WHY CULTURE IS KEY?
Why Connect Civic Health and Cultural Organizations? Over the nearly 50 years since the founding of the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities Council as the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council has supported a wide variety of organizations in engaging the public through the humanities. We implicitly have understood that cultural engagement at places like libraries, museums, historic sites, theaters and community centers enhances the lives of Rhode Islanders. It produces outcomes that include creating knowledge, encouraging interpretation, building empathy, and sparking dialogue. Culture Is Key took steps toward explicitly identifying and documenting civic health activities and outcomes reported by cultural organizations that positively contribute to civic health. WHAT IS CIVIC HEALTH? According to the National Conference on Citizenship, a Congressionally commissioned organization that conducts civic health indexes across the country, civic health is a measurement of two things: the extent of community participation in the civic/public sphere; and overall community well-being (see Appendix: Resources on p. 40). Civic health reflects the degree to which people participate in their communities, from local and state governance to interactions with friends or family. Civic health also relates to the overall well-being of neighborhoods, communities, states, and the nation, which depends on myriad dimensions of civic life. WHY USE THE FRAMEWORK OF CIVIC HEALTH TO DOCUMENT THE IMPACT OF CULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS? Existing frameworks for civic health don’t necessarily measure the impact of cultural participation, nor do they recognize cultural organizations for their role as civic institutions. There is extensive research that seeks to measure civic health impact in a variety of dimensions and fields, including well-being, community development, economic impact, placemaking, civic engagement and education, and social equity. Culture Is Key drew upon this body of work to identify established civic health indicators and potential outcomes relevant to the contributions that cultural organizations make to the civic health of the state. Selected resources are included at the end of this report (see Appendix: Resources on p. 40). Definitions of civic participation tend to focus on governmental processes like voting and census participation, due to the critical role they play in the health and functioning of democracy. This type of participation is relatively easy for researchers to see and measure. Cultural organizations can and do contribute to more straightforward components of civic participation; for example, artists, faith leaders, and public scholars played substantial roles in encouraging voting in the 2020 election in Rhode Island. At the same time, many cultural organizations highlighted the importance of going beyond voting in order to include all community
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CULTURE IS KEY
