Six Free Webinars, November 2019 - April 2020

Click each title below to either replay a past webinar or register for a future one.

Webinar #1: Introducing the Creating Healthy Communities through Cross-sector Collaboration White Paper, Watch Replay

The United States is experiencing heightened dialogue and debate on issues at the core of our collective health and wellbeing, such as trauma, racism, and mental health. Many of these issues tie directly to social and structural determinants of health, indicating that collective action is required to address them. In response, the national Creating Healthy Communities: Arts + Public Health in America initiative has recently released a white paper drawing on the views and consensus of more than 250 thought leaders from the public health, arts and culture, and community development sectors.

The paper presents a case for why cross-sector collaboration is critically needed to address the complex issues that limit health. This white paper frames the value of arts and culture for advancing health and well-being in communities, and offers examples of impactful cross-sector collaborations that engage arts and culture to address five critical public health issues - collective trauma, racism, social isolation and exclusion, mental health, and chronic disease - and inform the paper's recommendations and call to action.

This webinar will overview the initiative and the white paper, share impactful program models, and present new resources for cross-sector collaboration and program building. 

Presenters for this webinar include:

• Danya Sherman is a consultant working nationally at the intersection of arts, community development, and social justice. She is a Senior Consultant on the Research Strategies team at ArtPlace America, and runs a consulting practice based in Boston. 
• Jill Sonke is director of the University of Florida Center for the Arts in Medicine and Assistant Director of UF Health Shands Arts in Medicine. Her current research focuses on the arts in public health and the effects of music on emergency medicine.
• Dr. Tasha Golden comes to her work as a public health researcher after a career as a singer/songwriter, and she now studies the impacts of arts, culture, and aesthetics on health and well-being. She also founded Project Uncaged—a trauma-informed, arts-based program for young women in the juvenile justice system.
• Dr. Samantha Francois is an Assistant Professor at Tulane University’s School of Social Work with a specialization in adolescent development and vulnerability and resilience in African American populations. Dr. Francois’ research examines African American cultural assets that promote resilience in order to inform prevention and intervention approaches.

Webinar #2: Addressing Collective Trauma through Cross-sector Collaboration, Watch Replay

Despite the clearly systemic, community-level nature of collective trauma, many health interventions to address community trauma focus on individual level treatments, such as providing access to individual mental health services. While these approaches are important, cross-sector collaborations can enhance these efforts with collective, place-based offerings that target upstream causes. Artistic and cultural expressions—from performances or exhibits to murals in public spaces—can reflect, magnify, clarify, or reimagine a community’s history and collective experience, including the traumas that have led to systemic inequities and health disparities.

This webinar will overview the issue of collective trauma and present practice models that demonstrate how cross-sector collaboration between the arts and culture and public health sectors can address collective trauma in communities. 

Presenters include:

• Dr. Kelley Sams is a Visiting Research Faculty at the University of Florida's Center for Arts in Medicine. Kelley's research takes place at the intersection of the social sciences, public health, and the arts, and engages ethnographic photography and other qualitative methods to study the circulation of public health initiatives in the US and sub-Saharan Africa.
• Dr. Joseph Claunch is the co-director of the Zuni Youth Enrichment Project, an organization with programs designed to help Zuni youth be active and engaged in the community and natural world. 
• Roman Baca is the Artistic Director/Co-Founder of Exit 12 Dance Company, a contemporary dance company committed to creating and performing works of high cultural significance that inspire conversations about world differences and the lasting effects of violence and conflict on communities, families, and individuals.
• Anthony Gonzalez is the Assistant Director of School Partnerships, Tours & Community Engagement at Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art & Storytelling in New York. The museum is a stimulating space for neighborhood families to gather and share in cultural programs, as well as a setting to actively address the educational needs of the community's youngest children. 

Webinar #3: Addressing Social Isolation and Social Cohesion through Cross-sector Collaboration, Watch Replay

• Victor Rubin – Victor Rubin is a Senior Fellow at PolicyLink, where he leads, designs, and conducts knowledge-building activities to create a strong research base for PolicyLink. An urban planner with broad experience in community development, education, and social policy, he guides the PolicyLink analyses of issues in infrastructure, economic growth, healthy communities, youth development, and other areas.
• Josh Miller - Originally from Chattanooga, TN, Josh is the co-founder + CEO of IDEAS xLab - a nonprofit based in Louisville, KY named Nonprofit of the Year in 2019 by the Derby Diversity & Business Summit. His approach to values-based leadership is rooted in curiosity, creativity, courage, and connection. Through their artist-led work at IDEAS xLab, they focus on leveraging the power of community creativity and culture to transform lives through art, in support of a more healthy, just, and hopeful society.
• Ann Basting – Anne Basting is a theater professor at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts. Through the Islands of Milwaukee exhibit, a 4-foot Styrofoam island in the center of the rotunda at City Hall, Basting and the Sojourn Theatre showcase the isolation that some seniors in Milwaukee experience within the community.
• Abdurrahman Mahmud – Abdurrahman Mahmud is the Project Coordinator for Project 154 at the Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Project 154 uses theatre, film and storytelling devices to empower the residents of Cedar Riverside to be advocates for their health care, create a dialogue about community health and use art as a means for overcoming stigmas and obstacles with healthcare.

Webinar #4: Addressing Racism through Cross-sector Collaboration, Watch Replay

The significant health costs of racism present critical opportunities for place-based arts and culture initiatives. By naming and acting to eliminate all forms of racism, such initiatives can help advance progress towards better health outcomes for communities of color.

Presenters for this webinar include:

• Chera Reid serves as director of strategic learning, research and evaluation for The Kresge Foundation. She leads organization-wide work to grow the foundation’s learning endowment—drawing from the full suite of philanthropic tools, including evaluation and thought leadership—to advance the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. Chera has long focused on issues of access and equity in institutions and systems.
• Elizabeth Hamby is an artist who serves as the Director of Take Care New York at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Take Care New York is the City’s roadmap to achieving health equity. Elizabeth develops and deploys strategies that range from storytelling to social epidemiology to advance racial justice and build community power.
• Hannah L. Drake is a writer, spoken word artist-activist, and cultural strategist at Ideas xLab in Louisville, Kentucky. Her work focuses on the intersection of arts, culture, and health with an emphasis on the impact of race and injustice in underserved communities.
• Dr. Lydia Clemmons, is President of the Clemmons Family Farm, an African-American-led arts and culture nonprofit organization in Vermont.  In 2012, Dr. Clemmons brought her 35-year career in international health and communications back to the Vermont farm where she grew up. She now serves as Executive Director of the A Sense of Place project- a creative placemaking project funded by Artplace America and led by the Clemmons Family Farm.

Webinar #5: Addressing Mental Health through Cross-sector Collaboration, Watch Replay

While there are no quick or simple solutions for eliminating mental illnesses such as depression or substance abuse, those working at the intersections of community, arts and culture, health, and social change offer models of innovative, collaborative work that provides a trajectory for continued and increased investment, exploration, and development by and with the field of public health.

Presenters for this webinar include:

• Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson. Dr. Jackson’s expertise is in comprehensive community revitalization, systems change, dynamics of race and ethnicity and roles of and arts and culture in communities. She is Institute Professor at Arizona State University with appointments in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and the College of Public Service and Community Solutions. She is also Senior Advisor to the Kresge Foundation.
• Sarah Davies 100Stone Project is a creative placemaking movement to affect lasting change on attitudes and approaches to those who struggle with mental health-related vulnerabilities. The visual product of the project's placemaking activations was a public art installation of nearly 200 personal stories of vulnerability told in sculptural form. Sarah has been a public school teacher for 13 years, and currently teaches Visual Art at Bartlett High School in Anchorage, Alaska.  
• Yoko Nogami, an interdisciplinary artist, was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. She resides in Letcher County of Eastern Kentucky as the Program Coordinator for Culture of Recovery Program at the Appalachian Artisan Center. As a multimedia artist and longtime art educator, she programs various performing and visual art curriculum to substance abuse clients as alternative tools to aide in their recovery.

• Nadia Malik is director of the Porch Light Program at Mural Arts Philadelphia. She has completed masters degrees in Social Work and Nonprofit Leadership from the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, she worked as a journalist and with several nonprofits. At Porch Light, Nadia combines her love of art with community work.

Webinar #6: Addressing Chronic Disease through Cross-sector Collaboration, April 7 from 2-3:00pm EST

In general, as individuals live longer and early diagnoses improve outcomes, so grow the ranks of people in need of new forms of care, prevention, intervention, and support. By facilitating connection, empathy, and social cohesion, arts and culture can mitigate poor health and health disparities while also impacting the systems that produce them.

Presenters for this webinar include:

• David Olawuyi Fakunle, Ph.D. is a self-described “mercenary for change,” willing to employ any talent and occupy any space in the effort to elevate anyone who feels divested from their truest self, particularly People of Color. David is the co-founder and CEO of DiscoverME/RecoverME, an organization that utilizes the African oral tradition to encourages the claiming of one’s narrative for personal and organizational growth. Additionally, David currently serves as a consultant to the International Arts + Mind Laboratory at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. 
• David Leventhal is a founding teacher and Program Director for Dance for PD®, a program of the Mark Morris Dance Group that has now been used as a model for classes in more than 300 communities in 25 countries. He leads classes for people living with Parkinson's disease (PD) around the world and trains other teaching artists in the Dance for PD approach. He's co-produced five volumes of a successful At Home DVD series for the program and has been instrumental in initiating and designing innovative projects involving live streaming and Moving Through Glass, a dance-based smart glasses app for people with Parkinson's.
•  Primus Wheeler, Jr. is currently the Executive Director of the Jackson Medical Mall Foundation in Jackson, MS. The Jackson Medical Mall Foundation manages the Jackson Medical Mall facility. The facility is a one a kind comprehensive healthcare facility providing human, art/cultural, community development and healthcare services for more than 200,000 clients per year.
• Josh Hecht is the Artistic Director of Profile Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Originally from New York, he is also a Drama Desk Award-winning director whose work has been seen in New York, regionally in theatres around the country, and internationally at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (Fringe First Award) and Dublin Arts Festival. Awards include the Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience, GLAAD Award nomination, IRNE nomination (Boston). His writing has received the support of the Jerome Foundation. He has served on the faculty of the New School for Drama’s MFA Directing Program; Fordham University’s MFA Playwriting Program; Purchase College, SUNY’s BFA Dramatic Writing Program and has served as a guest artist at The Juilliard School, NYU Tisch, University of Minnesota, Carnegie Melon, Reed College and many others.

An Un-Webinar: Live Q&A about Best Practices for Arts Programming in Uncertain Times

Hosted by Kimberlee Campbell-Smith with Panelists: Amy Bucciarelli, MS, ATR-BC, Ferol Carytsas, MM, and Ricky Kendall (musician in residence).

The Practice of Partnership: Arts + Public Health

The national Creating Healthy Communities: Arts + Public Health in America initiative has recently released a white paper that presents a case for why cross-sector collaboration is critically needed to address the complex issues that limit health in the US. This white paper frames the value of arts and culture for advancing health and well-being in communities and offers examples of impactful cross-sector collaborations that engage arts and culture to address five critical public health issues - collective trauma, racism, social isolation and exclusion, mental health, and chronic disease.