How might Street Works have an impact?

We look at impact in 4 dimensions: systems, processes, collective participation, and outcomes. The outcomes are relevant, but they’re only one part of the picture. And the focus on outcomes over other dimensions has skewed our definitions of impact alongside our priorities.

Outcomes

Street Works considers outcomes in 2 ways. First, we look at the the social actions related to the arts or exhibit theme. Second, we believe that figuring out how to fairly pay artists is a way of having impact and consider our business model below.

Climate Action

Urban areas are responsible for 70-80% of global CO2 emissions associated with energy consumption. Activists and artists are working at the hyper-local level to advocate for better policies, watch out for collective good amidst corporate interests, and support neighborhoods through a just transition. Practical actions associated with climate, democracy, and more can coexist alongside *freely expressed* art, and these actions can be tracked. For example, for our pilot Street Work, we’re beginning to explore how climate solutions service providers can embody the core Street Work principles in the space. We hope to partner with these providers and aggregate data on interest, signups, or sales. In this way, climate action could be tracked.

Income

Social practice artists are severely underpaid. But they foster action, by opening up minds to creative and new ideas. By partnering with climate experts, we hope to develop a sustainable business model to support artists. For example, if companies provide us with a commission from sales (with a justice lens) it could seed a nonprofit pool explicitly intended to support social practice projects. Artists should benefit from the value they bring to enabling change, and they don't have to be — and shouldn't be asked to become — advertising and marketing consultants to prove their value.

This model could fund community projects in a new way, and the income in itself demonstrates impact. 

System

We hope Street Works can be an intervention in an unjust asset ecosystem and colonial narratives that currently contribute to the wealth gap and racial injustice. At scale, we’ll have more alternative arts organizations resisting these forces, funding artists differently, and respecting community-centered practices as valuable cultural assets.

But we’re careful about the burden we put on individual Street Works and artists. First, Street Works on its own won’t solve an unjust cultural asset ecosystem. That’s why we're doing more research.

Also, no single art project solves big challenges. Instead, art is a system intervention — without straight one-directional lines between action & outcome. The impact of a single experience on individuals comes in intimate human feedback loops and patient reinforcement. For example, over time, art makes us happier, healthier, and more civically engaged. When we're happy, we can participate, make better life choices, and see our future with hope. We can care about long term thriving — a necessary ingredient for social action.

But hope isn’t 1-way; we need to see our actions spark success, at least in our own lives. And in our pain, hope falters and we struggle to act for ourselves — let alone for others and collective good.

It’s at these moments that an art experience — often connected with spirituality, family, and more — helps us process grief, heal, and replenish hope in ways that match our needs, so we can get back up to act. As social practice artists, we’ve seen it often with participants. Their individual priorities shape impact and resulting actions; their lived experiences define it. (See here for 1 example.)

In addition to grounding in the nature of all art, Street Works relate to creative placemaking impact and offer specific ideas for personal and social action. Eventually, we hope to make collective action joyful and replenishing in our community spaces. In doing so, Street Works can be one alternative to top-down decision-making that can result in disaster.

Process

Many organizations do not evaluate processes, which invite us to analyze how we went about change, including the design of our decision making and procedures. Democracy is nothing less or more than a process innovation intended to serve justice, and the lack of democratic organizational practices in the nonprofit and corporate sector contributes a wealth gap that damages our federal and state democracies. We're thinking about how to include process evaluation, uphold our philosophies, and offer creative civic spaces for shared power. This is one way we’ll assess our practice of democracy but we might not be able to track its impact.

Collective participation

Collective participation looks like exercising our right to vote, picking up trash on the street if it's in the way, working with others to clean your local park, joining a protest, organizing a protest, volunteering, and so much more. Participation — where you can and even in small ways — on its own, matters as much as impact. We start by trying. And finding hope and joy in the small leads us to the big — whether as individuals or as participants in movement. Many local mobilizations that have been lost to history were nonetheless important. 

As a local, ground-up community project, we focus on being a participant in local movement, communities, and civic fabrics, which are essential for all long-term change. By creating a blueprint, we hope to create a translatable process that we and others can use in multiple locations in the future. As these multiply, if our first Street Work is successful, we could reach for a national scale.