Since 2011, the Alliance for California Traditional Arts (ACTA) has been bringing traditional artists together with community members in Boyle Heights, Merced, Santa Ana, and the East Coachella Valley to open pathways for connection, reflection, and mobilization as part of the Building Healthy Communities (BHC) initiative of The California Endowment. This program builds power locally by positioning traditional artists as leaders in their community and by positioning the traditional arts as a means through which community members can gather, share ideas, and organize toward the goal of reducing health disparities in some of the most heavily affected areas in the state. ACTA has embedded traditional artists in the target communities to facilitate collaboration toward policy change around four different areas: schools, neighborhoods, preventive health, and anti-displacement.
ACTA contributes to this initiative by mobilizing participation in traditional arts practices as a way of building healthy communities. Our work has shown that gathering through the practice of the arts strengthens community resilience and resourcefulness, deepens a collective capacity for democratic deliberation and decision making, and enables individuals to hone and refine their creativity and virtuosity as artists and activists. People learn new skills, develop new interpersonal relations, and gain confidence about solving problems when they construct altars, participate in collective songwriting workshops, or organize gatherings to make murals, quilts, or embroidered blouses, to name just a few of the projects ACTA has seeded. For almost a decade, ACTA has provided artists with the space, resources, and support for them to exercise their agency in experimenting within their practices to develop their own engagement methodologies. The goal has been to center artists, cultural practices, and community voices that are often left out of mainstream movements and discussions around health equity. ACTA’s Building Healthy Communities program helps sustain community and individual health at a moment when disparities in health outcomes and access to healthcare disproportionately affect communities of color across the state. The program recognizes generational, collective practices that help create stronger individuals and communities as radical practices of traditional arts as social justice methodology. _____ Project Website: click here State: California Category: Health & Wellbeing |