonstrates the impact of innovative, ambitious, and entrepreneurial arts and cultural initiatives across its sites. Among these sites are the Stony Island Arts Bank, Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative, a mixed-income housing and studio development, and the St. Laurence School, a shuttered elementary school which will become an arts and business incubator for local makers and creators.

To date, Rebuild has hosted tens of thousands of visitors across its sites to participate in exhibitions and programs. With a variety of film, music, and educational programming, visitors have access to special collections and resources; pop-up events; panel discussions; free film screenings; music and dance performances; writers’ workshops, and rotating exhibitions.

Through innovating to strengthen the impact of this work, Rebuild Foundation has deepened our partnerships with community members and artists on the ground. By increasingly engaging organizations and individuals leading impactful programs, Rebuild has begun to serve as more of a platform for mission-aligned organizations. For the Foundation, serving as a civic commons means providing space, support, and partnership around common goals.

Here are four insights we have gained from shifting our focus from program production to becoming a platform for mission-aligned individuals and organizations:

Upend Statistics by Providing a New Lens

Chicago has long established itself as a world class city with a rich history of arts and culture and beautiful public spaces that commemorate and expand on that history. Within the city, the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood is a strong, vibrant community within the city. However, generations of divestment and discriminatory public policy excluded Chicago’s South and West sides from the prosperity that has accompanied Chicago’s economic growth. This systematic exclusion has led to high rates of unemployment and poverty, weakened public education, and increased crime. As a result, the narrative of the neighborhood has become dominated by statistics that dictate the opportunities available to the community.

The median income on the South Side is $40,812, over 30 percent less than the citywide median of $63,153. In Chicago’s South and West Sides, 40 to 60 percent of residents live below the poverty level. In Greater Grand Crossing, unemployment is 14.8 percent, 154 percent higher than the national average.

Kids from the Greater Grand Crossing community join BraveSoul Movement for free, weekly hip-hop and street dance classes at Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative. Image credit: David Sampson.

But these ​​statistics​​ fail to capture ​​the ​​multi-generational ​​historical​​ significance​​ of​​ these​​ neighborhoods ​​and ​​the resiliency ​​of​​ our ​​residents. We have come to realize that one important role that ​​Rebuild Foundation and the Stony Island Arts Bank provide is a new and alternative lens — arts and culture — through which to approach these longstanding inequities.

Through this lens, we are able to use our spaces to empower creatives and organizations in our neighborhood to share their talent on a wider scale. By tapping into the local organizations already doing the work in our communities, we are able to partner in ways that allow us to have an augmented impact on generations to come.

Lean Out

As a private rather than public entity, Rebuild Foundation has enjoyed the flexibility of experimenting with optimal organizational structures and the advantage of being nimble. However, Rebuild Foundation’s initial approach to staffing relied on internal employment. As a new, growing and changing organization, this approach limited the impact we were able to have in our communities.

Over the past three years, we’ve learned to lean on external support for marketing, security and additional staffing needs. We’ve hired communications consultants to amplify our work and outreach to the community, which has allowed us to streamline and broaden our storytelling approach. Through our efforts on social media, we’ve also received additional insights into what our community members are interested in seeing from a programming perspective. Interestingly, more exposure for Rebuild Foundation has also resulted in increased awareness and interest in our partners.

Engaging interns and volunteers has allowed us to be more intentional and thoughtful around engagements with our collections at the Arts Bank. Tapping into a community of neighbors and friends who are interested in our work has not only allowed us to bring the community in to connect with our collections directly but also supported our work as a rather lean, growing arts and culture organization in Chicago.

Reclaiming and reactivating underutilized space to create public amenities is significant work, especially in disinvested neighborhoods. It is worth considering whether a staff-centric approach is best suited for the process. We’ve found that a more fluid approach to who accomplishes “the work” — a mix of staff, consultants, artists and community members — amplifies our impact.