Today, the Creative Youth & Community Development research initiative, commissioned by ArtPlace America and led by Creative Generation, has been released. The initiative sought to explore the intersections of arts & culture, community development, and youth development through community based, youth- and practitioner-led research. The initiative produced a series of web-based tools and resources created by and for practitioners operating in this intersecting space, which we are excited to release the first of today on the ArtPlace America website.
This new publication, “Centering Creating Youth in Community Development: A Creative Placemaking Field Scan,” aimed to answer the question: What impact do creative youth have on communities? The answer is simple: Unabashedly, young creatives believe their projects benefit both people and places and promote more just and thriving communities. We explore the intricacies of this answer through identified three sets of findings: community benefits defined by young creatives, opportunities for partnering to expand the reach of projects, and defining success in new ways.
More important than ever before, the role of young people in the future of their community - particularly in the midst of several crises impacting communities throughout the United States like 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 – is significant and is too often unacknowledged.
This field scan concludes 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
To fully explore these impacts and understand how to best ensure their reality, we dove deep in a nationally-scoped study, which included a sample (n=134) of self-reported creative youth & community development projects, nine in-depth interviews with youth/adult pairs representing a diversity of youth-led, place-based creative projects, and written and artistic works by young creatives and their adult allies articulating their original research and documentation of the origins, practices, outcomes, and impacts of their work.
We, at Creative Generation, are proud of this work; our partnership with ArtPlace America; and most importantly the values-based approach we took to centering young creatives in understanding their community development work. As practitioners, we encourage you to read this field scan for its content, of course, but also for insights on the processes utilized throughout the tumultuous year of 2020. We specifically call on our peers to draw attention to
The power of young people in catalyzing social change through youth-led, place-based, creative, community development projects;
The responsibility of their adult allies in ceding power, co-creating, and bridging the work beyond existing silos; and
The potential – modeled in this very research initiative – of empowering and uplifting young people to lead the generation, documentation, and dissemination of knowledge about this work.
What resulted from this body of research is a suite of tools and resources, which will begin being rolled out today with the field scan and continue into early 2021 with a number of tools and resources made available through the Creative Youth & Community Development resource center. Onward from January 2021, we will continue to curate responses to this research, and specifically the questions below, which were contributed by young creatives engaged in community development work to provoke the field towards new possible futures:
How do youth and adults define the impacts of their creative and community impact projects on communities?
How can youth and adults broaden the scope of their project or program to include other partners or community members?
How can youth and adults together strategically approach allied sectors to encourage greater programmatic cooperation aimed at shared objectives?
How can youth and adults together better understand the myriad stakeholders impacted by their projects, map connections, and determine barriers to involvement?
How can youth and adults together more accurately articulate their intended and observed outcomes?
How can youth and adults together define the metrics of success against which their projects are measured?
We invite you to join the conversation. If you are interested in contributing a perspective, please send us a note at info@Creative-Generation.org.