Seifert, Susan C
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Publication Communities, Culture, and Capabilities: Preliminary Results of a Four-City Study(2014-08-01) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan CThis paper reports early findings of a multi-city study of social wellbeing, neighborhood transformation, and the arts that builds on SIAP's Philadelphia research (Cultural Ecology, Neighborhood Vitality, and Social Wellbeing--A Philadelphia Project, Stern and Seifert, December 2013). The team used new data on Philadelphia to investigate ways in which two capabilities—economic wellbeing and social connection—influence four others—social stress, personal health, school effectiveness, and security. The appendix provides preliminary comparative data on four cities under study: Philadelphia, Austin, New York City, and Seattle. The paper was prepared for the Human Development and Capabilities Association September 2014 conference in Athens, Greece on the theme “Human Development in Times of Crisis: Renegotiating Social Justice.”Publication An Assessment of Community Impact of the Philadelphia Department of Recreation Mural Arts Program(2003-04-01) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan CThis 2003 report is a first assessment of community impact of the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program since its start in 1984 under the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network. The study, undertaken from 2000 to 2002, incorporated a variety of methods. SIAP developed a geographic database on the location of murals to assess whether their density was related to other characteristics of a neighborhood. The team also developed a detailed mural production database to examine the nature of community involvement in MAP's process. Finally, the team employed a “community leveraging" model, based on a method developed by Penn’s Program for the Study of Organized Religion and Social Work, to estimate voluntary and in-kind contributions to mural production. The report concludes with a set of organizational and programmatic recommendations intended to maximize the potential of the Philadelphia Department of Recreation Mural Arts Program to mobilize resources and build connections among the city's neighborhoods, its young people, and its artists.Publication Re-presenting the City: Arts, Culture, and Diversity in Philadelphia(1999-04-01) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan CDiversity is an essential feature of urbanism, as articulated by Louis Wirth in his classic 1938 essay, “Urbanism as a Way of Life.” This paper presents 1990s findings on the connection between social diversity and cultural engagement in Philadelphia neighborhoods to question the reality of “city trenches” (Ira Katznelson 1981) and dominant views about the limits of urban revitalization. The paper examines the links between civic engagement and ethnic and economic diversity in Philadelphia by analyzing the relationship of the geography of civic and community organizations to their socio-economic context. The authors argue that arts and cultural organizations and engagement do not parallel divisions of race and social class; rather, they tend to concentrate in neighborhoods that are ethnically and economically diverse. Thus, cultural organizations provide an opportunity to support community institutions without reinforcement of social segregation.Publication Cultural Asset Mapping Project: Progress Report(2012-12-01) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan CThis report describes SIAP work undertaken from December 2011 to December 2012 as part of the Philadelphia cultural asset mapping project. SIAP research and data analyses underway, in collaboration with Reinvestment Fund, included: a cross-sectional analysis of associations between cultural assets and social and community indicators by neighborhood; a time-series of the geography of cultural assets between 1997 and 2010, using SIAP’s historical database; and a Philadelphia livability/social inclusion index that links information on cultural assets with other community indices on neighborhood vitality and social wellbeing.Publication CPAA Evaluation: Interim Findings(2006-07-01) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan CThis presentation is a summary of SIAP’s interim report on the Knight CPAA evaluation. The report has three parts: an assessment of the relationship of cultural participation and serious crime in North Philadelphia; an update on levels of cultural participation in North Philadelphia and Camden; and the findings of a set of interviews with grantees and others involved in CPAA.Publication Community Partners in Arts Access Evaluation: Final Report(2009-06-01) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan CThis research report evaluates the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Community Partners in Arts Access (CPAA) initiative to expand cultural participation among residents of North Philadelphia and Camden, NJ. The initiative had two phases. From September 2003 to December 2004, Knight invited 35 cultural organizations to participate in a planning process with a focus on organizational capacity, audience development, and action plans to broaden, deepen, and diversify participation. In December 2004, Knight awarded grants to 19 organizations to carry out their action plans over the next three years. The final evaluation report concluded that CPAA met its goals. Both regional and benchmark participation rates had increased from the beginning to the end of the initiative. By 2008 the gap between levels of cultural participation in North Philadelphia and Camden and the rest of the metropolitan area had been reduced significantly. This conclusion, however, belies the complexity that attended the initiative as it unfolded. Knight began CPAA in 2003 with an orthodox theory of organizational capacity building but by 2006 had shifted its focus to community transformation, and grantees had to rethink their projects. SIAP maintained its evaluation design: waves of grantee and regional participant data-gathering; a survey of artists living or working in North Philadelphia and Camden; and ongoing interviews and participant-observation with CPAA grantees. The qualitative record allowed SIAP not only to document what actually happened but also to make sense of changing theories of action during the course of the initiative.Publication Divergent Paths--Rapid Neighborhood Change and the Cultural Ecosystem(2017-12-01) Seifert, Susan C; Stern, Mark JThis paper considers the impact of rapid neighborhood change on the cultural ecology of Fort Greene and surrounding Brooklyn neighborhoods based on qualitative study undertaken during 2016 for the NYC project. The paper argues that rapid neighborhood change causes an attenuation of the organic neighborhood connections among artists, creative businesses, cultural organizations, and cultural participants—that is, the neighborhood cultural ecology. Cumulatively these changes in cultural ecology further weaken the neighborhood ecosystem and introduce an additional source of inequality with respect to the wellbeing of the City’s communities. In response to rapid neighborhood change, different cultural agents find themselves on divergent paths as they respond to challenges and seize opportunities. The paper identifies and illustrates four trajectories: 1) the uprooted and replanted—organizations and individuals for whom rapid neighborhood change has made their existing modus operandi and/or location untenable; 2) flourishers—organizations and individuals that have been able to benefit from the economic and social effects of a neighborhood undergoing rapid change; 3) adaptors and transplants—organizations and individuals, both locals and outsiders, that have devised survival strategies in the face of increasing challenges; and 4) new growth—new cultural entities that have seen the emergent ecology as an opportunity. These trajectories, posed as more a set of hypotheses than a set of findings, are based on approximately 40 interviews conducted during 2016 and supplemented by references from those interviews.Publication Migrants, Communities, and Culture(2008-01-01) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan C; Vitiello, DomenicNew immigrants have already changed Philadelphia's cultural scene—particularly in urban neighborhoods. This brief uses three types of evidence— a small-area database of cultural participation, a survey of residents of North Philadelphia and Camden, NJ, and a survey of artists living or working in the metropolitan area—to explore migrant cultural engagement. Taken together, SIAP’s evidence on artists and cultural participants paints a portrait of migrants and foreign-born residents who are positively oriented toward cultural expression but frustrated by institutional, spatial, and socio-economic barriers. Can culture serve as a means of linking new Philadelphians to other social institutions?Publication The Social Wellbeing of New York City's Neighborhoods: The Contribution of Culture and the Arts(2017-03-01) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan CThis research report presents the conceptual framework, data and methodology, findings and implications of a three-year study of the relationship of cultural ecology to social wellbeing across New York City neighborhoods. The team gathered data from City agencies, borough arts councils, and cultural practitioners to develop a 10-dimension social wellbeing framework—beginning with construction of a cultural asset index—for every neighborhood in the City’s five boroughs. The social wellbeing tool enabled a variety of analyses: the distribution of opportunity across the City; identification of areas with concentrated advantage, concentrated disadvantage, and “diverse and struggling” neighborhoods with both strengths and challenges; and analysis of the relationship of “neighborhood cultural ecology” to other features of community wellbeing. Major findings include: 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 wellbeing. Notably, if we control for socio-economic status and ethnic composition, the presence of cultural resources is significantly associated with improved outcomes around health, schooling, and personal security. Qualitative study highlighted how neighborhood cultural ecology also contributes to other dimensions of wellbeing—in particular, social connection, political and cultural voice, and the public environment and public sphere.Publication Foreign-Born Population of Philadelphia, Composition and Change, 2000-2007(2011-01-01) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan CThis map series accompanies the full report, Arts-Based Social Inclusion: An Investigation of Existing Assets and Innovative Strategies to Engage Immigrant Communities in Philadelphia (September 2010). See Section 3, "The Changing Profile of Metropolitan Philadelphia's Immigrant Communities."