In September 1919, American Legion Tom Powell Post #77 in St. Louis was the first of its kind to become chartered as an all African American Post, decades before the military would desegregate. Post #77 takes pride in having members who served with distinction with the Tuskegee Airmen, Buffalo Soldiers, Montford Point Marines, and many other distinguished military units. Post members also have a proud history of assisting disabled and unemployed veterans, and a strong legacy of providing community youth arts programs. Tom Powell Post #77 was instrumental in bringing the concept of competitive marching music to the community through the development of the Spirit of St. Louis senior drum and bugle corps, and mentored the famed American Woodmen Cadets junior drum and bugle corps programs. The Tom Powell Post Junior Drum and Bugle Corps was organized on September 1, 1935, to help curb juvenile delinquency in and around the neighborhood and to provide music to the Post members marching in the American Legion parade held in St. Louis. The Corps as a competitive group won many honors, including perennial Missouri State championships and placing in the top 10 of numerous national conventions. The Corps was the only Black Corps in the country participating in American Legion competition.

First launched in 2012, the pARTnership Movement is a program and online platform of Americans for the Arts which demonstrates that by partnering with the arts, businesses can gain a competitive edge. Over the past seven years, Americans for the Arts has developed toolkits, shared stories of success, published how-to workbooks to engage employees, and continued to celebrate America’s best businesses supporting the arts—all for the purpose of supporting the work of local arts organizations and businesses as they seek to build creative relationships. Our goal has always been two-fold: build the capacity of the arts field to cultivate and sustain mutually beneficial partnerships with business; and make the case to businesses why partnering with the arts is good for their people, their companies, and their communities. We are pleased to introduce a new pARTnership Movement website to help us (and you) further this work.

Every day, the sound of jackhammers provides a soundtrack to my workday. My organization, COCA–Center of Creative Arts in St. Louis, is expanding with a 50,000 square foot addition. Historically, arts organizations have built facilities and spaces in service to their art, such as grand museums and acoustically pristine symphony halls. In planning for our expansion, we have done more than our fair share of discussing, debating, and decision-making about the technical specifications and “performance” of our new space. However, as the project has evolved, I’m more interested in thinking about how our space, and our art, can be in service to humanity, not the other way around. Can we, as arts organizations — with our abundance of theatres, studios, museums, and community spaces — do a better job of serving as cornerstones of community connectivity and human engagement?