Pottenger Presents at St. Louis Regional Arts Commission Conference

On March 25-27, AAW Director Marty Pottenger presented her work at the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission’s conference, “At the Crossroads: A Community Arts & Development Convening.”  The meeting included, “150 practitioners and their partners in arts based community development programs and collaborations” who have convened “for hands-on workshops, panels, presentations and provocative thinking.”

Pottenger individually led the workshop, “Art at Work and The Police Poetry Project: Artist Driven Solutions for Community Change”, on Saturday. She and RMC Research evaluator Chris Dwyer also co-led a 5 hour workshop called, “What Difference Are We Making? Assessing Social Impact of Arts for Community Change.”

In it, they presented their progress in applying an evaluative framework (developed by Dwyer) to systematically define outcomes and measurable indicators of change for AAW’s Police Poetry Project, which sought to improve low department morale and relations between police and the public.

Over time, this framework enables individual arts organizations to make the case for the role of the arts in catalyzing social change in your community. Animating Democracy co-directors, Barbara Schaffer Bacon and Pam Korza also introduced resources and other findings from the Arts & Civic Engagement Impact Initiative.