 So welcome back from lunch. I hope everybody enjoyed the wonderful sunshine that we brought you, had a moment to sit and bask, and now we get to dig into all the fun things around, things like metrics and evaluation, just what you want after lunch. So this should be a lot of fun. I think I've been introduced before, but just in case you're tuning in for the first time, I am Liz Crane. I'm the deputy director of Art Place America. And we know that there's a lot of ongoing conversations about measuring creative place-making online in articles, at events, Water Fire had a great Art of Place Making conference back in November, and I know their sessions are now available online. There's a lot of great conversations about metrics and evaluation there. We set up this session with the goal of really trying to demystify some aspects of measurement and try to hone in really on what's important when we're actually talking about those things. So many conversations about measurement in the arts start with folks thinking about what it is that they do or what they want to do, and then trying to figure out how to measure or understand the impact of that set of activities. For creative place-making, we actually want to turn this conversation around. So as Jamie often notes, most nonprofit sectors start with a problem agenda. So here's a problem in society, we want to solve it. We'll know if we've solved it because there won't be a problem anymore. The arts, in contrast, traditionally have started with an opportunity agenda. So here's an empty park, what can we put into it? Theater has changed my life. We want, I want to provide this opportunity for other people to experience it. I want to make this piece of art that explores the connections between this and that. So under this model, you start with the doing of the art. This is the art I want to do. And then you measure success on whether you did it. Is the art in the park? Yes. How many people came and saw this play? This many, which may be more or less than what we wanted. We might even go deeper into thinking about measurement and exploring the intrinsic value of the arts. So what is the impact of a piece of public art in a park? What is the impact of seeing a theater production? And then you might take that further into more instrumental things like economic impact or social connections or cognitive development. And for years and centuries, people have opined and rigorously studied the role and the value of the arts in society and on an individual. So it is an important question to ask. And the NEA developed a system map last year called How Art Works that seeks to actually tease some of this apart where you can actually look at all the different ways that these things interact, the inputs and the outputs, the community and the individual. So I encourage you to check out the How Art Works map if you haven't looked at that yet. And I assume that everyone in this room feels a really deep connection to and value of the arts. And whether or not you understand why it's important at its most fundamental core, you feel it and you want to increase its presence in the world. So complimentary to this deeply valuable line of inquiry, creative placemaking is asking a related but slightly different question of instrumentality. So as Jamie mentioned yesterday, we think about creative placemaking as any placement of the arts as a part of strategies to intentionally change a community's social, physical or economic future. And I want to put an asterisk on this word changing because I think it's a really important and potentially interesting word to unpack. So in this model, it's the placemaking and the making that's creative. It's that shift thinking about creative placemaking creative as an adverb, not an adjective. So in creative placemaking, you start with an intention to change something in a place. So again, the sort of doing art to change a place model is what we're moving towards. And that helps us to start with a problem agenda like other sectors do. So for example, right now maybe there's a neighborhood and where local businesses are suffering. There's a couple of things that folks like to do, but they don't often sort of travel in between those things. There's an alley that one's through these things or ones to these things. And right now, people don't go down the alley. They're nervous, there's not enough lighting. There's something that's dropping them from actually going from this note of activity to this note of activity. So what is it that the arts can do in this situation? And first I want to break this down. So the outcome here, the change that this project is trying to affect is healthier local businesses downtown, which we can extend out further, more resources circulating in the community, more opportunities, a growing economy. The hypothesis here is that drawing more people to use the alley will actually help to achieve this outcome. And then the method for doing this is creative placemaking in their arts. And I'm assuming that the arts are in some ways uniquely positioned to do this because of all the great research that's been done in the past about how people interact, experience, and sort of feel that sense of pull that the arts might have down this alley. So the question then of measuring this project, the answer to how will you know if you've had the effect that you've intended to, may have multiple layers. So one, did you do art in the alley? Yes or no? To go even deeper, did you do more or less art in the alley or a higher or lower quality of art in the alley than what you wanted to? So that's really the process evaluation. That's how we understand, did we do this project that we set out to do? Then we might go a little deeper. Are more people using the alley? Maybe we count before, maybe we count after and we sense that somehow there's more people using this alley. Do we know yet whether the project is a success? Not necessarily. So did local businesses do more business? Maybe you look at gross sales before or after. And so that's starting to get a little bit more towards the impact. And you can take it out a little bit further. Did new independent businesses open? Did the government's budget increase from sales taxes? Are new amenities now available in the community? You can take these things and you can draw them out as far as you wanna go. But it started with that intention of trying to draw people down this alley to help increase the sort of overall impact on the local businesses in the community. So it's not necessarily easy to measure these kinds of outcomes. But rather than asking the question of what is the value of the arts that I wanna do or even something more specific like what is the economic impact of the arts that I wanna do. Our question in creative placemaking is what is the effect that we want to have and how do we know if we've had that effect? So the example I just listed is just one kind of creative placemaking. So other types of intended effects might be community narrative, community identity, maximizing a transportation investment, encouraging new development in rural town, increasing vibrancy. And once you know what you're trying to change, then you can actually follow that line backwards to figure out how to measure it. So all of these different projects will have their own potential measures of success related to the goals of the project. If it's vibrancy, which we define as changes in people, activity, and value in a place, then the vibrancy indicators could be a useful tool for that. And here's also where I wanna close that asterisk on the word changing. So changing does not always mean taking something that's like this and making it something that's like that. Changing when we're talking about changing in communities is often more about enhancing than it is about transforming. I wanna enhance this identity. I want to highlight this thing. I want to change the way that people interact to make it sort of more pleasant. That's not changing the fundamental character of a community. It's just sort of enhancing it or adapting it or responding to it and then using the tools of the arts to actually create a world where we can all feel and experience that in a new and different way. So related to that, I think another important nuance in thinking about change is that it means different things in different places, depending on the context of the project. So for example, rural and urban places clearly function differently. Central cities and low income neighborhoods. Or whether we're talking about changing the future of a disinvested neighborhood, helping a community that might be at a tipping point or really thinking about how to take an actualized place and injecting some new sense of meaning and connection into it. All of these different types of creative place making are gonna have different types of outcomes and measures to actually understand what it is that we're doing and, I'm sorry, what it is that we're changing and how we'll know whether or not we've had that change. And I also wanna address just briefly the sort of thorniness of causality. So in my previous example, I mentioned that an increase in revenue for local businesses might be something to measure whether or not a project was successful. So can we know that it was the art in the alley that made this change? Maybe, maybe not. Can we know what it is about the art that actually had this change? Maybe, maybe not. But in this part, in this creative place making model, we want to see the arts as a part of strategies that sort of maybe align towards larger goals of improving outcomes for local businesses. So we may also not be able to say that the arts alone are having that effect. So we can't begin answering these questions though until we begin going into projects by being intentional about what we're trying to change. And then over time as a field, amassing a bunch of data on what did and didn't work in concert with what other local strategies are doing. So it's the same challenge, this causality challenge. It's the same challenge that plagues other sectors that play in this space and that struggle with program evaluation. So one of the most important things that we can also do is to begin working more closely with other sectors that are looking at their own sort of complicated social and economic and physical systems and how to measure impact. So this doesn't mean that the arts sector shouldn't continue all of the research that we're doing on the intrinsic and instrumental value of the arts in a larger sense. And indeed those conversations actually inform the creative place making model because it helps us to understand again what it is about the arts or why the arts can have the effect that we want to have down the line. So with this session, what we want to do is actually give you some sense of how other projects are looking at what they're doing and thinking about what they're trying to change and then understanding how they're gonna know whether or not they've actually had that change. So I wanna ask each of the folks up here to start by talking about the context and the intention of your project and then follow up with talking about how you chose to measure whether or not you've actually met that intention. So we're gonna start and we'll go through each person and then following the short presentations we're actually going to have breakout sessions led by each of these folks on their various different sort of types of projects and types of outcomes and intentions that they're looking at. So you'll see each one of them has their sort of own unique approach to this work. So we're gonna start with some sort of more specific intentions of what people are trying to change and then we'll sort of move into a broader agenda and look at how people are sort of looking at larger neighborhood change and community change. So we're gonna start out with Laura Zabel who is here from Springboard for the Arts and the Irrigate Project and she's gonna talk about community narrative and how they've looked at understanding their impact and community narrative. Okay, thanks Liz. Hi everybody. So like Liz said, the project I'm gonna talk about today is a project called Irrigate that is based in St. Paul, Minnesota. It's a partnership between Springboard and Twin Cities Local Initiative Support Corporation and the city of St. Paul. And fundamentally it's a project about mobilizing and engaging the creative community to help address a big community challenge. The particular community challenge that we were hoping to address is the construction of the central corridor light rail. So we're building a train in between the two cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The train goes right through the center of St. Paul through six of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city and neighborhoods that have a high concentration of small businesses and neighborhoods that have very real historic reasons to be worried about displacement. So our question was, as artists who live and work in these neighborhoods already, what is our investment? What can we provide during this moment of community challenge? And what the project looks like is hundreds and hundreds of small projects. So we engaged local artists, artists who have a significant investment in the neighborhood already to design projects in partnership with small businesses and neighborhood organizations. Those are projects that are designed to be small, that are designed to be an on-ramp for those businesses and neighborhood organizations many of whom had never worked with artists before and are designed to create lots and lots of moments of joy and surprise and delight and lots and lots of moments for the media to cover what's happening in those neighborhoods to give people reasons to come there, to spend money there, to change people's perception of those neighborhoods because when you are in the midst of a big disruption like that, one of the predominant challenges is the challenge of narrative, both the narrative that gets told through the media to other people in the community and the narrative we tell ourselves about what's possible in a place. So we trained over the last two and a half years, we've trained about 600 local artists who've created over 150 small projects and as we were doing that and seeing these sort of stories crop up in the media about these projects, we realized that that was a way that we could measure people's perception of their place. So we engaged Tunheim Market Research to help us with that and they were able to collect all of the media stories about these small projects which were, it's important to say these were stories that were not written by arts reporters predominantly. They were stories by city beat reporters and traffic reporters and people who are looking for daily content and they can either reach for the latest crime stat or they can reach for an authentic project that came out of the community about a giant puppet of a dog walking around. And let's see, Tunheim was able to give us a count of how many people saw that coverage and it was a pretty astounding number. So 30 million people saw coverage of these small place making projects. So that really expanded the reach beyond just the people who experienced them directly. They were also able to divide it by type of coverage which was significant to us because this question of narrative is something that communities already spend money on. So we spend money to buy ads during big challenges, big disruptions. So what if you spent money on artists instead or in addition to? Do you get better or the same results? The answer was better, by the way. They were able to help us understand the sort of seasonality of the coverage and the projects and how those two things were related. And they were also able to divide the coverage by geography. So to our partners that we worked with in the neighborhoods, particularly neighborhoods that deal with a predominantly negative narrative all the time, not just during construction. We were able to say to those partners, this is what this work is creating in your neighborhood. They were also able to do an analysis of the sentiment and found that 100% of these stories were positive stories about the central corridor. And furthermore, they were able to say that without these stories, there would have been little to no positive narrative. So these small projects essentially created an alternative positive narrative about neighborhoods. They did stakeholder interviews from people in the public and private sector about their impression and how their impression had changed both of the neighborhoods of the community challenge and of the idea of engaging with artists. And so once we did that work with Tunheim and had these results from them, that was great. We were able to show that there was some impact, but we still didn't really know what that meant. So what does it mean to have 30 million positive media impressions? Well, it turns out there's a whole school of research and thought that we were able to connect this study to, which is a whole school of thought about the media impact on public policy, on influence, essentially. And that line of thinking goes that the media has a tremendous effect on setting agenda, especially if it's reinforced by actual personal experience when you walk down the street. So essentially that it feels authentic and real. So in that way, we were able to take these 150 small projects and essentially draw a logic model line to a change in people's perception of their own place, to a change in people outside of the community, their perception of the place, and hopefully eventually to a change in public and policy agenda. Just as a little foreshadowing of the breakout session, I wanna be clear that this isn't just a measurement tool for construction projects or projects that are happening in construction zones, we're using a similar strategy in our work in rural communities around the historic reuse of a large historic property and also with the Asian Economic Development Association in trying to reinforce and create a cultural district brand for the little Mekong neighborhood in St. Paul. Five minutes. Yes. Well done. So next up we have Prima Kataragupta from the University City District in Philadelphia who's gonna talk about their porch project and all of the crazy data stuff that they've done with that. Thanks, Liz. My name is Prima Kataragupta. I work for University City District. We are a special services district in West Philadelphia and lately we've gotten into the business of developing and managing public spaces. So I'm gonna talk to you a bit about that. So much. So I'm gonna start with a really corny analogy and I hope you'll pardon me. And it's kind of a polemic about why we develop public spaces the way we do now. Typically when you develop a public space you design something and you create a capital intention of vision and you make the vision happen and it's expensive and it's sort of irreversible and I think the argument that we're trying to make is there's a better way of doing it. There's a more iterative way of doing it and I use the example of Facebook. So this is what Facebook looks like today. Pardon the pictures of my kids. But what if, and this is what Facebook looked like 13 years ago or 14 years ago, what if it was that and it was stuck in time and that was it forever? Wouldn't it be obsolete? Wouldn't it be irrelevant? I think a better way of designing public spaces and I think there are probably lessons for creative place making in general not just public spaces is that we need to design responsive to human behavior. So Liz wanted us to start out a little bit by talking about what we were trying to change. So in this case with our public space we were trying to change pedestrian behavior. How we'll know if we're successful? I mean people will use the space but for me what's also equally important is why and the reason you measure it is you can make incremental iterative changes over time rather than designing the whole thing in one big expensive fell swoop. Let's tinker a little bit and let's not be afraid to take risks and let's see how people respond. So this is the area in question. This is around 30th Street Station in Philadelphia if you've been there, perhaps you've arrived by train. It's clearly an area that's designed to design both for the automobile and for the trains to get in and out of as quickly as possible. And the little bet that we were trying to make is that this could be a place where people could pause. I mean we really believe that public spaces in general and make cities more livable, make them more dynamic, make them more sustainable. But you know here was an opportunity to do something. So this is what the area previously looked like. Welcome to Philadelphia, right? You come out of the train station and this is what you see. For better or for worse, there was a massive Pennsylvania Department of Transportation project in the area, the whole area is sort of on bridges because the rails underneath. And this plaza was created. You know it's kind of easy for us to make fun of it and say this is the way we designed plazas and we didn't want people to linger in them. But I mean to be honest, there wasn't anyone at the time to sort of take care of it and power wash it in water plants. So we sort of came in at the 11th hour. And we realized immediately that this was a really important space. There's a tremendous amount of employment in the area and because of the bridge structure, there's barely a tree. And there's a huge amount of development coming. And so when you talk about how we know we've changed it, I mean yes we want to change pedestrian behavior but the implications for changing pedestrian behavior are you change the way people develop land. You create a more walkable, more pedestrian friendly area. And this is an area that's gonna have a tremendous, tremendous amount of development over the next 10 years. So we immediately started fantasizing about the great public spaces of New York and Paris when we realized that this was an opportunity. But if that's what we were still thinking about, A, we probably would have done it wrong because we didn't really understand our users and how people would use this space. And B, it would still look like that PennDOT rendering except without the people in it, of course. Because we'd still be trying to tell people to give us money and help us do it. So, and I know some of the folks from Times Square here, I saw them earlier. Our inspiration was Times Square. I mean let's just do something, let's do it quickly and let's see how people respond. So we very quickly set up tables, chairs, and umbrellas and planters in this space. That's what it looks like from far away. And here's a more zoomed in version. Moveable tables and chairs, umbrellas. I think we thought plants were really important because it's a pretty bare space. We couldn't afford planters as an aside. So we got these agricultural troughs that livestock eat out of and we got them, we got some holes drilled in them for drainage and those became our planters. And because we put nice plants in them, they look pretty good. And then one of the little bets was, could you create a public space with, I mean to use another corny tech analogy, could you create a public space with software instead of hardware? Could you create the programming that's really gonna drive people to the space and then think about improving the environment later? So we did a ton of programming. You name it, we did it. We had a circus, we had a beer garden, food trucks are a huge part of it. We had a huge concert. We had a, we've had a lot of small concerts as well. But then, I mean the most important thing again, and getting back to the data part, we collected a huge, huge amount of data. So like this is the part that gets really geeky and I'm gonna be quick, so tune out if you've had a big lunch. But we collected a huge, huge amount of data. Every hour, we took a six month period, every hour, on the hour, we had somebody walk the site and basically fill out this form. And this is a methodology, like very explicitly crib from the workings of William Holly White if you're familiar with his work from the 1960s. But basically filled out this form and mapped out where people were on the porch, were they sitting, are they standing, are they in the shade, are they male, are they female, are they, you know, what activities are they engaging in? And we had a huge, huge, huge amount of data on this. So what did we do with this data? This data all got crunched. Whoops. So we produced a report. I only brought one with me to LA, but if you give me your business card afterwards, I'd be happy to put it in the mail to you. But this really is our analysis and synthesis of the huge amount of data that we collected. So a couple of things we learned. I mean, for example, we've got this long linear site. We now know which site people naturally gravitate towards. So if you think about design implications, do we put something really cool on the quiet side or do we kind of celebrate the fact that it's a quiet side and kind of designed to encourage more passive activity? We know exactly what percentage of people sit in the shade so we can design shade structures accordingly. I mean, this is where we get a little creepy, but we took every way of getting onto the site and we followed 100 people through the site and mapped how they traverse it, but no, no, no, you laugh, but think about it. You're going to spend money on planters. You have a finite amount of money to spend. Do you want to spend the money where people have the most impact? That's what we did. We have a good sense of pedestrian traffic through the site. We obviously know the effect weather has, rainy days, heat and the like and just understanding that in our first season of operation it was a very positive, very favorable trend line. So now comes the fun part. Now we're really thinking through what the future of the porch is. What porch 2.0 is, if you will. So we've been surveying folks, asking them what kind of amenities that they'd like to see, what they like about the porch, what they don't want to see go, as well as what additions can we make? And I think what our place has allowed us to do, which is really exciting, is include an artist in that master planning process. And so we still believe in this sort of verdant capital intensive vision and I've no doubt that the porch will look like that someday, but in a very methodical, data-driven way. Thank you. So now we've heard two, I think sort of fairly specific types of intentions around community narrative and around the sort of activation of a public space. So I think now we wanna sort of look at a little bit of a broader agenda with Brian Friedman from the Northeast Shores Development Corporation, who's gonna talk about their neighborhood revitalization work and how they've gone about measuring it. Hi, I'm Brian Friedman. I'm the Executive Director of Northeast Shores where, here we go. Where we are a CDC that serves a neighborhood in the city of Cleveland. Frankly, a neighborhood that does not have a great story. As we've all heard throughout many Rust Belt communities, it's a neighborhood that has a lot of blight, ban and properties, et cetera. And our place project and other kind of place making in general is to take that vacancy and instead of thinking of it as a liability to actually think about it as an asset and how can the arts actually take advantage of the fact that we have this abandonment and make it into something that's powerful and helps create a sense of place. So going into, so basically our place award, about half of it was spent on, about half of it was spent on long-term improvements and about half of it was spent on short, artist-driven, artist-proposed projects. So at the beginning of our process, we surveyed anybody, everybody, online, in-person, at block club meetings. For all I know, you guys filled out surveys to tell us where do we stand today? What is our baseline on things that we care about? Is the neighborhood authentic? Is the neighborhood affordable? Is it a good place to raise kids? Is it a good, is it a safe place? And from that, we actually learned that there were five areas that we had to resolve or work towards with our small projects. And that is neighborhood safety, engaging the youth, telling our story. So what happened was artists over the entire art place period did about 25 to 40 projects to help move that forward opposite that survey work. So we did a number of things. We had people paint murals. We had people build sculptures and put them in the public space. We gave people a canvas by doing art right there on the sidewalk in front of their homes. We programmed vacant spaces on either short-term or long-term basis so that people can come in and recapture some of these abandoned buildings. We started a festival. We brought culture to the street, bring people, have it involved and engage with people right where they are. Have them come in and learn about the neighborhood history and do oral presentations of the history of the community and have bands and whatnot perform. Build a stage. We created new places for people to come out and learn about what, come out and enjoy the new public spaces that we've created and find new ways to program them. Address an issue. These are painted rain barrels. So we have a stormwater problem in our lakefront community. So those big white barrels that people all around the country are putting in their yards that these are a little bit more attractive, right? So now you have a piece of art that also is relieving stormwater issues that we have in the community. And also sell the homes. So all the projects that I've shown you so far are less than $10,000, including that house, which we sell for, we sell our artist relocation program sells houses for $6,500. And that's an example of one of our $6,500 houses. I'm actually sold to an artist that relocated to us from New Zealand. You know, and then also engage next generation, having kids do art in the street during festivals and during public events. And send a postcard. So part of our artist relocation program is also engaging and convincing artists to come move here by mailing out these postcards. So all these investments that you saw are $10,000 or less. And while our place is very forgiving in the fact that we're allowed to, what's the word, failed dramatically, right? I'm okay with failing dramatically, but I'm also really cheap. So I don't want to fail dramatically and lose a lot of money. So a $10,000 investment is not a big impact if nobody comes out or it didn't work out or the artist didn't pull it off. But when you add them up, it starts to really make a huge difference in how things are going. With all these projects they add and they combine and they grow and they grow and they grow. And over the period of time, we have all these opportunities to connect things. And I'm a big Jim Collins nerd in his newest book, Great By Choice. He has this whole thing about bullets and cannonballs. I mean, this is a perfectly great example about how these small projects are not a big thing, but what do you learn from them when you learn great things is what you can do going forward. So while that was going on through that march, as we went through our place and those projects happened over and over again, month by month, we surveyed again the exact same survey mid-session and then at the end, right? And we did this very, very deliberately to, and this is a, I mean, this goes on for pages and pages, but if I showed it to you, you wouldn't be able to see it because there are numbers and you're way out there and I'm up here. So what we wanted to do is track how things we cared about mattered. So about 200 people every year filled out the survey, not necessarily the same 200 people. Each year, two thirds of them were residents, a third of them were not. Half of them were artists or self-defined as artists, half of them were not. And they really kind of helped us gauge the things that our place asked us to look at about vibrancy. You know, we're all asked, well, is the neighborhood safer? Well, sure, I have crime data, but frankly the period of time to report that back, there's a lag, right? So if I tell them the most recent data, that doesn't cover my entire project, I'd have to wait a whole another year and Liz wants to report. So we're not gonna wait for the crime data, but is the neighborhood safe? Well, over the period of time of the our place investment, it went from 25% of people saying the neighborhood is safe to 37% of the people saying the neighborhood is safe. Do I have room to go? Of course, two out of three people don't think my neighborhood's safe. But when I started, three out of four people said the neighborhood wasn't safe. So it's those things that we've been able to track and really have now, for us, because every single item actually increased over the period of time, some were dramatically than others, you know, we're particularly proud of the fact that, you know, neighborhood pride went from about half the people thinking that they're proud of the neighborhood at 58% to 77% of the people say they're proud to call this neighborhood their home. So the other thing that we've done, because we're a little nerdy, is then we've cross-tabbed the living daylights out of this, right? So I know how authentic artists think the neighborhood is versus non-artists. I know how safe the neighborhood is perceived by residents versus non-residents. And we can go further and through that. And now this actually, as we've come out of our place, drives our work. So we're planning on doing the survey until we, I don't know, until I'm done, until I retire and somebody decides we're not allowed to do it anymore. But now this actually drives the agenda beyond the outcomes we all have, beyond the outcomes that we all have to share with governmental entities for our grants and whatnot. This drives our agenda on a year-to-year basis. So for example, under Raised Kids, we had a number of programs around children and youth and engagement. But at the end of the day, after a year and a half or actually two years, I only moved that needle 8%. And still only 37% of my neighborhood thinks it's a good place to raise kids. So we grabbed a small subset of people, asked them what's that about, and there's a reality in our perception that the neighborhoods in our community are, I'm sorry, the schools in our neighborhood are not conducive to learning and that they have to be poor schools. So this year, we are co-opening a charter school that will open this fall for K to A. And not only will I obviously, going forward, know how those 96 students perform academically because they're gonna take the state test and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm gonna keep surveying. And I sure as heck hope that Raising Kids makes a big leap now that I opened a quality school in the neighborhood and that we're promoting that. So this data, which admittedly was a little bit for us to make sure that we could capture whether something was happened, now cycles through on an ongoing basis with us driving our agenda going forward. So thank you very much. Thank you, Brian. There's a couple of things I'm gonna put a pin in and come back to when we're actually doing our conversations. And I think that's failure. I think that's timeline for outcomes and the sort of iterative process which has sort of come up a little bit. So we'll talk about all those things with everybody. But we'll keep going through and give everybody a chance to speak. So next up we have Kimberly Driggins who's here with us from the DC Office of Planning. They have sort of a similar mandate in some ways to look at broader neighborhood revitalization. But their project sort of looked specifically or involved specifically the planning process for the neighborhood. So I'm gonna have her talk a little bit about that and how the sort of community engagement outcomes changed as a result of the project that they did. Thanks, Liz. This is a great panel that you assembled and learned a lot about the projects. And it's really interesting listening how there are a lot of common themes throughout the projects. As Liz said, I'm gonna talk about, so our art place grant, this one that I'm gonna talk about is, it was for these arts and culture temporums and really kind of activating vacant underutilized space. The grant, we actually worked in four neighborhoods, but I'm only gonna talk about this one today, which is the Central 14th Street neighborhood. And just to orient folks, this is north of Columbia Heights. So we were in the midst of a planning process, a small area plan, neighborhood plan for this area. It is Spring Road up to Colorado Avenue. And we thought that this neighborhood would be ripe to take advantage of the art place grant to really test the ideas in the plan. So we were about a year in the planning process. The small area plan priorities included enlivening retail to encourage more patrons, creating active walkable and safe streets, increasing connectivity between the commercial nodes. That stretch between Spring and Colorado is about a mile, 1.4 miles. So it's actually a fairly long corridor. And also sort of thinking about activating the public spaces. The grant takes place or took place in the broader context of our temporary urbanism initiative. And that initiative is really driving a lot of the work that we do. And that is, placemaking is really at the center of our temporary urbanism initiative. And it really is jump-starting goals in our creative economy study. Small area plans, we have a retail action strategy and our neighborhood planning. So what I'm gonna talk about is really kind of the specific design intervention for the three corridors. I wanted to also say that as the Office of Planning, we don't really do arts. So this project would have never happened without the strong collaboration. And I just wanna talk about the partners here because they really stepped up and really made it happen. So we partnered with our Arts and Humanities Commission and they just so happened to have this really dynamic citywide public art project going on in the city at the same time. We chatted with them about trying to get some of their artists and curators to work in some of the art place neighborhoods. There was a match with this neighborhood. From this relationship came our partnership with the Rebar Group based in San Francisco. Rebar was really interested in doing a design intervention that was really rooted in the neighborhood. So after discussions, this was the neighborhood that was selected. So the first intervention is, this is, you're looking at Colorado Avenue actually. And the plan strategy specifically was looking at the area between 14th and Longfellow Streets and looking at it as a unique arts cluster creating a unique sense of place within the public realm. So what we did is we closed off the street for the day. We partnered with Rebar and we did, we recreated a pedestrian friendly art plaza per the plan's recommendations. Visitors and residents were able to envision the plan's development concept by creating a public mural with paint, landscaping and temporary seating. Residents and businesses that had not participated in the planning process were engaged in the community placemaking and made familiar with the plan and its objectives. So we had actual easels and we had billboards of the plan so as folks stumbled upon what was happening and were interested about the plan we also talked about it in conjunction with the placemaking activity. Later on that day, we held a design charrette for the creation of temporary street furniture. So the plan strategy here is connecting each of the commercial nodes through beautification improvements that could improve the corridor's aesthetic appeal as well as improve walkability. This was sort of two-fold. We also developed or came up with a street furniture concept to really talk about and activate the businesses. So Columbia Heights is a really trendy happening area of town. People go there to destination. The just north of it, which is where this project is, was really suffering from not really getting a lot of foot traffic. So the street furniture was meant to activate and peak interest and kind of get folks to experience that corridor. So we did everything out in the public realm because we had these great sidewalks and we activated that. So through the community charrette process, art place stakeholders designed temporary street furniture to be used within the corridor's wide sidewalks. After the charrette, the street furniture was actually designed to meet the issues raised during the charrette. Some was around loitering, and I'll talk about that a little later. And then built and painted by the residents during a subsequent workshop. So we had to design charrette and then a couple of months later, we did a workshop that was the entire week and we rented out a vacant space that housed the pieces of furniture. It was prefabricated and what you're seeing there is the putting together of the furniture and the painting of the furniture. About 30 pieces of temporary furniture were made and now can be used in various store fronts in the public realm along the corridor. The furniture was easily moved and shared amongst the businesses. So with that, we also engaged the businesses to try to take ownership of the furniture and that was met with varying degrees of success but we did get some folks to kind of take ownership. And this open kitchen crawl was our last specific event and this was the planned strategy was really, this is the part right north of Columbia Heights between Spring Road and Shepherd Streets. And the goal here was to engage patrons through arts and cultural amenities, thus stimulating interest in the businesses. The art place activity was a culture crawl combined with art and musical entertainment and it was used to attract visitors and residents to experience a handful of restaurants in this node. So this is like a pub crawl but it was a food crawl and it's a food festival and we brought the food and the restaurants out to the street. We had a mural painting, we had entertainment, we had music and it was really good and it sort of moved throughout the corridor. It was very cool, very interesting and gained a lot of interest. I'll sum up by saying that our experience with doing early implementation during a plan process really was catalytic for us. The plan awareness was raised, there was neighborhood networking, tangible end product and small but impactful actions and during the Q and A I'll talk a little bit about some of the unintended but positive effects that came from this project. Thank you. So next up and the proverbial last but certainly not least, we have Jordan Poole who's here from Somerville, Georgia and the Paradise Garden Foundation to talk about this sort of notion of broader rural revitalization and how you can sort of go about thinking about that with an art space project. Thank you. Thank you. Well, first off, let me just ask who remembers the band REM? Okay, all right. So who can tell me what was their first music video? What was the first music video that REM did? You've got it. So Radio Free Europe was filmed 30 years ago in Paradise Garden. So guess what? You all know where my hometown is. Who watched that film? That's kind of the basis of really what we're doing here. So I'll just, I'll start into the discussion of exactly where we were, baseline. So Chateau County was the most economically depressed county in Appalachian, Georgia. Probably the population of 25,000, 20% below the poverty line at the height of the recession, there was over 13% unemployment and there was even the fact that schools and they still are doing it, something that I'm working very hard, but they decided in order to cut things, first off, we've cut the arts out of the schools. That's the first thing that's gotta go. Secondly, what we'll do a four day work week, a four day school week for that. We'll save on the power bill. So we'll just do it to four days a week. Yeah, those kids don't need anything for instruction on that Monday. All of these disparaging things. For me, this is important because this is my hometown and I think we all have a hometown. You're making your own hometown, but you know, you can't buy roots and that's something that you just, you have in a wonderful way and we have a world that becomes homogenous, but it's embracing the uniqueness of things. And Chateau County is a creative place. People have always done things that are very creative. They've had to, they've had to do it out of necessity. They didn't have a store to go to, they would do things. Right across the mountain from Chateau County is a place called Dalton, Georgia, which is the carpet capital of the world. Well, you know what, out of a traditional craft, an art, a billion dollar industry was born. And you know, there is that. There is this cottage industry, this traditionalism that exists. So what happened whenever Chateau County really hit that bottom mark was a need for discussion. So first off, y'all all know where Chateau County is. Who knows R-E-M? You've got a connection built. The next question is who's painted over 20 paintings in here? As anybody who's an artist, y'all, if we've got lots of artists, paint over 20 paints. Okay, who's painted over 200 paintings? Well, y'all, we had a resourceful guy here at Paradise Garden. He painted 46,991 paintings before he died. He had a vision from God, actually, to do all this. He was repairing a bicycle one day. And he had this vision that said, you know, you should stop everything and paint arts, paint sacred art. And this is the story of him. Was, well, how do you know? How do you know? And that's what he was hearing from this vision on his finger, was how do you know? And I think that's what we can a lot of us learn. How do you know unless you do it? And that's what's wrong with a lot of artists today and a lot of people is you don't know unless you go forward and do it. And this was approach to a lot of funding circles, a joke, because here you have an art site, an environment that's built out of cast-off objects. How can it be a codifying agent to create an economic development tool for this county? How can that be possible? So in that, how do you know? Well, we were able to convince the Appalachian Regional Commission to help out in an economic development manner for the purchase of the property, to allow for our development to come in and really work on being able to be that, that codifying agent, to be the glue that bonds to help break these stop gaps. Yeah, we have a default chamber of commerce. I'm working right now with a team of people and with the Georgia Department of Economic Development and Tourism. We have the potential to bring all the small businesses a workshop and ways to bring them together. We have a wonderful amount of things that are coming into place with this, with providing educational opportunities for students. So it is taking the historic place and making it work. So I would go into a little bit more, as connecting the two was the biggest thing. And y'all, I lived in Washington, DC and in some other places. And the average two bedroom apartment rents for $599 a month, which, you know, actually I told, I was talking to some people on my board and they said, oh, that's expensive. Yeah, it's so inexpensive to live in this area, but there is a basis of artists. We have so many artists who have done work that things that are passed down, everything from painting to pottery to quilting, fiber arts, you name it, there is an existence and there's the embrace of what's unique, authentic. And, you know, that's what we really wanna do is we wanna, we are the authentic article. I mean, you have to see it to believe it. And I think that's what we want to get. So out of that, I have a basis in historic preservation and I believe wholeheartedly that you can have this wonderful Victorian house that somebody lived in and it's great and the finishes are wonderful and it should be saved. But you can't sell it. You can't sell the idea of it being warm and cozy. That doesn't relate to the sheet of paper that says what's its value back. So we do have the intangible results and the tangible results. One of which is, I'm just gonna go ahead and talk to you a little bit about the intangible results, which is for right now, I have a professional art installation for the first time in Chateau County, existing, it's the state collection of art, 28 pieces I called Inspire Georgia that's just been installed yesterday at our visitor center. And students in Chateau County are all, we've got basically every school is busing all their students that they possibly can to have exhibition time for the students there. And when they go to that garden, these students who really do see a helplessly hopeless existence, they go home to their trailers, they go, their parents are working, probably cut hours in most of the mills. We can tell those students, here you go, here's somebody local. You don't have to have a million dollars. You don't have to be from a big city. You don't have to be from an influential family. You don't have to be going to an ivily private school. But guess what? This local guy was an artist and he was creative. If you're passionate about what you do, you can inspire the world just like this guy. So there's the educational factor. The other things are as the intangible results is the community pride, the marketability. We're able to take something we already had, something that was part of our history and kind of redefine it. Don't ever reinvent the wheel, just find a new way to spin it. And that's exactly what we have really wanted to do with this project. Now you still have the naysayers. And that's why it's been so important for us to collect the data as we've been doing here. We started the project. Paradise Garden had gone through a quiet an amount of time to fall and disrepair. And so what started in June of 2012 was Kathy Berry would sit on the front porch and people would come. And we had this little form that they would all fill out and she took notes throughout the whole summer. Now we didn't have water or electricity that whole summer and that got to be about 114 degrees one time. But to have conclusive data throughout the whole process, we can backtrack to other information and help us be able to correlate. But as we go along, we're able to see the impacts and you gotta sell it to people because you do have these folks in the community, the businesses, well that's still, what relationship does that have? Well yeah, we get people who come from all around the world. And that's what's the most interesting thing is that to have someone show up from Paris, France, who knew about this artist and knows about these creative arts that are in this area and to have them show up in Little Oaks II County, which is not that easy to get to. That's the things that's wonderful. We've also been able to keep up with the amount of money on sampling from these economic development surveys. So in 21 months of being active and doing what we've been doing a lot of work to improve the industry experience with improvements to the site and also work on community development aspects, we can actually see that you gotta bring people to the party. But once they come, they can always go and spend in the community, but it's us being able to be that bonding agent to say, where can you go to be active in encouraging all these aspects with spending. So these surveys and questions we asked, where people ate, where do they shop, how much money do they spend at each shop? And so after which, we crunched the numbers and we realized that 504 people spent a total of $19,419. Now this is small to a lot of you, I know. But I wanna go back to the per capita income of Chateau County, which is, our per capita income is $15,727. So basically, we can estimate that we have brought in through this process the income of 14 people in the county. Yes, we've only been active in 21 months. That in itself is something to keep encouraging the local businesses that there is that ability to have these things. So we can help to encourage the stop gap of lack of educational opportunities and also to have that marketability because I have to tell you, when I went to high school, went to high school, we had the highest teen pregnancy rate. Growing up, we also had one of the highest illiteracy rates. We also had, when I went off to college and moved away, they had one of the highest meth arrest rates. It's not very marketable. So how would you, what do you wanna sell your place with? You wanna sell it with the fact that this place is filled with creativity, that it's Mayberry with a twist. It's a place that's unlike any other. So that's what we've got. Thanks. So I think there's, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff here to explore. I think some of the things that I like the most about these projects, I think all of them, the measurement that you are doing, you are doing for yourselves and for your projects and not sort of angsting over what does this funder want or what does this city person want. And that's an important question to be able to develop the data and the stories and the quantitative and the qualitative things that are gonna reach those different audiences. But I think all of these were sort of so endemic to the actual project that the results are actually much more meaningful. And one thing that, another thing I really liked, I feel like all of you have iterated at various different points. The process of actually measuring these types of intentions has allowed you to course correct along the way. I think timeline, I just wanna address this notion of short term versus long term timeline, because I think we know as well as anybody that place-based change doesn't happen in that 18 month period that you might have an art place grant. We like to hear about changes that you're seeing, whether or not you're seeing them and then we like to learn from that. And then we expect that changes will continue to happen and some of the biggest changes may not happen until well after the grant. For us, and this is just sort of for art place, we are learning from this as much as anybody else. And I think some of the, again, the sort of angst that we hear about measurement. For us, we wanna know if you've failed. We do wanna know. I promise you wanna know and I promise I'll be really nice about it. If I'm not, tell me. No, but you know, and I think last year we had a session about fear of failure versus fear of failure to learn. And I think that notion is something that we need to consistently bring up again and again and again. And even though these projects have seen sort of spectacular success with the metrics that they've chosen, it's just as valid to go into a measurement process and come back and not actually get the results that you were looking for. And you need to be able to learn from that just as well as you're able to learn from the projects where you do see that large delta shift. So I do wanna ask just a couple questions and then, you know, I think as far as everybody else having conversations, I think the breakouts are gonna be a great opportunity to talk with each other and to talk with the panelists up here. But what I'd be interested to hear from you all what sort of resource commitment this was both in terms of time and money and sort of how that has been valuable in its return to what you've been able to do with future programs, the sort of capacity that it's built in community. I'm asking a leading question right now. The capacity you've been able to build in the community or the way that it's sort of allowed, again, better future programming? Or not? I'll start. With this project and this neighborhood, again, our place grant, we were working in four neighborhoods. So this was one of four. This one by far was the most time intensive and it was a big lift and the timeframe was, you know, three to six months. And it was a big lift mainly because I didn't mention the community partner, but it was a nascent organization, the 14th Street Uptown Business Association, which was really a person of, it was an organization of one person. And he was really the most difficult person in the neighborhood and we knew that we couldn't do the project without his support. And so, you know, and they really wanted to be very, very involved as they should be, but there was a capacity issue there. And so, you know, my office, we spent a lot of time with that organization and working with, and having them work with Rebar in terms of what they could meaningfully contribute to the process, which is a lot of the marketing and promoting and also getting the word out around what was happening in the neighborhood. So, you know, that was really key for us to kind of, you know, it was a three-legged stool in terms of, you know, government, strong government support, the resources. I mean, we had, this one had the most because we were able to leverage the Arts and Humanities Commissions Project and OP also, my office, kicked in a little bit of money. So, this one had the most resources behind it, but it still was less than, I'd say it was total like around 90,000 for like the project. And it really did a lot to build community and the community engagement piece was really big and because we involved the local stakeholders, they were vested in the outcome and they really started to look at the planning process in a way some of them weren't even engaged in that. And so, we were able to bring in folks that hadn't been involved at all through this process. So, it was very rewarding for us and at the end of the day, it actually changed the way we do planning in the Office of Planning for all the neighborhood plans. We have a early implementation aspect to all of our planning because we realized the value of a different type of engagement. Other thoughts on, especially in regards to the investment in the measurement as well and how that sort of had returns? I think I like to always say this tool of measuring community narrative it started with a digital alert. So, we knew from the beginning that the issue of narrative was something we were hoping to impact and address but we didn't know going in what the tool for measuring that was and we had a digital alert set up for irrigate central quarter. And those alerts started popping up more and more frequently. That was the point at which we were able to sort of iterate and say, oh, this thing is happening and we're able to track and capture it just through observing what's happening. And so that part of the process for us was efficient and fairly easy lift. Then, of course, we invested some resource into working with the market research group to actually tell us what all of that meant. But we would have had to invest a lot more if we had needed them to collect all of that information if we hadn't been collecting it all along. So for me, the lesson in that going forward has been to just make sure you're collecting that information, make sure you're tracking things even if you're not quite sure what they're gonna add up to later because it's a lot easier to do it while it's happening. Any other thoughts? You know, for us, the surveying tool was a few days work, right? And obviously then, but we're still staffing all these community meetings and staffing all these block watches. You know, if they fill it out on paper, then you have to fill out a form. But that's what, you know, it's sort of online, but that's what interns are for, right? And interns are free, cheap-ish. So, you know, generally that's been a very useful tool. I mean, it took a few days of labor, but really it's not that much investment in it to get it launched and make it go forward. Great. And then were there any major challenges that you encountered or things that, you know, roadblocks or data acquisition or philosophical challenges that you may have seen from the community or what were some of the challenges that came up as far as measuring things or maybe, you know, focusing in on one thing in particular, like a park activation or community narrative or, you know, the amount of money coming into the community. You know, have you talked to community members about that? Is there general buy-in, push-back? What are some of the conversations like that? I think it's the direct noticeability of the businesses in town. But, you know, we have, because we are identified whole county, it is what, it's the belief that it is possibly helping out, but they don't, you know, they have existed for years in the basis of, you know, baseline status quo. This is what we do. There's no reason to continue on. So you're in trying to encourage that to this day. We still, we have a major thing that you always look to as identifiable market successes. You need a coffee shop. Still don't have that coffee shop. We, you know, you have to create the need to have that in place. And that's why I hope that us collecting this data is that maybe some investor who would actually see, okay, you know, you actually have this data that can conclusively show you need the coffee shop. You need lodging. You need bed and breakfast. You need all of these things. And for instance, we do what's called Finster Fest each year. Well, I would swear to you there would have been a more successful show if we'd had more lodging. But there's no lodging. And so the number of people who came versus the potential of reach that we had in different times of the day. You know, I think that kind of data helps sell the story. And again, we're kind of trying to play the role of Chamber of Commerce slash Arts Development. So it is very much important now that we can carry concurring all this data. And when you all were thinking about putting together some of these, again, the sort of evaluation portion of the project. So you have this thing that you wanna do, something, you know, you're gonna do it and then you wanna know how you did with it. What sort of expertise do you feel like you needed to build either on staff or bring in from consultants? I know we talked, you know, we've mentioned Rebar. We've mentioned, I think, a couple other groups that were brought in. So what's the sort of expertise investment? Well, for us for the surveying tool, we're a little bit less in effect that I have some staff that are very aware of the social sciences and quantitative analysis and whatnot, including, you know, I actually happened to teach it while I was in college as a TA, but so that helped us kind of create the survey knowing what we know, and then we were able to engage a university and verify that these are like good questions that are not, you know, that they don't have two subjects and whatever and they're not leading, et cetera, et cetera, to verify that. But it does take a decent amount of internal technical knowledge to create a good survey tool that would test, you know, other people's skepticism about how everything seems to be increasing over time. So, you know, I would say at least if somebody was to replicate that from us, they could, I'll give you guys the survey tool, or you'll have to engage people that are actually technically aware of how you create a, you know, a good survey. When you guys get a phone call at home asking you to fill out a survey, they didn't come up with those questions like three minutes ago, all right? I mean, those things are well-designed, well-thought-out, tested before they, you know, they're deployed to the masses, and you have to make sure you do that, especially if it's a question, like in our case, like we're gonna ask in our march for the history of time now. So, you know, we're not gonna be able later on change the vocabulary of a question, because then you're actually changing what the data means going forward. You know, I was gonna say, I think, I guess sort of somewhat flippantly, I was fortunate when I started this job, I inherited a staff person with a PhD in insect behavior from Caltech, so he was incredibly useful in the measurement of public space, but I mean, frankly, I think that, you know, I think that we've created a format that other people can use, I'm hopeful, like I think that we've done a lot of the hard work, I think we've hit our heads against the wall, trying to figure this stuff out and trying to make this really, really manageable, but I think it's out there. I mean, one process improvement that we made is we literally had, you know, the folks going through the site with a clipboard and sheets of paper, and literally two weeks ago, and so that had to be inputted into GIS at a later date, so something that we just started two weeks ago is now, you know, the folks doing the surveying work have iPads and it kind of automatically populates things, and we can sort of see it pop up on our desktops as it's happening, so it's pretty neat. I just wanted to say that this project was sort of the least data-driven, and it was really about the neighborhood change, and you know, it's a little bit harder to measure, but with the planning process, we had kind of clear plan objectives, and you know, the actual art place project did meet those objectives, but the biggest thing was sort of changing the narrative of what the neighborhood could be, and the art place project was really powerful in demonstrating that, and some things that happened afterwards that we didn't necessarily go in planning, but what very impactful was that, you know, that nascent organization, you know, really, they had to rally to get the funds to do what we needed them to do, and it organized them in a way because it was a very sort of tangible project, and so when we had our council hearing for the plan approval, you know, we had a lot of people come out and testify on behalf of the plan, and so that was also a measure just in terms of we increased our numbers of people coming out to testify, and with that group, that organization is still together, which is a big deal actually, considering the personalities that are involved, and they also were able to receive technical assistance from other government agencies, so this project set them up to be more sound in terms of their organization and their infrastructure to be able to go after more planning dollars from our office, as well as they submitted an art place grant, but they didn't get it, but the point is they were organized and they were thinking about, you know, how can we continue the efforts that were started a year and a half ago, so that community organizing piece and that organizational structure was really key, and I think that that's sort of the lasting output from that temporary intervention. For us, a really important thing that we learned, really pursue that hunch that this was something that could be measured, so we started sort of having this feeling that there was the potential to do a real quantitative, like numbers measurement, and we beat our heads against that wall for quite a while trying to find someone, trying to find the right partner to do that with us, and a lot of people who came more sort of out of the arts field wanted to help us capture the stories or tell the stories, and we felt like that's the capacity that we have on staff or within the project already, we know how to do that part. I wanted somebody who could really count it up for us, and so I was talking about this with my group this morning, we actually just cold called a bunch of people and said, here's the project and here's what we think this line of rankery is, are you interested? And we finally found the right partner, but I feel like there was a lot of value in sticking to the idea that there's gotta be somebody out there who's interested in this in this way, and of course now we know there's a whole sort of field of people who are interested in that, but they didn't necessarily exist within the arts community. I think it's so exciting to have these tools being developed, and I think we're at a moment right now where moving forward, we get to start sharing all of these things, and I think we always want to be careful not to sort of cookie cutter one measurement tool from this community to that community, that's where we sometimes get into trouble when we're trying to sort of measure ourselves against other people's outcomes, but that being said, being able to look at Brian's survey or to look at your Google news or to look at the space or the way that you're sort of looking at jobs and funding and everything in the rural communities, I think there's a big opportunity here to start sharing more, and I'm hoping that that's what we can start doing from this point forward. So I'm gonna use that to segue into our next portion of the same session, which is going to be sort of individual conversations with each of these folks a little bit about their projects, but also about your projects and some of the struggles or ideas that you've been having. I think there's some clear themes here between the sort of planning, community engagement capacity building, the neighborhood revitalization, the community narrative, the rural revitalization, and then the public space activation. So I think if you're sort of working in that space and wanna talk a little bit more about that, I think this is the opportunity to do that and explore some of those answers to the question of how will you know if you've had that effect that you're trying to have. So just in terms of logistics, I just wanna make sure that everybody knows where they're going again. So we have Laura here in this room doing the breakout and Laura will also be on the live stream. We have Jordan Poole in Museum A. He's the Paradise Garden gentlemen over there. We have Brian Friedman in Museum B back here. And we have Kimberly Driggins is now in the Hershey room as a result of the leak mentioned earlier. So she's in the Hershey room and we have Prima Katari Gupta in the Whitney room, which is also overbacked that way. Again, page 26 has the map. We're gonna try to wrap these up by about 3.15 or so and then we'll go into our last plenary on people in place for the day. So this is not a break. This is important. This is not a break. This is a transition. This is a transition from here to wherever you're about to have a conversation. So we'll see you back here soon. Thanks everybody. It's hilarious.