2018 | Cultural Organizations

Category: Sharing economy

Industry: Community

Location: United States

Related to: Future of Urban Living, Urban Cities, Urban Development, Community, Data

Reviewer: Logan Larkin / BFA Parsons School of Design

Website:  https://repository.upenn.edu/siap_culture_nyc/1/

About:

There have been several reports in the past few years done on the impact of art and culture in communities and how they create a sense of wellbeing for residents in the area. A study done between 2014-2017 by the University of Pennsylvania Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP) in collaboration with the Reinvestment Fund, which is a federally certified community development financial institution, was initiated in order to better understand how art and culture influence communities in a positive way. This report emphasizes the worldwide conversation on how art and culture can be used to benefit urban areas and the residents within them. SIAP states that the major findings of the study were:

1) Cultural resources are unequally distributed across the city, with many neighborhoods having few resources.

2) At the same time, there are a significant number of civic clusters—that is, lower-income neighborhoods with more cultural resources than their economic standing would lead us to predict.

3) Although lower-income neighborhoods have relatively few resources, these neighborhoods demonstrate the strongest relationship between culture and social well-being.

SIAP discovered that there are over 4700 nonprofit cultural entities and over 17000 for-profit cultural entities. The concentration of these cultural entities directly correlates to the wellbeing and accessibility to education and institutions of surrounding neighborhoods. Areas with more cultural entities oftentimes fair far better than the areas that do not have access to these cultural outlets.

This is where the concept of creating a sharing economy that shares and helps nurture the growth of art and culture in areas that are absent of these valuable resources becomes relevant. In an article published by the Standford Social Innovation Review, they discuss how nonprofits should take the opportunity to redefine the phrase “sharing economy”. The article states how nonprofits should make an effort to create an economy that has access to shared resources and shared ownership. Sharing knowledge and tools that a proven to work helps create more a competitive environment. Shared solutions help lead to better and stronger solutions that can be replicated and multiplied. For example, models like the Community Supported Agriculture demonstrate how an idea can spread quickly if the data and resources for recreating them are open-sourced.

Another concept introduced in the article is to share governance. If for-profit companies emphasized a conscious capitalist outlook and put profits towards future development towards cultural programs that support the employees, customers, and community, the business will be strengthened by gaining a goal of higher-purpose.