The Power of Art

Addressing social determinants of health through community engaged collaboration

Rabbi Nancy Epstein, MPH, MAHL, has long seen the power of the arts to transform individuals, neighborhoods, communities and societies.

A professor in the department of Community Health and Prevention at the Dornsife School of Public Health (DSPH), she led the development of the Arts in Public Health graduate minor at DSPH. This new minor, which is open to all graduate students at Drexel, focuses on the fast-exploding global arts in health field.

The minor builds on Philadelphia’s renowned commitments to community arts and the growing evidence-base linking creative arts and positive health. Learning how to design and evaluate community-based arts and health initiatives provides public health students with a valuable toolkit for social change and improving health at every level.

From talking with perspective students to co-authoring articles on the topic, Epstein advocates for this field in various ways.

Rabbi Nancy Epstein, MPH, MAHL professor in the department of Community Health and Prevention at the Dornsife School of Public Health

In May 2021, Epstein co-authored a Health Promotion Practice (HPP) article featuring the Skywatchers Program. Her collaborators on the piece include community partners Anne Bluethenthal, MFA, and Deirdre Visser, MFA; Clara Pinsky, MPH student at DSPH; and Meredith Minkler, DrPH, professor emerita of Health and Social Behavior at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health and renowned Community-Based Participatory Research Program (CBPR) researcher. The article discussed how art can be leveraged for justice, equity, and public health.

The Skywatchers Program is a collaborative community arts ensemble of artists and residents of the culturally rich but economically poor Tenderloin neighborhood in the San Francisco area. Now just over a decade old, the program’s original values-based methodology to be “relational, durational, conversational, and structural” focuses on process over product and leverages arts for justice and equity.

The work of Epstein and her partners shines a light on collaboration between community-based health promotion practice and community-engaged arts to address the social determinants of health and build vitality and neighborhood assets at multiple levels of the social-ecological model.

Their article about the Skywatchers Program also outlines implications and offers recommendations for community-based health promotion practice and research.

This program’s model can be used by public health practitioners, community organizers and leaders to build mutually beneficial relationships, co-create artworks, and promote arts-based advocacy to improve the conditions that foster poor health in neighborhoods.

“While there has long been a strong field of creative arts therapy primarily focused in clinical settings and serving patients, their families and caregivers, the newly emerging field of Arts in Public Health focuses on primary prevention, social justice, inequities and disparities — all of which are necessary to respond to the overlapping public health crises of COVID-19, racism and injustice,” said Epstein.