Tracking Trends: Introducing a Framework for Developing Community Hubs for Artistic, Cultural, & Creative Learning

By Erica Joos


In this post, I speak to Creative Generation leveraging its positionality working with a diverse portfolio of collaborators to track trends and more deeply understand what attributes are central to an organization becoming a “Community Hub” for artistic, cultural, and creative learning. This post is a brief summary of our recent, more extensive publication Developing Community Hubs for Artistic, Cultural, & Creative Learning: An Approach. 

Tracking Trends: In Context

The team at Creative Generation is privileged to support organizations across the country whose missions align in a shared belief that youth create change. In my role as Manager of Learning and Development and Project Manager on some of these initiatives, I work with my colleagues to understand, document, and interpret our collaborators’ unique contexts, stakeholders, and project objectives with the intention to provide unique, relevant, and meaningful strategies to support them in their missions. (Read more about our ethnographic-inspired approach to working with organizations here). 

While honoring the differences of these unique contexts is core to our collaborative approach, we also work to leverage our positions within such a diverse portfolio of collaborators to observe and take note of similarities between them. In doing so, we are able to contribute to the growing body of knowledge of best practice in arts education and all its applications.

Foundational Research in Real-Time

This past fall, members of our Learning and Leadership team were working with two arts-integrated schools and some such similarities began to emerge. Specifically, we noticed how relationships between key groups both within and outside the organizations have the potential to generate high-impact outcomes for students, artists, families, and the community at-large. 

Using the framing from Creative Generation’s foundational research on exploring the qualities of a central organization, or “Community Hub,” that has the power to cultivate the conditions for artistic, cultural, and creative learning, we compared the observed trends of the two arts integrated schools in real time and drew up a framework.  

A Process to Create a Community Hub for Artistic, Cultural, and Creative Learning

The framework that arose from this integration of Creative Generation’s foundational research and real-time data collection helped answer the question, “What are the attributes of a Community Hub for artistic, cultural, and creative learning?” Further, what are potential outcomes of these attributes when they are in strong alignment? 

To begin, we recognized that a Community Hub for artistic, cultural, and creative learning cultivates conditions and capacity for the following:

  • Learners to create; 

  • Spaces where arts integrate with learning and human development; 

  • Artists, culture bearers, and creatives to collaborate; 

  • Families and caregivers to be welcomed and participate; and 

  • Neighbors and the community to engage as supporters and potential collaborators. 

Once the conditions and capacity were articulated, we began to more clearly articulate the processes and strategies that help achieve them. From this, a process-oriented framework emerged that outlined the relationship between three key groups that enable a Community Hub to achieve specific outcomes. These key groups include:

  • Individual: The cultivation of individual educators, school leaders, parents or caregivers, students, or community members

  • Organizational: The development of intra-organizational relations within an educational or cultural organization committed to cultivating creativity in youth

  • External: The fostering of relationships with external, community-based organizations with direct or integrated interests and investment in the community’s youth 

As shown in the framework image below, the relationships between each of the key players has specific outcomes, indicating that building toward the Community Hub can happen in phases or wherever the current strengths of an organization currently exist.

Conclusion

At Creative Generation, we believe that youth create change. We also know that systems, relationships, and conditions can support this endeavor even more, no matter the scale or context. We hope this model serves as a symbol that all actors, no matter how big or small, have the potential to create the change we wish to see in the cultural, artistic, and creative education of young people.

Read the full publication, “Developing Community Hubs For Artistic, Cultural, & Creative Learning: An Approach”