 Hey Penelope, how are you? I'm very well, how are you? Good, I've had a few minutes to think about how I might vamp if somebody else doesn't need to join me. Hey, say welcome to everybody. Penelope, you're probably better suited for that since this is your gig. Can everybody, are you able to hear me fine? I am, I am. Great, wonderful. Well, you're really going to have to be a great facilitator now, Jamie, but this is a topic that is familiar to you. That I know will do just a wonderful job in the time that we have to chat together. Thank you. I'm disappointed not to have Onye because we had an incredible prep call this week and her background as a dancer and as a choreographer and as a dean of a college brings a wildly different perspective than I have. What I was planning to do, which I think I can start and share some resources with the folks that are here to join for this conversation, is a little bit about the work that Art Place has done at the intersection of arts and public health and talk a little bit more about some resources that folks can find. My name is Jamie Hand. I should have started with that. I'm the director of research strategies for an organization called Art Place America. We are a 10-year fund, which is actually sun setting in 11 weeks, not that I'm counting. Our final date is December 31st this year, but we were created out of 16 foundations, film profit foundations, 10 years ago. Essentially, to advance the idea that the arts and that artists specifically, which exist in every community in this country, have an incredible power and capacity to shape society and to shift how community development happens. That means how and where housing gets built, what it means to truly welcome new Americans into a community, how to conceive of water, transportation infrastructure, in a way that everyone can not only understand and access, but be inspired by. So over the past five years, I've had the privilege to oversee a series of research initiatives where we've done a deep dive into the intersection of arts and culture with other sort of sectors of community development, other industries where folks are looking at doing, making change, investing in communities. So housing, safety, transportation, immigration, environment and energy, etc. And we pulled them apart and there's a reason why I'm telling you this. We pulled them apart, not because the work should continue to happen in silos, but so that we can focus on translation and the idea of talking about the value and the function of the arts and language that makes sense to stakeholders in a particular industry. So we sort of have pulled these things apart to really do a deep dive into understanding how to talk about impacts, outcomes and values that you should these sectors have. And all of this background is just to say that of all of the sectors that we've investigated, there's 10 of them. Every single person we talk to, interview, you know, involved in this research thinks that their sector is the overarching umbrella. Their sector is the thing to which all other work, all other community-based work should roll up. And if I had to put a stake in one of them, I would say that's actually true for health and for public health. And I think the reason why I'm sort of using that as background to say there's been such a seismic shift in the public health sector over the last decade or I mean, it's an ongoing centuries along sort of spectrum and continuum, but just in the sort of public understanding of what public health is and in sort of expansion into the social determinants of health, where every aspect of one's social, physical, economic environment impacts their health. Because of that, because we're so focused on sort of a broader definition, there's sort of, I would say, venture to say that there's a new bottom line in understanding wellness and well-being in this country. And I think there's also a similar parallel understanding that we're actually quite frankly failing the majority of people in our country when it comes to public health and all of this expansive definition and specifically Black, Indigenous, and people of color in this country. So with all of that, Arts and Public Health, we've done this deep dive and there's been an initiative called Creating Healthy Communities, Arts and Public Health in America that my organization, Art Place, has partnered with the University of Florida Center for Arts and Medicine, where Onge is a dean at the College of Arts there. And just to say that it's been a two and a half year initiative that has been specifically not just about sort of doing research, most of my work isn't sort of just pulling up evidence and outcome sort of understanding, but really field building, bringing in policymakers, practitioners, artists who are doing this work to sort of understand and talk about what, as I said before about the language, what's the power of the arts? How do we talk about the value and sort of make the case to public health practitioners? Jill Sonke, who leads the Center for Arts and Medicine has done an incredible amount of work for over three years. We've produced a white paper that frames the top, you know, issues in public health that the arts can help with. I can talk about those a little bit, but that was all my way of sort of getting to how I know Onge and how I was going to tee her up to talk a lot about understanding sort of new ways to define what the arts are and how the arts can impact public health. So I'll stop there, Penelope, and see if there's something specifically you'd like me to go into or bring up for this audience in particular. This is a great opportunity for our own performance arts, Jamie. Well, we'll converse as colleagues without practice, and I think that's actually going to be very inspiring for both of us and for everyone. I think the most important thing that I want to say is that someone who cares deeply about making that case, you know, the case for artists who work in service of community and the direct impact they have on the health and well-being of communities, our real interest and part of the reason we're so excited about the work that you've been doing at Art Place and how we can continue that work with the University of Florida, with Johns Hopkins School of Art and Mines, with others, is that we now need to do what others in the world of social investment have perhaps done a little better than we have, but that I think we can quickly catch up to, which is to use some rigor in how we, it doesn't, it doesn't mean, rigor doesn't necessarily mean we all have to become researchers. It's how we apply methods in practice as artists working in communities so that we can gather evidence of the kind of impact that the data and research that the University of Florida and you and others have been garnering is pointing us towards and that's going to require us to gather together around using common approaches and certain ways of having a dynamic method for asking our communities to tell us whether or not, you know, they're, they can show us the evidence of the shifts that we know artists are helping create in those communities. Go ahead, please. Well, I was going to say, I want to sort of unpack the idea of evidence too, and specifically in the medical fields and in the health fields, you know, in public health, epidemiology and others, there's a lot of, there's a lot of science there and, and I, you know, I should have, I don't always say this anymore, but my background is in landscape architecture. I do not have a formal research background. I have utmost respect for formal evaluation and protocols. And, you know, I actually have interpreted my charge at my organization over the past decade as much about sort of the, you know, it's almost strategic communications, as much as it is research, and sort of creating a call, not a calling card, but a call to arms, a sort of this language, the idea of a shared language to start the conversation so that then we can do, as you say, begin to talk about and cohes around the set of evidence of things that we can start to invest in, build infrastructure around, build practice around. But one thing that I think is, is really fascinating that I've learned in this creating healthy communities initiative, we had nine working groups over the course of two years, over 250 people participated again, policy, research, practitioners from a lot of different sectors doing this work to help sort of create language and give language. And one of the, one of the topics that kept coming up is this idea of like, if it was, if public health was working, we wouldn't have such a problem, we wouldn't have so much chronic disease, we wouldn't have so much failure of, you know, whether it's poverty driven, trauma driven, other issues that are creating public health crises in our country. And there was, you know, I'm as an arts person, as a person sort of working for an organization that essentially is not advocacy, but really trying to, to create value for the arts. I go into these rooms thinking we have to make the case and convince people and, you know, speak in their language, all of that, almost without fail, every one of these conversations in the public health work, people have said, you know what, we need help, we're not doing things right, we're not, we need new ways of knowing, because the ways that we're relying on and the scientific method and the randomized control trials and all of the ways that are sort of part of the system of public health, which again, I'm not, it's critical, I'm a science believer, you know, this is all important. And there was a, there was a, for me, a surprising humility and enthusiasm and sort of readiness for new ways of doing things and for new ways of connecting with people on a human level, on emotional level, you know, whether it's an individual or whether it's at the community scale. And so in the context of public health work, in the context of public health outcomes, to me, it's not just about sort of answering the call to, you know, fit into the exact kinds of evidence or the exact kinds of outcomes that they're used to relying on and needing, but also starting to sort of say, well, hey, we're actually seeing progress and we're seeing outcomes that sort of you haven't even thought of or aren't even measuring yet. We know that we're able to create connections in a community through the programming that we do in the arts and that that's actually leading to long term, you know, we have to play the game a little bit, but it's not, you know, I've been surprised, I'll just say that there's an openness and a willingness to new ways of doing things in public health. That's very reassuring. That's really encouraging. I'm very optimistic too. I'm hopeful, I should say. I like the word hopeful better probably because it's more action oriented. I think I think it'd be really interesting to talk with you a little bit more about what you think will be the best ways to make that bridge, you know, between, because I think many artists that we work with, and when I say we, I mean, you know, at the Upper Buena Center for the Arts, but I think for you too at Art Place, they have made a strong connection. They actually are already partnered with perhaps their public health center or with kind of those who are in a very, as Akiah Harris was saying in a prior session, they may not identify themselves as healthcare workers, but that's what they are. There are Black and Indigenous artists who are actually doing kind of primary responding kind of work. So do you have thoughts about the ways in which we as organizations that are really trying to help create those bridges between these powerful artists and those health leaders who say I need help about more that we can do, specific ways that we can be, we can be, we can be allied? Have you got thoughts about that? Yeah, I mean, this is the blessing and the curse of working at a sort of national scale and as an intermediary is the best thing, the thing I'm best at is pointing out other examples, right, where people are doing it. And so I sort of default to saying like, well, you need to talk to so and so, right? So the city of Providence has an incredible example. Yeah, incredible example where they have sort of community health workers that are artists that are out there doing it and the state of Rhode Island has a partnership between the state health agency and the state arts agency. And they're building out that infrastructure now. So I think the folks that are leaders in the field, such as your point of center and the partnerships that you all have, such as the state of Rhode Island, the city of Providence, like, how do we actually create learning amongst and between the folks who are actually in the lead doing it so we can not troubleshoot but start to talk about sort of what are the what are the hiccups that happen, whether it's, you know, basic things related to partnerships and understanding priorities, but also I think some of the systems within your trying to work, system within which you're trying to work. I think I just, oh, yeah, only did join us. I don't know if she can get on. Can you hear us? We can let me go. We can all three of them conversation. Yeah, I think there is on your voice. No, maybe not. Well, let me keep, let me keep that thread going and here at YBC, one of the things that we're very excited about and people around the country will definitely be interested in this. There's is let me finish by sentence and then I'll completely turn this back over to the two of you. We're just talking about building bridges as you probably might have heard. One of the things we're excited about is, for example, the city of San Francisco is, thanks to Debra's leadership here and all of our work, she is interested in partnering with us to create, you know, an artist core, you know, a basically an action oriented group of public health ambassadors, but coming from the artist sector and understanding how well artists really know how to engage with the public to create health messages. And of course, the University of Florida has a tremendous body of work about this that stems back to the Ebola crisis and others and how effective that work was transformative. We're seeing opportunities now to do that in replicable ways, you know, for the city of San Francisco, potentially also in the state of California. So that's one way in which we're not only employing artists, of course, but also building a bridge between these sectors because by just the real time activity of artists and service of health and the health sector being so interested in making sure that those messages are delivered to our population at large, you know, that's a natural way of bridge building. What I think we can always do better at is making sure that we're documenting that in some way, cataloging, you know, making sure, again, we're gathering evidence and not just doing the great work that artists always do. Onye, hi. I jumped in as the very poor substitute. I was about to talk about our work to start to develop some outcomes-based research work with the University of Florida. So I will be very quiet now and turn it over to you. I'm so glad that we got you along in here. So sorry that it took me a minute to figure it out. I think the University of Florida has some very aggressive security measures and so it would not let me unhop in. Nothing I would do. So we eventually came through Google and here I am. So Jamie, what can I contribute? I was going to say with our couple minutes left, I want to, you know, I do want to, one of the things that Onye and I talked about sort of teeing up is for, not just for this audience, but in general, the sort of why is so important to have such an expansive definition, definition and sort of understanding of the function of art. And Onye, I already sort of talked about the fact that you are a dancer and choreographer in addition to a dean, in addition to the work that we've done together. But maybe if you want to share a little bit about how important that is right now to sort of get to this idea of what dancers, what artists are going to be doing for public health. Absolutely. Yeah, so I came into the arts through dance. I was always in community practice from the very beginning here in Florida as a West African dancer and working in communities, dancing in churches and funerals and having a perspective of dance as part of community practice. As I went into studying dance more as a professional, becoming a professional, the scope or the context narrowed onto the stage. And I always thought that there was something in that that was a loss. And much of my, much of the sort of advocacy work that ended up getting me called into administration came because I was sort of always trying to punch back the walls of the page, the stage, the frame that capital A art always wanted to put us in in the context of the U.S. Because what I could see was that the way that art exists in our multicultural, many cultured context was so it is so expansive. Art does exist powerfully on stages, on pages, in frames, in galleries, and it exists on streets and on street corners and on walls and on the underside of bridges and in restaurants and in the after party where families dance salsa and after as a Cuban restaurant closes down or in the way that gets resolved in the B-Boy community in the midst of a battle that happens in a club. And that many of the most profound community building transformative effects of art were happening way outside of the places that we were transacting art. And as we expand our definition of art, we include so many other communities of practice beyond the ideas of sort of being the the most highly skilled practitioner that everyone comes to see. Being someone who's skilled for instance at getting everybody up and out of their seats to participate is also a skill that furthers the impact that the arts can make in the community. And that expansive definition then widens our lens to see where it's all happening and where it has traditionally happened in churches and in the singing and dancing practices of Yoruba diaspora religions in Philadelphia, for instance, that have lasted and persevered in those communities for generations. And that what what what, you know, my dad was an elbow from Eastern Nigeria and there's a phrase in our culture that says, you know, one man's meat is another man's poison and I always extend that to like one man's meat is another man's poison is another man's art is another man's religion is another man's science is another man's politics is another man's magic like and we when we start to understand and see and then we we in the College of the Arts and the Center for Arts and Medicine understand what communities we need to go to learn from and to share what we're learning so that we can become a highly nuanced network of practitioners that can interface with this emerging epidemiological data driven evidence of the impacts that are actually happening. So I think that we can start to then take all of this all of these many cultures of practice into a future where we understand that when I show up at a hospital with anxiety and headaches, that a prescription for a pottery class may be the thing that I need. And in the activation of that, those layers of networks, we can collectively as a society save money, get better outcomes and have your local neighborhood artist be a key provider of a fully and holistically well lived life by the standards of many of our grandmothers. Yes. Amy, I can't hear you. Oh, there we go. Oh, yeah, I can hear you. Can you hear me now? There we go. I just want to be allowed to go a little bit longer Penelope, Daniela. I'm just sort of checking. I know we're at five o'clock now. I don't know if we can push it since we started late. I think Daniela. So can I just pose another question for either of you to answer? I think you both know more about it than I do. But in terms of like the infrastructure to support what you're talking about on Yang and what we sort of what the vision is, you know, what are what are some of the policy things? What are some of the investments that can be made now to get us to that point? Again, I was talking about making the case and sort of building a shared language around it. But something like I'm going to plant the seed social prescribing is happening in the UK in Canada. What would it take to have that here? What do we need to do now? What is what does an audience like that need to be thinking about now? Well, social prescribing that was kind of what I was referring to when I talked about showing up at a hospital with anxiety symptoms. In the UK, some of our partners have participated in a process that led that led to that reality. One of our partners has been doing work on epidemiological models looking at large cohort data, which looks at data and can show correlations in a very specific way between arts participation and very particular phenomena like inflammation, for instance, or heart disease over the course of long periods of times over large, large numbers of people. And the correlations were so strong that they were able to then move what we call moving the policy needle. They were able to move the policy needle in order to set up a structure where individuals like myself that might show up in a hospital with anxiety symptoms could be referred to a person that on the social prescriber and not a concierge, like an arts concierge. And the concierge is someone who would be a concierge for a social prescription. So I have a social prescription to go and participate in some sort of participatory art form. The concierge are trained to sort of intake me, interview me, ask me questions about who I am, how I live, what kind of time I have, what my interests are, and then kind of match me to an arts practice that matches my prescription and my needs. A structure like that delivered outcomes in the UK where they were finding that as a whole their costs were going down. Because the cost of moving a person with average lack of sleep and anxiety symptoms through the medical system were much higher than diverting me to concierge that landed me in my pottery class. And that example is I think a model that we are in the process of beginning to work, to step down the paths here in the United States. And at the Center for Arts and Medicine we are going to start working at our EpiArts lab which is about to launch on a large set of data that is available here in Florida which will be the first US epidemiological study of that scale. I just dropped a link to the EpiArts lab info in the chat. Yeah, go ahead. So it just takes a partnership between entities like ours who do the academic research and entities that can move the needle in terms of insurance companies and the healthcare system. Yeah, and that actually gets to one of the questions in the chat I see from Dale Ratcliffe, what are some surprising relationships of non-traditional art partners in culture that make sense in a community health standpoint or whoops there it goes, or to reframe it if you're starting a community health project in the new city, who are the essential stakeholders? I'll just address really quickly to the example I used about the city of Providence that is sort of explicitly led by the city local arts agency so if you're not familiar with it there's a there's a network and a system of local arts agencies at the municipal level, state arts agencies at the state level that is sort of the arts infrastructure in this country and often those can be a starting point for a public if you're coming from the public health side, check in with them. If you're doing hyper local work at a neighborhood scale like look for the local community arts center, understand who's doing program who already exists because often those entities those organizations have strong partnerships with the community and are already know the community. I can list a lot of examples what I'm going to do is drop some more links in here. Another piece of the work that came out of our partnership with the Center for Arts and Medicine was a series of resources specific to COVID-19 and sort of the arts what we're calling the arts response so the way the artists were sort of showing up in their communities and the way arts organizations were showing up and sort of providing relief, providing prophecies, providing a lot of different things in response to COVID so not how can we support artists which is also an important question right now but the resources were specifically for like how to start a collaboration so but I think would actually have some material whether we're talking about the pandemic or longer term I think it's relevant so I'll drop those in the chat too. I don't know if Penelope or Onya you want to add more to. I put something in the chat in the interest of time about an entirely different way of putting unlikely partners together that I'm very interested in but for me I'm just passionate about making sure that we continue to make sure that health leaders, community investors and artists are always in the same conversation about these strategies. I think just that alone really changes the way in which we find those unlikely alliances. So many times you know found that it's the conversation the artist has with the health leader that exposes an alliance that neither had thought of and it's and one of them may be working in that partnership and the other isn't or they may each be close to that partner that ally but they've not made the connection to the kind of upstream benefit of making sure that we're focused on health and well-being in communities. I have lots to say but I think we're out of town again. One thing that I'm going to say as someone who's an arts educator is that at the intersection of these kinds of conversations we get to move past the idea of artists needing to be supported and we get to live in the reality that artists support society. Absolutely. Thank you and so I mean I thank you for pinch hitting I just wrote that in this lap Penelope and thank you Oni it's going to be sorry we didn't get to have the full time Penelope thank you for having us. I really appreciate it. Thank you everyone.