Placemaking & Community Capacity-building in AA & NHPI Communities

Emerging during the Asian American movement of the 1970s, locally-based community development organizations have played important roles in supporting the local neighborhoods and overcoming structural barriers facing Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AA & NHPI) communities in the United States. The introduction of creative placemaking through the Our Town program under the National Endowment for the Arts played an important role in spurring many community arts initiatives around the country. While creative placemaking has been envisioned to support community well-being, center the community’s voices, and even empower participatory governance, there have been questions about how their outcomes and efficacy can be measured. The main question of this research concerns how community arts initiatives (including placemaking and place-keeping projects) expand the community’s capacity to address socioeconomic and cultural well-being and historical and structural disparities facing the AA & NHPI communities. This project consists of four components: (a) the development of criteria for assessing community capacity-building; (b) an online survey of community-based organizations that are engaged in community arts initiatives; (c) in-depth case studies through ethnographic fieldwork and participatory action research that examine challenges and opportunities faced by selected initiatives and their outcomes, and (d) a symposium to share the preliminary results and engage interested community organizers, artists, and researchers in examining the results and developing strategies for future projects. [Link] 

Arts for Capacity, Against Disparities: Community Arts Initiatives and Community Capacity-building in AA & NHPI Communities. National Coalition of Asian Pacific American Community Development. Funded by the Wallace Foundation. Co-PIs: Jeff Hou (UW), Diane Wong (Rutgers University), and Jonathan Crisman (University of Arizona). September 2023 to December 2025