Civic Dialogue, Arts & Culture explores the power of the arts and humanities to foster civic engagement while advancing possibilities for arts and humanities organizations to be vital civic as well as cultural institutions. From 2000 to 2004, Americans for the Arts, with support from the Ford Foundation, implemented Animating Democracy, an initiative to foster artistic activities encouraging civic dialogue on important contemporary issues. This book examines the experiences of 37 arts and humanities projects, realized by a wide range of cultural organizations. These projects

Dialogue in Artistic Practice explores the work of three exemplary artist companies. Case studies examine the Animating Democracy projects implemented by these companies, as well as their long traditions of community engagement, to highlight how dialogue is inherently a part of their artistic practice. Through a form that alternates dance performance and dialogue, Urban Bush Women’s Hair Parties Project taps personal experiences to generate dialogue about the politics of hair within the African-American community and to examine deeper issues of race, class, and

This monograph describes what the Points of Light Foundation learned from their study into the nature and practice of volunteering in rural communities; identifies the critical issues that impact volunteer mobilization, especially of low-income residents; and offers strategies to advance volunteering in rural communities.

This article discusses Creative Communities, a program which partners community schools of the arts with housing authorities to provide free arts instruction by professional artists during non-school hours to youth living in housing projects.

The authors discuss the contributions of arts and cultural organizations in revitalizing communities in the .

This article presents a typology of arts-based community development approaches: arts business incubators, artists cooperatives, development of tourism venues, and comprehensive approaches. Five community vignettes illustrate the different approaches, providing evidence of the effectiveness of arts-based development.

This article reports on how communities apply the elements of the four-point Main Street Approach and discusses factors contributing to their usage and effectiveness.

Development Center is part of the authors on-going series of collaborative projects that explore people in their personal space. For this article, the author interviewed five residents of a housing project called Urban Horizons in Bronx, New York.

This article describes the development process of the Urban Horizons Economic Development Center in Bronx, New York.

Creating Change Creatively - Activists Converge in New Orleans is the seventh in a series of nine articles on the Creative Economy.