Read about how the Lambent Foundation leverages the critical role of arts and culture at the intersection of social justice. Through its grantmaking and creative programs, Lambent explores the impact of contemporary art as a strategy for promoting sustainable cultural practices in New York City, New Orleans, and Nairobi. Learn more about the Foundation’s current work and Executive Director Michelle Coffey’s vision for the future in this paper and podcast interview by Ann McQueen.

The J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, based in Montreal and funding throughout Canada, supports what it calls socially engaged arts—arts organizations and activities that build bridges between culture and community—as a way to realize its vision of “a Canada where all people feel a sense of belonging and contribute as active citizens to improving the well-being of all.” The foundation’s most recent initiative focused on arts-based social inclusion owes much to what it learned from ArtsSmarts, an arts-infused learning program launched at...

In October 2003, Detroit-based activist, cultural worker, and octogenarian Grace Lee Boggs energized and inspired a national gathering of artists, arts organization and community leaders, and activists with her speech at Animating Democracy's National Exchange on Art & Civic Dialogue. Boggs described a United States that is increasingly jobless; that jeopardizes its youth in a problem-wrought education system; and that is resented for its economic, military, and cultural domination. "Can we create a new paradigm of our selfhood and our nationhood?" she implored. In Boggs...

In “What Happened in New Orleans? Reflections on the National Convergence of Artists, Educators and Organizers,” Animating Democracy staff member Andrea Assaf reflects on her experience at the National Convergence of Artists, Educators, and Activists. Inspired by Grace Lee Boggs and conversations on art and social change at the Animating Democracy National Exchange on Art & Civic Dialogue, the National Convergence attracted more than 200 people to New Orleans inJanuary 2004. In her article, Assaf reflects on the impetus, unfolding, and impacts of this convening.
...

This article explores the role that museums can play in expanding opportunities for democratic participation through civic dialogue and engagement.  Published in Museums and Communities Toolkit, American Association of Museums. 

Dialogue specialist and clinical/organizational psychologist Patricia Romney offers an accessible review of the ideas of selected historic and contemporary philosophers and dialogue theorists including: Socrates and Plato, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paulo Freire, David Bohm, and David Isaacs, and considers the implications of their ideas for arts-based civic dialogue practice.  Romney shares her observations about a production of West Side Story that was never carried out due to a polarizing debate that ensued in the community.  West Side Story was seen alternately as an extraordinary...