Peoples Housing's
Community Arts Program 1993-1995

Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Henry Cisneros, spoke to a gathering of artists in Chicago in April 1994, at ARTS 21, a national conference convened by the National Endowment for the Arts. In his keynote address he made the following plea:

"At HUD, we see the arts not as an amenity, not as a luxury, but as a necessity in building America's communities. These children -- and every child in America -- deserve a chance to learn and to participate. So I encourage those of you whose work daily is in the arts to find ways to expand the accessibility of [the] arts to my world of public housing and distressed communities....Programs that would keep our children out of trouble and give them skills, give them help to develop talents that may pay off with a career or perhaps simply pay off in skills that enable them to cope with the stressful world in which they live. Help us build communities....all of us needs to do what we can to reconnect. What you do is the business of connecting human beings. Good luck in your work because we need you on the job to save our country. Thank you very much." (emphasis added)

I would like to acknowledge the MacArthur Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust for their early willingness to fund the combination of grass roots cultural programming and community development that was the Community Arts Program at Peoples Housing.

The CAP staff and all the people we worked with also owe a debt to Donna Smithey, the former Executive Director at Peoples Housing. She served the organization for eight years and she risked a great deal in bringing me on staff and allowing the CAP to unfold as it did.

This article was commissioned by the Asset Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern Univerity. You can visit their home page at http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/abcd.html

© Contents copyrighted June, 1998, Revised 2001 by Thomas Tresser. All rights reserved.