Youth, Artists, and Organizations: A model for just and equitable collaboration

The health and economic crises caused by COVID-19 and the ongoing fight for racial justice have augmented mental health challenges in our communities — and in communities of color, in particular. Individually and collectively we have faced loss of all kinds, lack of basic necessities, illness, inadequate access to healthcare, education disruption, quarantine, and more. Access to community healing is integral to managing the immediate and long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the everyday work of social justice.

Service organizations are working around the clock to help support their communities in meeting basic human needs through emergency funds and supplies. In addition to people’s physical needs, how are we addressing the mental health needs of families and communities? How are we helping them to cope with the stress and strain of living in quarantine and experiencing the social justice movement?

We — Siva, Sarah, and Carly — connect here to share a justful, co-creative engagement process between service organizations, artists, and young people to support creative coping, identity building, and community for positive mental health.

Our initiative, piloted by Trust for Youth and Child Leadership TYCL International, is a Virtual Creative Arts Camp for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) youth living through these dual health and social crises. While we center the value of the arts for positive mental health among youth, we also prioritize equitable partnerships that support the wellbeing of our teaching artist partners. Leaning into a “New Normal” in nonprofit and arts administration, we leave behind old, oppressive, and colonial approaches that did not serve many in our communities and cannot be returned to. It is high time for a serious reinvention.

There is a long history of tension that exists between artists and administrators. Art is too often valued for its own aesthetic purpose and not often enough for the work put into it by the artist, nor the artist’s own identity, expertise, and originality. Challenges faced by artists, including insecurity of compensation, benefits, and recognition of labor, are often under-discussed in organizations’ strategic operational plans. This affects the artists’ physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing, causes conflict and tension between the partners, and further limits the ability to deliver effective and impactful arts programs.

But in this time of social trauma, our BIPOC youth are struggling. The arts have historically been used as forms of empowerment, expression, and communication. Think of art history and expressionism, the Harlem Renaissance; or of painting the streets with Black Lives Matters and art honoring the lives of George Flloyd, Breonna Taylor, and tragically many more. We know that painting, writing, dance, mixed media, theater, improv, graphic or fashion design meet us in our unique spaces of need and provide us space to develop our voices, find community, be seen, and — maybe — even make a living. At the same time, Art — capital “A” — as an institution, in museums, in performance halls, in education, has been made more and more exclusive to middle- to upper-class communities, limiting access by others.

Our initiative looks critically at this gap in access from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The mental health and wellness research perspective presents the opportunity to promote the healing and preventative benefits of creative arts. Healing-centered arts programming recognizes the holistic benefits of social-emotional learning and personal identity building that occur in the art and creative space. In practice, this means providing mental health and wellness support to both BIPOC youth participants and teaching artists.

We enact this through a collaborative model of holistic inclusion practiced by organizations and justful partnership with artists, in order to support positive mental health and social justice for everyone involved. We position the artist as a bridge between organizations and communities, who can provide necessary creative support for wellbeing in these — and future — times of crisis.

The process of decolonizing and dismantling partnership models in the nonprofit service and arts sectors is essential in establishing inclusive and justful partnerships between organizations and artists.

Holistic Inclusion, on the one hand, proposes an integrated ecological approach to service administration, organizing for the inclusion of participants and collaborators around the social, cultural, economic, and environmental domains.

The social domain aims to include all individuals regardless of race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, caste, religion, ability, and other social demographic characteristics.

The cultural domain enables administrators and organizations to consciously involve diverse participants from different cultural backgrounds, particularly locally indigenous and native cultures, in the preparation and presentation of the arts program.

The economic domain of inclusion addresses class and wealth disparities between administrators, collaborators, artists, and participants.

The environmental domain provides for inclusive processes that honor the Earth. Organizations, collaborators, and participants critically engage with eco-friendly planning and programming to avoid natural resource exploitation.

The above model of holistic inclusion requires multi-stakeholder consciousness to make it reality, and that consciousness can be developed through justful partnerships between collaborators, and in this case, with artists.

We propose a 3Cs model for justful partnership: Connect, Collaborate, and Co-Create.

Connect: The justful partnership begins with meaningful connection with collaborators and artists. This is in part defined by the kind of access that project organizers open up for collaboration, ensuring that the opportunity to connect is available across diverse networks and domains of inclusion. Connecting then involves creating a safe space for artists to reflect on their perspectives, ideas, and thoughts for the program; discuss financial and non-financial compensation models for preparations, presentations, and evaluations; and outline a follow-up agenda that meets artist expectations from the organizations. Carefully developed online forms help us to initiate these processes of meaningful connection to understand collaborators’ voices towards collaborative action.

Collaborate: Our model encourages organizations to facilitate pre- and post-program consultations with collaborators and artists to reflect on the theme, purpose, and expected outcomes of the program. These are also opportunities to invite free and open contribution and feedback to program planning and execution. The collaboration phase can also include participatory budgeting and crowd-sourced compensation models that strive to meet the needs of collaborators. We are managing these collaborative sessions as paid Focus Group Discussions with artists to practice justful engagement and assess its impact on the participants.

Co-create: The justful partnership model includes paid hours to artists to co-design, co-prepare, co-develop pedagogies, evaluation strategies, and the program schedule along with the organizers. Holistic inclusion is a core element of the co-creative process to ensure that all artists, organizers, and participants are committed to ensuring a comprehensive understanding of inclusion and the intentionality behind decolonizing and dismantling the nonprofit and arts service model for engagement with artists and communities of color.

What does this look like in practice? We are in the early stages of piloting this program, but here is a slice of what we are trying to do so far:

• Hold space for individual voices, perspectives, and expertise: Among the program team, we’re not all experts in the same fields, but we hold ourselves accountable for our own domains to develop a shared knowledge base.
• Offer open invitations with unknown outcomes: We are actively developing this partnership together. We consider this a collaboration in thought to uplift each other’s voices in a collective and inclusive form
• Offer support to collaborators: This includes effective framing to present a cohesive program led by artists who understand a shared goal. We’re committed to informed bodies entering the spaces of young people and ensuring that those spaces are safe and inclusive.
• Maintain a flexible timeline to account for the participatory process: We’re making sure that we can accommodate the feedback loops that this process requires, and restructuring as we go.
• Record the process: Participatory and collaborative projects are successful because of the processes they follow, so we’re getting all of that down (like here, in this article).
• Prioritize resources for collaboration: Justful collaboration means equitable forms of compensation across stakeholders, and that requires resources. We make funds available for these types of projects, and we’re honest with each other about what resources are available.
• Consider non-financial compensation and partnerships as networks for opportunity: We center a value on artistic labor, but we’re also upfront about what we can and cannot offer financially as a small organization. We collaborate on what other forms of compensation can be valuable to our collaborators, including leveraging our networks.
• Support participatory compensation planning: Especially in this era of instability, we want to be able to support artists and collaborators with what they really need, and we’re making space for feedback to build just compensation models.

This model of holistic inclusion and justful partnership is in the early stage of development for TYCL International. We are open to constructive feedback, and other models and approaches for justful engagement of artists and collaborators. By centering the human value for people and planet, we’re working to reflect, connect, and act for mutual transformation among all stakeholders.